What Actual Racial Equality In Cricket Would Look Like

Everyone’s asking what racial equality would look like in the sport of cricket. The typical, low IQ, explanation is that it would look like equal representation for all disadvantaged communities and blah blah blah. This article suggests an alternative, higher IQ explanation free of Marxist nonsense.

The laws of cricket are based on a great many assumptions. One of those is that cricket is fundamentally a contest between bat and ball. Another assumption is that bowling fast is the “standard” way of beating the bat, and that spin bowling is a variation.

This latter assumption plays out often. The fast bowlers almost always open the bowling. Usually only after they’ve already had a go does the captain bring on a spinner. Often the spinner has to wait until the third (or even fourth) seamer has already bowled.

Seaming conditions are, at time of writing, considered “standard” conditions in international cricket. But not every bowler is suited to seaming conditions. More importantly, not every cricketing nation is suited to producing fast bowlers. And here we’re not talking about culture, but genetics.

As anyone who has recently seen the Australian cricket team will know, there are a lot of tall fast bowlers on the international scene. Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood are 6’7″ and 6’6″ respectively. Pat Cummins is relatively short in such company, at only 6’4″. But even Cummins, the shortest of the three, is two standard deviations above the mean height of Australian males.

Fast bowlers tend to be tall for the same reason that baseball pitchers tend to be tall. The taller someone is, the longer their arms. The longer the arms, the higher the handspeed at point of release (all other things being equal). And the higher the handspeed, the faster the delivery. So international fast bowlers are almost always taller than their national average.

The national average, of course, varies from nation to nation. But it is precisely here that the current cricketing setup advantages some nations and disdvantages others.

Richard Dawkins has explained that civilisation has the effect of making populations smaller over the long-term. This it does by removing the major selective advantage in favour of large size, which is capacity for violence. In a state of Nature, a capacity for violence is the primary determinant of whether a man gets to pass his genes on to following generations. In a state of civilisation, the violent are executed and don’t pass their genes on.

So countries such as India, whose people have been civilised for several millennia, have long since lost a strong selective pressure in favour of size and capacity for violence. Countries with people of Northern European descent, whose people were barely civilised at all as recently as a thousand years ago, maintained that selective pressure much longer. Hence, Northern European men today are much bigger than Indian ones.

If the average height of an Anglo-Saxon male aged between 20 and 35 (the demographic that produces the vast majority of Australian cricketers) in Australia is 5’10”, and if this demographic is 10% of the total Australian population, then there are about 2.5 million men in this population.

If the average standard deviation of male Anglo-Saxon height in Australia is about three inches, then a player like Starc or Hazlewood is about three standard deviations above average. This means that players of their height are about 1 in 740 among the general population. 2.5 million divided by 740 gives us 3,378 – the number of Australian men tall and young enough to be extremely effective international fast bowlers.

Let’s assume that those young and male enough to make the Indian cricket team are also 10% of the population. But their average height is significantly less than that of the average Anglo-Saxon Australian – 5’5″-5’6″. So in order to be around Starc’s or Hazlewood’s height, the average Indian male has to be 4.5 standard deviations above the mean. This makes them much rarer – only about one in 300,000 Indian men will be that tall.

So if all the men aged between 20 and 35 in India comprise 10% of the nation’s population of 1.4 billion, this makes 140 million young enough for the national cricket team. Of them, only some 467 will be of a similar height to Starc or Hazlewood.

In other words, Australia has 7-8 times as many men tall enough to be extremely effective international fast bowlers as India does. This is despite that India has over 50 times as many people.

The conclusion from all of this mathematics is simple: the normalisation of fast bowling as the standard method of bowling a cricket ball provides an unfair advantage to countries with taller populations (the West Indies are also a beneficiary here, as anyone who saw Joel Garner, Curtly Ambrose or Courtney Walsh bowling will know).

The Indian phenotype, being shorter and with much more flexible wrists than white people, is far better suited to spin bowling. The more flexible one’s wrist, the easier it is to put large spin on the ball, and the greater the spin the higher the likelihood of taking wickets.

