Chappell-Hadlee series could be the last for many Black Caps
This week’s three-match showdown in Cairns is the only transTasman ODI series on the cards in a 10-year span from 2017 to 2027. Andrew Voerman reports.
The Black Caps had better cherish their one-day internationals against Australia in the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy series in Cairns over the next week.
Because for many of the players, it could be the last time they play for that particular piece of silverware, named for the great cricketing families from either side of the Tasman.
The Chappell-Hadlee Trophy will come of age later this year, celebrating its 18th anniversary in December, but it has been living a rather lonely existence in recent times. This month’s series is also part of the World Cup Super League, which will determine who qualifies automatically for next October’s World Cup in India.
It was originally scheduled to take place in March 2020, but only one match was played, in front of empty stands in Sydney, before the first border restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic forced the Black Caps to return home.
Cricket Australia placed it on its schedule in early 2021 and early 2022, but border restrictions prevented it from going ahead both times.
That led us here, to the start of spring and September, a month in which Australia hadn’t hosted international cricket for 14 years.
This time around New Zealand’s visit is following one from Zimbabwe, for a pair of ODI series that may have been lost to the aether if not for the World
Cup qualifying implications.
When the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy started, back in 2004, it was hoped it would become cricket’s version of rugby’s Bledisloe Cup, contested by the All Blacks and Wallabies, and be
a regular fixture in the cricketing summer.
That was the case from 2004 to 2010 and briefly again in 2016 and 2017, but this month’s series is set to be the only edition played in the space of a decade.
It has been five-and-a-half years since the last bilateral ODI series between the two teams, won 2-0 by the Black Caps on home soil, and almost eight years since the last completed series on Australian soil, won 3-0 by the hosts.
When the International Cricket Council released the Future Tours Programme for the period through March 2027 last month, it didn’t feature a single trans-Tasman ODI series, which means the one this week is set to be the only series played in a 10-year period.
Of the group of 15 that flew to Cairns on Friday to begin preparations for Tuesday’s series opener, only three players will be younger than 35 in five years time – Finn Allen, who has played seven ODIs to date; Glenn Phillips, who has played five; and Ben Sears, who is yet to make his debut.
There is also Kyle Jamieson, currently injured, who will only be 32, but it’s fair to say the next time the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy goes on the line, New Zealand and Australia’s squads will likely look very different to how they do now.
Perhaps a 35-year-old Tom Latham or Mitchell Santner will be hanging around, but that’s a matter for the future.
Right now, Australia will go in as favourites to wrestle the silverware back off New Zealand, and not just because they’ve been in action in Townsville over the past week playing Zimbabwe and getting used to conditions in north Queensland.
Just one of the last 11 completed ODIs between these two teams on either side of the Tasman has been won by the visiting team – the second of a three-match series in Wellington in 2016.
Otherwise, it’s been five wins for New Zealand in New Zealand and five wins for Australia in Australia since the Black Caps won a dead rubber at the end of a home series in early 2010.
Two matches on neutral soil in that time have been won by Australia – at the 2011 and 2019 World Cups in India and
England.
These two nations don’t meet nearly enough – even when you bring cricket’s two other formats into the equation – so even if the timing might be odd, this week’s series is a must-watch.
It will be the in-form Black Caps first outing against Australia since their loss in last year’s T20 World Cup final and comes ahead of their meeting in the opening match of this year’s T20 World Cup in late October in Australia.