Black Caps
Incredible summer of supremacy
The end of the start happened on November 27, 2020, when Mitchell Santner launched Kieron Pollard into the stands at Eden Park to win a raintruncated Twenty20.
The end of the end happened 125 nights later, late on Maundy Thursday, when Nasum Ahmed sliced Glenn Phillips to Tim Southee as New Zealand won a rain-truncated Twenty20 at Eden Park.
In between, some stuff happened. I must resist the temptation to reach for the thesaurus to search for new ways to say the same thing, but what New Zealand have done this summer has been unprecedented, unparalleled, singular and unmatched.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, overstatement or embellishment, hyperbole or overkill, think again.
Seven series played, seven series won. Twenty-one matches played, 17 wins, three losses and one no result.
Four tests played, four wins and qualification for the inaugural World Test Championship final secured.
New Zealanders scored 10 centuries this summer, two of them doubles, while only Jermaine Blackwood and Fawad Alam reached three figures against.
Important numbers, all of them, but the one that paints a complete picture of the Black Caps’ dominance is this: across all formats, they have amassed 5357 runs for 119 wickets, the rest have mustered 4435 for 202.
Even with the bulk of the matches being T20s, they’re averaging 45 for every partnership, while taking a wicket every 22 runs scored against them. If this was softball, you’d apply the mercy rule.
The team’s dominance has been so complete that a couple of historically bizarre narratives emerged. One was that New Zealand were doing ho-hum New Zealand things against ho-hum teams in ho-hum conditions. The other was that the Black Caps didn’t “deserve” to qualify for the WTC final.
To address the first, it is enough to say the very idea that New Zealand is expected to smash all-comers on home turf shows just how far they’ve come in a relatively short time.
This is a team that have won less than a quarter of their 446 tests, yet sweeping a test summer against Pakistan, a team that before the tour led the head-to-head 25-12 overall and 10-7 in this country, is considered par for the course.
While the West Indies result was more predictable, New Zealand lead that head-to-head 17-13 only by virtue of winning eight of the past nine tests between them.
It should be remembered New Zealand had the worst of the batting conditions in three of the four tests, while the fourth at Bay Oval was probably a toss-up.
As for the WTC qualification, the entire process was a quirk. Don’t take my word for it, a number of credible online sources indicate the world has been rocked for much of the past 14 months by a global pandemic.
Did New Zealand benefit from rejigged scheduling more than most? Not really. After getting their clocks cleaned 0-3 in Australia, they had to do a lot of things right — which they did, including beating India 2-0 — and rely on Australia doing a lot of things wrong — which they did, including losing to a second-string Indian team 2-1 at home and losing points for tardy over rates.
If anything, New Zealand could have felt aggrieved if they didn’t make it because a 1-0 series win against England weirdly didn’t count even though it took place during the qualification window.
So just embrace it.
Most of the above can be worked out on a calculator. While cricket tragics have a deep and abiding respect for numbers, they speak little to the romance of the game.
Cricket has an element of maths, yes, and history, but at its best, there’s also a lot of English.
Cricket is a collection of short stories and characters.
Each century is a drama — and Henry Nicholls’ century at the Basin Reserve had drama while the Windies provided farce — and each wicket a plot twist.
It doesn’t matter if you view this season through a maths, history or English lens, it leads to the same thesauric answer: this was a summer of profound dominance, supremacy, ascendancy and authority.
Kyle Jamieson’s emergence as a world-class performer was one of the major talking points, as was the decision by the brains trust of the Royal Challengers Bangalore to turn him into a very wealthy young man. As if by some universal decree, the cricketing gods chose that time to send Australia here for a T20 series to remind everybody that Jamieson is brilliant but not infallible.
He’s going to be just fine, though.
Many others outside of the summer’s main stars made their marks, from Lockie Ferguson blitzing the West Indies in a T20 at Eden Park with a five-for delivered at extreme pace, to Martin Guptill rekindling his form with a sensational 97 in the second T20 against Australia.
Finn Allen was clean bowled to the first ball he faced in international cricket, then reverse swept a four to get off the mark in the second. Todd Astle got one chance — and only went and took 4-13 in a 10-over match. There were glimpses of Will Young’s talent, Jimmy Neesham’s final over against Australia in Dunedin was ballsy, and Trent Boult’s performance across that series reminded everyone of his class.
But there’s another Boult story that tickled this fancy more than many of the “big” moments of the summer. It’s not the sort of thing that usually wins headlines and it didn’t even come from the horse’s (small) mouth, but was just tossed out as an aside during a mundane postday press conference during New Zealand’s win against Pakistan in the second test at Hagley Oval.
It went like this: Late on day three, Pakistan were batting for a second time, a massive 362 runs behind New Zealand, who had just racked up an abacus-busting 659-6 declared.
There were 11 overs left in the day. That’s Southee and Boult time. Although cricket has moved on what from its selfish, look-after-your-owngame days, fast bowling is the one remaining A-type, territorial corner of the dressing room. Southee and Boult are the kings of that corner. In the past, it has taken time for them to warm to new members.
“[Neil Wagner] didn’t quite gel straight away. It took time — he broke us down. We got to know him . . . Looking back, we made it harder for him than we needed to,” Southee once confessed. “He’s such a good bastard; he’d do anything for you.”
But Wagner doesn’t get the new ball, no matter what a good bastard he is. Jamieson doesn’t either, no matter how spectacular his performances are. Yet there in Christchurch, after just three overs, Boult could see they had another Kookaburra ball that was refusing to swing, so reportedly told Kane Williamson to get Jamieson on for a couple before stumps. Jamieson obliged and took a wicket. New Zealand won the following day.
It’s a tiny yarn to which perhaps more meaning has been attached than is necessary. It was one of 202 wickets taken across this season, after all. But there’s something about it that speaks to a team that knows small sacrifices can lead to big things.
Much tougher tasks lie in wait. International cricket has skewed wildly towards home advantage. New Zealand were fortunate to be able to host tours and play live sport in front of live crowds.
(Interestingly and probably not coincidentally, two of the three games they lost this summer were in empty stadiums when Auckland moved back to Level 3 during the Australian series.)
England at home will be tough, particularly if the Indian Premier League affects the availability of some of the best Black Caps. Then there’s the WTC final on neutral ground against the best team in the world.
Falling short would hurt New Zealand. It might even cause some to reclassify this summer as something less than it was. That’d be a mistake, an error and a miscalculation.