Racial equity in cricket, then, would require the normalisation of the idea that fast bowling and spin bowling were arts deserving of equal attention.

The situation facing the Indian Test team, and Ravi Ashwin in particular, is a disgrace. Ashwin is currently the world’s No. 1 Test bowler by far. The fact that he can’t find a place in the team when India tours England – because conditions in England have been manufactured to suit fast bowling on the basis that that’s normal bowling – is an absurdity.

The main argument of this essay is that genuine racial equality in cricket does not involve any Marxist nonsense, but is chiefly a matter of providing conditions that suit spin just as much as seam.

This might even entail a requirement that conditions in non-Asian countries be manufactured so that teams bowl at least 40% of their overs in spin (averaged across a season), and of the players’ own volition. That way, it could be said that bowling in cricket was something for all possible physiques, not just the tall and strong.

Such a measure would tip the balance back towards skill from strength. Cricket is primarily a game of skill – in contrast to sports like wrestling, boxing or rugby, where strength is the most important factor. Extreme skill on display has always been cricket’s major appeal. Forcing balance between pace and spin could be the way to maximise the skill component of cricket, and to minimise the strength component.

Eventually this might entail that international cricket teams would bowl around half their overs in pace and half in spin.

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Reflections On 30 Years As A Black Caps Supporter

I’ve been supporting the Black Caps since they were known as the Young Guns. My first memory was being told to watch an ODI against Australia in Adelaide, as the tour was expected to be the swansong of our greatest ever cricketer, Sir Richard Hadlee. But watching cricket didn’t interest me until I learned to play it at school, and understood what it was about.

The first match I ever really followed was by fluke: the ODI against Australia in Hobart, 1990. I happened to be alone in a room with a television and that was the most interesting show on the three channels. The drama of the match captivated me. I realised that Chris Pringle was like me, only greater. Like many who saw that match, I started wearing zinc sunblock.

The first series I really enjoyed was the England tour to here in 1990/91. The second ODI taught me to enjoy cricket from a moral angle. England were chasing, and seven wickets down but looking good for a win, when their No. 9 – Martin Bicknell – was run out by a metre but not given. In the age before television umpires, such outrages were common. That New Zealand went on to win seemed righteous, as if the cricketing gods understood justice.

The 1992 World Cup got me hooked. The opening match, against the defending champion Australian team, was fascinating. The hurry to beat Zimbabwe before rain stopped play, Mark Greatbatch slamming Curtly Ambrose over cover for six and the easy win over nemesis England were also highlights. It seemed then that our time would soon come, and we would soon be world champions somehow.

It was tough to be a Black Caps supporter in the years after that. The Centennial Season of 1995 was launched with much fanfare, but the results on the field were brutal. Getting bowled out for 146 in a home ODI against the West Indies, then losing by nine wickets, seemed like a low point at the time. Worse followed a few weeks later – losing by an innings and 322 runs, again at home to the West Indies.

The kids joking at school were just as brutal. Murphy Su’a took 0-179 in the Test loss – the joke was that “Su’a bowled like a sewer: he sprayed shit everywhere”. Sometimes it felt that I personally could have improved the side. These feelings were especially strong after I stopped trying to bowl like Wasim Akram and started trying to bowl like Glenn McGrath.

At high school I was told that Test match cricket was always going to be a bridge too far for New Zealand. Unlike ODI cricket, Test cricket required specialists, which required depth, which required a big population. Aussie managed it by having a population five times ours for who cricket was the No. 1 sport. New Zealand cricket, I was told, would always be populated by athletes who couldn’t cut it in rugby. As such, we would get the odd ODI win against the bigger teams but would never be a legitimate Test cricket force.

By the turn of the century I had observed that the team was making a transition from talented amateurs to actual professionals. This had begun under Australian coach Steve Rixon. He had inherited a team considered by many to be “the laughing stock of New Zealand sport“. His efforts to bring the Black Caps into the modern day resulted in a good showing at the 1999 World Cup, as well as beating England in a Test series in England.

