Black Caps need to rewrite history
It is past time for a new chapter to be written in the trans-Tasman test cricket rivalry, as two matches unfold over the next two weeks at the Basin Reserve and Hagley Oval. As of day one in Wellington on Thursday, it will have been 30 years, 11 months and 13 days since New Zealand last beat Australia in a home test, and 12 years, two months and 17 days since they last beat them in a test, full stop.
When the winning runs were scored at Eden Park in Auckland in 1993, New Zealand had won three of their last five home tests against Australia and five of 16 home tests all up, alongside six draws and five losses. There had also been two wins across the ditch, both in 1985, alongside 11 draws and 20 losses.
Since that morning in 1993, the two countries have met 28 times in the test arena.
The Black Caps have won once – in Hobart in 2011, where Ross Taylor played a captain’s knock of 56 off 169 to set Australia a target of 241 and Doug Bracewell took 6-40 on the final day.
Six matches have ended in draws – four of them largely as the result of rain – and 21 have ended with Australia on top, including the last six, nine of the 10 played on New Zealand soil and 13 of the last 15.
YouTube can only help you so much if you’re a Kiwi trying to remember what it’s like to win a cricket test against Australia. You can find footage of Hobart easily enough, as well as highlights of some of the wins in the 80s, but the last win at home is hard to track down.
For that – and to best appreciate the others, six which came in an 11-year stretch between 1982 and 1993, when, it must be said, Australia were not the team they’ve become in the 21st century – you need to turn to the history books.
In Out on a Limb, published in 1995, Martin Crowe writes: “It was 12 March, 1993, the opening hour of the third test against Australia, our greatest enemy”.
In A Hell of a Way to Make a Living, published the same year, Ken Rutherford calls that match: “One of the most satisfying memories in my career”.
“It was Blainy [Tony Blain] and I who saw the team through to victory with an unbroken 67-run partnership. That was, and still is, special to me.”
Back to Crowe, who found himself embracing coach Wally Lees and “crying with joy and relief. We deserved this win. It felt as though we’d been to hell and back to get it. The enemy was beaten.
“We celebrated from 11.30am to 4.45pm and then adjourned to the Cricket Society, where the entire bar rose to Wrighty and the boys. By 8pm the DB boys had arranged a dinner so, appropriately, we ended the day and marked our victory with DB coming out our ears.”
The oldest player in the Black Caps’ squad this week turned seven during that test. But seeing as that was Neil Wagner, growing up in South Africa with no idea he would one day play for New Zealand, it’s hard to imagine he took much notice. Three of the players in the current squad – Glenn Phillips, Rachin Ravindra and Will O’Rourke – weren’t even born.
New Zealand’s test victories before 1993 on home soil were in
1973 at Lancaster Park in Christchurch, where Glenn Turner made centuries in both innings;
1982 at Eden Park, where Bruce Edgar made 161 and Lance Cairns finished the job emphatically;
1986 at Eden Park, where John Wright batted for eight hours across two innings and John Bracewell took 10-106 in the match; and
1990 at the Basin Reserve, where Sir Richard Hadlee and Bracewell took fivefors and Wright scored 117 of the 178 runs required.
The two in Australia both came in the same series in 1985, which remains New Zealand’s only trans-Tasman test series win, if you don’t consider the one-off home test in 1990 to be a series.
First at the Gabba in Brisbane, where Hadlee took 9-52, John Reid made 108 and Martin Crowe made 188, and Hadlee took 6-71, to finish the innings win with match figures of 15-123; then at the Waca in Perth; where Hadlee took 11-155 in the match and Crowe anchored the final-day chase of 164.
Having played a starring role in New Zealand’s first test win over Australia, Turner was team manager for the first series win. In Opening Up, published in 1987, he wrote that “it was nice to be coming home smiling and not rueful, to know that the public had been satisfied and not disappointed. Sports Minister Mike Moore took great delight in telling a story which goes something like this: Who is a cricketing optimist? Answer: An Australian batsman walking out to bat with zinc on his nose.”
Almost 40 years on from that tour, more than 30 years on from the last transTasman test win on home soil and more than a decade on from the Black Caps’ last trans-Tasman test win whatsoever, the New Zealand public has been disappointed far, far more than it has been satisfied.
Current captain Tim Southee and his predecessor Kane Williamson were both in Hobart, so they have at least got a line on their CV that many others haven’t, including Stephen Fleming, Daniel Vettori and Chris Cairns, to name three late 90s-early 2000s greats. But both have been part of stronger sides since – away in 2015 and 2019-20 and at home in 2016 – that haven’t won a thing.
Southee’s and Williamson’s books are still to be written. Will they contain chapters on how they ended more than 30 years of hurt in Wellington and Christchurch in March 2024, or will tales of further defeats end up on the cutting room floor?
New Zealand cricket fans wanting to see a test win over Australia, rather than read about one, will be hoping fervently for the former.