Modern New Zealand Cricket Greats

 Chapter 2

Making the cut

The primary role of this book is to highlight the players who had contributed the most to New Zealand's rise and rise to something approaching powerhouse status.

The first job in preparation was to determine what constituted modern. I consider Shane Bond (2001-10) a modern player, for example, but my teenage son has no recollection of him playing for New Zealand - though he does have a couple of his playing shirts, gifted to me after I ghosted his autobiography.

The first decision was that it should be restricted to those who had played the bulk, if not all, of their international careers this century. The term 'the bulk' needed to be formalised, so I settled on this: they had to have debuted in the past 30 years, so 1993 was the debut cut-off; and the year 2000, Y2K, the twenty-first century, had to be closer to the start of their career than the end.

It's not perfect. Time is an abstract concept, but I'm comfortable with the idea that playing the bulk of your career in the newish millennium constitutes 'modern'. As it turned out, two players who played plenty of cricket in both the 90s and noughties made the cut, though the closest to miss out due to the 'bulk of' cut-off line, Nathan Astle, made it in by virtue of playing 774 more days in the 2000s than he did in the 1990s.

Whenever you come up with an arbitrary line, there will be fine players who fall just on the wrong side. There was a big part of me that considered shifting it just so I could fudge the numbers and consider including Dion Nash (1992-2002). Having said that, doing anything with numbers would be missing the point when it comes to Nash, whose importance to the Black Caps during a fallow part of their history was not measured by runs and wickets as much as it was by attitude: convincing those around him who might have had more natural talent - another abstract concept - that they were capable of mixing it with the best. In all likelihood, Nash would have missed the final cut anyway, because his body could only rarely keep pace with his mind, and he just didn't play enough cricket.

A more persuasive case could be made for Chris Cairns (1989-2006). He made his debut in a different era, but his peak years, when he was by common consent the finest fast-bowling all-rounder in the world, coincided with the start, albeit faltering, of New Zealand's rise. You can't help but think that if his debut had occurred four or five years later, both he and the Black Caps would have benefited in the long run, but such was his prodigious talent he was thrust in, like Martin Crowe before him, when his mental faculties had not yet caught up with his preternatural physical gifts. Early Cairns showed flashes of the brilliance that would later become commonplace, but he lacked the mental strength to deal with the fluctuations of the international game. There is, however, a soap-opera element to Cairns' life that would have made for a compelling chapter. With his famous dad, the tragic death of his sister, his rebellious early years and contentious relationships with authority, failed marriages, allegations of match fixing and a subsequent successful defamation claim and perjury trial, Cairns was a headline generator. Even today, as a middle-aged man, he is still creating compelling copy as he recovers from a near-death brush with an aortic dissection, a spinal stroke and bowel cancer.

It was tempting to change my definition of 'modern' to squeeze the all-rounder in, but a debut in the 80s, no matter how misguided that initial selection might have been, stretches the word 'modern' beyond any credible start point.

Now that the publishers and I had settled on the timeframe, there were myriad complicating factors, most notably that in 2005 another international format, twenty20 internationals, joined tests and one-day internationals as part of the landscape, quickly morphing from a purist-prodding novelty to the automatic teller machine of cricket.

How, then, do you rate the exploits of those who played a limited or no role in this branch of cricket? The short answer is you can't penalise somebody for not playing a form of cricket that barely existed during their careers. You can, however, reward those who did play it very well. To put this in human terms, Astle is not penalised for playing just four T20Is, but Martin Guptill's record in the format gives his case more weight.

T20 has complicated matters, though. There's no doubt about that, and not just because some players in this book played far more of it than others. There's also the fact that traditional metrics, like averages and aggregates, don't translate very well to the format. T20 is a game dominated by key moments. It is not a sport that lends itself well to consistent narrative arcs but instead is marked by dramatic spikes. It is the only format where a quick-fire 14 off four deliveries might be more valuable than 60 off 50, for example, or where two dot balls delivered towards the end of the innings might have far more bearing on the result than a couple of wickets taken in the powerplay. Every time there is a player auction for the Indian Premier League there is always at least a couple of players who are bought for amounts that don't seem to reflect their ESPNcricinfo Statsguru pages, but that tournament is a data-rich environment, and owners and team managers are always looking for an edge and looking for those players that might not produce high volumes of runs or wickets but who generate match-altering plays.

Without access to that data, we, the public, still tend to view T20 through a traditional prism: who's scoring the most runs and who's taking wickets at a good economy rate? These are the players who we see as the most valuable, but Stephen Fleming, the outstandingly successful coach of the Chennai Super Kings, might have a completely different view.

The evolution of the shorter format continues apace, and while its importance is acknowledged and even celebrated, when assessing the players to come, it definitely takes up far less space and weight than the other two formats.

Speaking of weighting, tests still reign supreme to the author's eyes, and success in the five-day game means more than success in the white-ball formats. Everybody who made this imaginary 12-man squad played and enjoyed at least a modicum of success in test cricket, while one player did not play a single white-ball international. In other words, you could qualify as a one-format great as long as that format was test cricket. Maybe if somebody drags this book off some dusty bookshelf in the year 2080, that qualifier might seem counterintuitive - even a little bizarre. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that in a generation or two's time, test cricket and those who play it well might seem like a novelty.

Even now, the weighting of test cricket is based on old-world and intrinsic values; the extrinsic certainly favours the shortest format, which has had a massive impact in the new world.

And what of one-day cricket? Media mogul Kerry Packer supercharged the format with coloured clothing, white balls and matches played under lights as the grey 70s turned into the vivid 80s, but less than 50 years later the format is being written off in some quarters as tired and boring. Increasingly, it is being seen as the odd format out as the purists demand that the sanctity of tests stays intact, while franchise T20 tournaments continue to proliferate.

This book reflects the importance of 50-over cricket through this era and, indeed, New Zealand's cricket history. You can make an argument that the most important day in this country's cricket story came on 1 February 1981, when Greg Chappell instructed his younger brother Trevor to bowl the last ball of a tri-series one-day final to Brian McKechnie, the only ball he'd face in the match, underarm. That 'low' act, designed to deny McKechnie the opportunity to hit an improbable six to tie the match, ignited and re-engaged a latent fanbase that had become disillusioned with the boring test cricket played in this era. While one-day cricket's global pre-eminence is being tested, the format continues to have a special place in the hearts of New Zealanders.

White-ball cricket, particularly T20, has accelerated the development of new trends. For example, being a metronomically accurate bowler was once the gold standard of limited-overs bowling, but with batters more adept at accessing all parts of the ground and being more fearless in doing so, being able to mix and disguise different types of deliveries has become critical.

Strike rates have ballooned as batters become more focused on run rate than wicket preservation. This has even bled into red-ball cricket. It feels like it has reached its apotheosis with Bazball, the ultra-attacking test cricket played by England under Brendon McCullum, but who knows where the game will head - switch-hitting batters seems fanciful as we watch the game now, but in a few short years they might be commonplace. I can also see a day where bowlers, no matter how far down the order they bat, are expected to be proficient batters. The days of out-and-out rabbits à la Chris Martin seem numbered.

It feels important to mention that because it is possible to read some of the numbers beside these players and wonder what all the fuss is about. Nathan Astle springs immediately to mind. That ODI strike rate of 72.6 is nothing special, right? I mean Kane Williamson, not a noted power hitter, strikes at 81.

All I can say in response is that one-day cricket was different back then. It was really only the...