Shane Bond gave us an idea of what a fully professional side might look like. On several occasions, he more or less won the game by himself, such as the ten-wicket ODI win against Australia in 2007. Bond wasn’t just some jock who happened to be good at cricket – he had a fully professional mind that he happened to apply to fast bowling. He had a plan for every batsman and executed it with extreme speed and precision.

Apart from Bond and a few others, the Black Caps remained frustratingly mediocre through the first decade of the 2000s. Rixon may have professionalised the national coaching setup, but the players coming through were still mostly the products of an amateur mindset.

The arrival of Ross Taylor changed a lot. Taylor was the first player to be professional right down to the soul. More than anyone else before him, it seemed like Taylor really cared about the team as a team. Losses were borne with more sorrow than before; wins were savoured with more appreciation than before. This emotional investment resulted in a change of attitude.

The 2011 World Cup semifinal win reflected this spiritual change, in particular the freak occurence of Hashim Amla being dismissed after chopping a cut onto his own boot, which then popped up and was caught. The Black Caps went on to do what they often did in those years: post a low total, yet manage to strangle the opposition out for less. It felt like this heralded the beginning of true self-belief.

People talk about the 45 all out in Cape Town in 2013 as if it was merely another milestone in an established tradition of crapness. From my perspective, it was an aberration in an established trend of improvement. McCullum’s captaincy had brought with it a change of mindset, seen already in the drawn Sri Lanka series. The Cape Town debacle was just a roadbump.

The tour of the United Arab Emirates in 2014 (to play Pakistan) was the first series, in my estimation, to hint at what a fully professional side might look like. The difference could be seen in the pressure exerted. Opposition batsmen were no longer able to simply wait for the bad ball. It was during this tour that I became a Matt Henry fan, which paid handsome returns in coming years.

Henry’s example was a microcosm of wider systemic changes. For the first time, Black Caps bowlers were good from when they joined the team. Lockie Ferguson and Kyle Jamieson were further examples of this phenomenon.

From 2015 onwards it has been a great time to be a Black Caps fan. We seem to get the best out of all players. Even when Henry Nicholls was playing scratchy innings at No. 5, I knew he would come good, as I wrote about here. Nicholls has gone on to average 50 with the bat in Tests since the start of March 2018, when that article was written.

Faith in the Black Caps rarely paid off in the mid-90s, but pays off readily now. The Black Caps under Williamson are about as good as the All Blacks under Richie McCaw when it comes to turning losing positions into winning ones. Even when they lose, it seldom feels like they played poorly.

The 2019 World Cup failure brought back those nagging doubts about New Zealand being too small to ever produce a champion team. It wasn’t that the team wasn’t currently good enough – I knew they were – it was that the coincidence of so many good players seemed like our golden generation, something that may never be replicated.

The World Test Championship final was, therefore, the highlight of my 30 years as a Black Caps fan. I watched almost every ball, drinking so much coffee to stay awake on the final day that I was sick the next. Never in 30 years has a Black Caps Test side displayed such sustained and excellent bowling. The batting was almost as good.

I expect this current golden age to last as long as Kane Williamson is the captain. The hope will be that this Black Caps generation compares well historically, but not to other Black Caps sides, for those have all long since been surpassed. The comparison will be to Clive Lloyd’s West Indies and Ricky Ponting’s Australia as one of the greatest Test sides ever.

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Neil Wagner And The Coming Golden Age Of New Zealand Cricket

Black Caps fans were disappointed to hear, last Sunday evening, that Neil Wagner had broken two toes batting in the first innings in the ongoing Test against Pakistan. The natural assumption was that the damage would prevent Wagner from bowling, and so the Black Caps were much less likely to win the match than they otherwise would have been. As it turned out, Wagner bowled 49 overs anyway, and the Black Caps won by 101 runs.

The win against Pakistan was important for a number of reasons. For one thing, it propelled the Black Caps to the No. 1 Test ranking for the first time in their history. For another, it meant that they still had a chance to make the World Test Championship final. But the main reason was spiritual.

