Long wait nearly over for Conway
Once upon a time, Devon Conway was a South African schoolboy, playing for his club team against the Mumbai Indians of the Indian Premier League, who had Australian international Luke Ronchi in their ranks.
At the end of that game, more than a decade ago, Conway walked up to Ronchi and, as he recalled yesterday, said: ‘‘Hi Luke, are there any spare shirts that you have available?
‘‘He actually gave it to me – I’ll never forget it.
‘‘I remember going back to school – I was in a boarding house at the time – and just wearing his playing shirt for the next two years – and now I’m sitting next to him, so it’s a surreal moment.’’
The duo were sitting together in the bowels of Eden Park ahead of today’s first Twenty20 international against the West Indies at the Auckland ground, a match where Conway is in line to make his Black Caps debut.
It will be almost three years to the day since his first appearance for the Wellington Firebirds, the association he joined in 2017 as he moved to New Zealand and began the three-year wait to become eligible for international action.
In that time, he’s performed at a level that has made that wait seem almost agonising. He’s scored five hundreds, including an unbeaten 324, in the Plunket Shield, where he’s averaged 69.24. He’s scored two in the one-day Ford Trophy, where he averages 47.19.
And in the Twenty20 Super Smash, he’s scored two hundreds while averaging 53.55, with a strike rate of 144.
In May, he was awarded a New Zealand Cricket contract. In August, he became eligible to play for the Black Caps.
There he was yesterday, next to Ronchi, who made his own switch to New Zealand (where he was born) in 2013 and is now the Black Caps batting coach.
Ronchi doesn’t remember their first encounter all those years ago, but he has enjoyed watching – and at times for the Firebirds, playing alongside – Conway over the past three years.
‘‘It’s gone from not knowing to just like, wow,’’ Ronchi said. ‘‘The numbers he’s put up have been amazing.
‘‘He’s put numbers there to say ‘pick me’, and he’s kept doing it for a long period of time, and that’s really cool, to watch someone come in and knock the door down massively.
‘‘If he’s picked for [Friday] it will be a fantastic opportunity and I think there’ll be a lot of people – not just here, but his parents and family – who will be excited to see him on the international stage.’’
The question now is whether Conway can carry his domestic form onto that stage.
His record suggests he can, but the wait for him to become eligible means expectation has reached a fever pitch – though he doesn’t seem too bothered by it.
‘‘To be fair, I don’t really listen too much about it,’’ he said.
‘‘I think about staying in the moment as much as possible and being present and I try to focus on the task at hand. Whatever else happens, happens – I try to get away from that sort of thing.’’