There are many reasons why the All Blacks are infamously hard to beat. Their extremely high level of skill is one. The main reason, though, is will. The All Blacks go harder than any other team barring the Springboks. They and the Boks seem ready and willing to die to defend their line, a quality shared by no other teams. The All Blacks are even willing to play on with broken bones.

On the 1970 All Blacks tour of South Africa, Colin Meads played most of a match against East Transvaal with a broken arm. The near-demonic will necessary to do this has since become part of the All Blacks mythology. In the half-century since that tour, the All Blacks have built a winning record against every other side in the world, even the 3-time World Cup winning Springboks.

Part of the reason why the All Blacks are so good is their “aura”. This is the name given to the All Blacks egregore, which is powerful enough to influence games in its own right. This egregore has gained so much power because of feats like that of Colin Meads. Other teams don’t have players willing to play on with broken bones, which is why they keep losing to the All Blacks, who do.

When most Black Caps fans heard that Neil Wagner had two broken toes, they would have resigned themselves to a draw. Tim Southee, Trent Boult, Kyle Jamieson and Mitchell Santner are fine bowlers, but it seems unlikely that they could take 20 wickets by themselves on a placid New Zealand pitch that would continue to flatten out.

That Wagner not only continued to bowl, but took 4-105, is a feat equal to that of Colin Meads half a century ago. Wagner has rightly been lauded for his influence on the outcome of the match, but the larger effect might be Wagner’s influence on the Black Caps’ egregore. The Black Caps are, now, also a team that fields players willing to play on with broken bones.

Wagner’s feat, and the subsequent Black Caps victory, may have created an egregore that is strong enough to win matches on its own. Every team that faces the Black Caps now knows that, as Wagner put it, their opponents would rather be carried off on a stretcher than lose. That is intimidation. That is an aura. That fact will create doubt in the minds of every team that gets ahead of the Black Caps in a match.

It’s also impossible to overstate the psychological effect that the Black Caps win will have on world cricket. The bar has now been set higher than ever before. Every cricketer in the world knows that, if they aren’t willing to bowl 49 overs on a broken foot, they don’t want it as much as the Black Caps do. Net bowlers the world over will tire and, thinking of Wagner, bowl for another hour anyway.

Thanks to the efforts of Wagner and others, the Black Caps are now the world’s leading cricket team.

What seems clear is that the Black Caps are about to enter the true Golden Age of New Zealand Cricket. From now until at least the retirement of Kane Williamson, the Black Caps will either be ranked No.1 or will be threatening it. They have a cadre of both batsmen and bowlers who will be able to perform at world-class level, and there won’t be mass retirements for at least one more World Cup cycle.

Over the next four to six years, the Black Caps will challenge in all conditions against all opponents. That they themselves believe they can do this has been ensured by Neil Wagner’s efforts this week. Both the Black Caps and their opponents know that not even broken bones are enough to stop the Kiwi pace battery. It will provide an invincible confidence.

This Black Caps side is already the No. 1 Test team in the world and easily the best squad that New Zealand has ever produced. The big question is whether they have what it takes to challenge Ponting’s Australia as the most complete side in living memory. The next four to six years should tell us.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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The Black Caps Can Win The World Cup If They Summon The Spirit of The Crusaders Team of 1999

Some say that you need to lose a final before you can win one, and therefore the Black Caps should win Sunday’s Cricket World Cup decider since they lost the final in 2015. Others point out that their opponents, England, have already lost three finals and are playing at home. The 2019 Black Caps, as Dan McGlashan writes, need to take their inspiration from the champion Crusaders team – of 1999.

The 1999 Super Rugby season followed a similar format to this year’s Cricket World Cup. The twelve teams all played each other in a round robin league, and then the top four played in semifinals, with the top team playing the fourth-ranked one and second playing third. The final would be played at the home ground of the highest-ranked finalist.

The Crusaders started the season with wins, but the wheels fell off the campaign in later rounds and they limped into the semifinals in fourth position. Their semifinal was away against the Queensland Reds, a team that had beaten them by 13 points during the round robin stage. To the surprise of many, the Crusaders won the game 28-22.

The lesser-favoured team also won the other semifinal, with the Otago Highlanders taking down the Stormers in South Africa. This meant that the Highlanders were the highest-ranked finalist, having been third at the end of the pool stage to the Crusaders’ fourth. The final would therefore be at Carisbrook, Dunedin.

Despite having qualified fourth, and despite having to win away, the Crusaders were able to overcome. They won the final 24-19 despite the hostile Otago crowd and the gallant efforts of the Highlanders.

The Black Caps have had a similar campaign this year. Their World Cup started with a number of wins against the easy teams, and then some very tight games, and then some losses. Consequently, they limped into the semifinals in fourth place.

India was heavily favoured to win the semifinal, having only lost one game during the round robin. However, vulnerabilities had been exposed in the Indian win against Afghanistan, and the Black Caps took advantage to win the fixture by 18 runs.

That the Black Caps have not been favoured to win is an understatement. Smarter media pundits, such as VJM Publishing, have been reporting for years that this Black Caps unit is an excellent side: their players stack up statistically to the world’s best, they’re better man-for-man than the 2015 side and we believed years ago that they could be the No. 1 ODI side in the world.

The mainstream media, by contrast, has been spewing out pessimistic garbage. They don’t simply remember the sporting landscape of 1999 – they’re stuck in it. Hence, they write as if the Black Caps were still as unfavoured as the team of 1999.

This garbage, however, could be used as fuel to spark a fire, the kind of fire that inspired Andrew Mehrtens to give a one-fingered salute to a raucous Bulls crowd on his way to leading the Crusaders to the 1999 title.

It’s true that the English team is probably the favourites. Not only are they the No. 1 ranked ODI team in the world, but they also beat the Black Caps in their pool stage encounter. This isn’t a bad thing from the Black Caps’ perspective – it just means that they have to do two things.

The first is to go to the final with an attitude of defiance. It’s probably fair to say that the 2015 Black Caps side were a little overawed by the occasion of a Cricket World Cup final. They were playing in the 90,000-seat home stadium of the five-time world champions. The Black Caps looked, and played, nervously that day. Those nerves may have led to incorrect decisions being made.

The 2019 side shows no sign of this. Kane Williamson has been a colossus of silk and steel who plays with the self-belief of a prophet of God, and his lieutenants all have experience from playing in the last final. Martin Guptill, Ross Taylor, Trent Boult and Matt Henry have all played multiple World Cup knockout games by now, with Guptill and Henry even winning Man of the Match in two of them.

They need to take this newly-won confidence into the final, then double down on it. Let them rage coldly against their doubters, against the sheep-like mockers. Let them take the field with the belief that they’re not there to do well or evenly merely to win, but to write their names into history.

For a second thing, they have to do something new that England isn’t expecting.

That something unexpected might be swapping Guptill and Tom Latham in the batting order. If Latham opened the batting with Henry Nicholls, the Black Caps would have their two best leavers of the ball to see out the first six overs. So far this World Cup, the ball has not swung much past the six over mark, and so surviving this period becomes crucial (as India found out to their dismay).

Opening with Guptill makes sense if the bat dominates the ball, as it has done for most of the past four years. If the ball dominates the bat, however, as has been the case for much of this World Cup, Guptill tends to nick off or miss a moving one early and get out. Better to have Latham and Nicholls deal with this, then to have Guptill come in at 5 once Williamson and Taylor have seen off the main danger.

Nothing needs to change in the bowling department. The Black Caps produced one of their greatest ever bowling performances in the semifinal, with lethal accuracy up front and then a dogged refusal to give away bad balls as the innings progressed. If they can bowl that well again, or even close to it, England will have to play extremely well to score 270 or more.

The Black Caps need to summon the iron-willed spirit of the 1999 Crusaders team. Then they can go into an away final against a favoured opponent with the attitude of sticking it up all of them, their crowd and their media. This need not mean they go against their established culture of goodwill and fair play – it just means they have to play with a bit more steel in the spine.

Summon the spirit of the Crusaders side of 20 years ago, and the Black Caps could be world champions on Monday morning.

Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing, is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people. It is available on TradeMe (for Kiwis) and on Amazon (for international readers).