Colin Munro’s T20 form has seen him elevated to open for the ODI side in the hope that he can replicate Brendon McCullum
A lot of things are going against the Black Caps before their One Day International series against India in India starts tonight (Sunday) at 9p.m. NZT. Ominously, India sit atop the ICC ODI team rankings table, equal to South Africa with 120 ratings points, while the Black Caps are currently a mid-table side at 5th. Worse, the matches are in India, where India just demolished the world champion Australia side 4-1.
On the other hand, a lot is going in their favour. New Zealand scored 343/9 in their last warm-up match against an Indian Board President’s XI, with centuries to Ross Taylor and Tom Latham, who in all likelihood will comprise the 4-5 axis over the series. Considering that Kane Williamson will bat at three, this suggests that India might have difficulty bowling the Black Caps out.
Colin Munro is expected to open the batting with Martin Guptill, which is an experimental measure intended to fill the gap left by Brendon McCullum at the top of the order. McCullum’s explosive starts made it possible for Williamson and Taylor to build innings without risk, and Munro has a T20 strike rate of close to 150 – close to what McCullum was striking at for the last 2 years of his ODI career.
It looks as though Williamson will try and get 10 overs out of Colin de Grandhomme, who will bat 7, and with Latham at 5 doing the wicketkeeping this leaves a spot for a pure batsman at 6. This spot might get filled by Henry Nicholls, as it was during the final warm-up match, or the Black Caps might start playing hitters from there, which would probably mean Glenn Phillips.
The other question mark is whether or not Tim Southee is still good enough to command a starting spot in this ODI squad. Although he has been a first-choice seamer for a handful of years, his ODI bowling average over the past three years – which includes the great run at the 2015 Cricket World Cup – is 36.47, which is only good enough for 33rd place on the official ODI bowling rankings.
Damningly, there are four players from Afghanistan alone higher than Southee on the official rankings, which is probably not good enough for a Black Caps side that made the final of the last Cricket World Cup and is aiming to go one better in England in 2019.
It’s very possible that the Black Caps play two spinners on the slow Indian decks, which means they take both Mitchell Santner and Ish Sodhi. Assuming then that they still need de Grandhomme at 7 for the sake of the batting, and that Trent Boult is undroppable, that means Southee will be competing with Adam Milne and Matt Henry for that second seamer’s position.
India, for their part, have two extremely crafty bowlers. With the new ball is Jasprit Bumrah, who isn’t quick but has a Nathan Bracken-style range of subtle variations that make him hard to hit off the square, and with the older ball is Axar Patel, whose wily orthodox is also a difficult proposition on Indian surfaces.
The likely winning of the game, however, will be in India’s power-packed top order. They have four batsmen ranked in the top 14 in the world, with two of them – Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma – ranked higher than Kane Williamson. Kohli averages a monstrous 55.13 from almost 200 matches, and getting rid of him early is simply a necessity if the Black Caps are to win.
Alongside them are the silky skillful Ajinkya Rahane and the brutal Shikhar Dhawan at the top and MS Dhoni with his 50+ average down the order. India have also found a genuine allrounder in Hardik Pandya so have no obvious weaknesses anywhere.
The Black Caps are only playing three ODIs and they are paying $3.80 on BetFair to win the first one, compared to India’s $1.35. This suggests that the market is expecting a 2-1 or 3-0 win to India.
Cricket is a game of skill, not strength, and Amelia Kerr has bags of that. Could she compete with the men?
The main reason for dividing sports teams into men and women is because this reflects the basic division of labour that has occurred in nature: into male fighters and female reproducers. This is the same logic as dividing boxers into weight divisions – that the categories are so different that to pit them against each other is not a fair competition. As this essay will examine, one niche within sports where the female body has an advantage over the male one is that of legspinner.
The chance of a female competing with men in heavyweight boxing, absent some wicked cybernetic arms or computer targeting systems in bionic eyes, is practically zero, and the same could be said of Greco-Roman wrestling or rugby. These sports are too similar to actual fighting for women to compete with men, who are the result of millions of years of natural and sexual selection of fighting skills.
Cricket is, like other sports, a metaphor for combat, but it is not like other sports. It’s not primarily a contest of strength, speed, size, height or aggression. Cricket is a contest of skill, guile, concentration and nerve – qualities that might be of immense value in the conduct of warfare, but not so much in actual fighting.
This is why the sportsmen who become the world’s top cricketers are very seldom in top fighting shape. Kane Williamson, Steve Smith, Joe Root and Virat Kohli are far from musclemen; Rangana Herath, who just moved past 400 Test wickets, is known as “Fatty” for his distinctive pot belly and the less said about Dwayne Leverock the better.
There’s a lot of skill in fast bowling, but physical attributes are crucial. Although the most skilled fast bowlers – like Dale Steyn, Trent Boult and Jimmy Anderson – are not particularly tall, they are all far from short. Moreover, any player lacking those skill levels almost has to be tall in order to make it.
In either case, women can’t compete with men in fast bowling because so much of the action of slinging a weight (like a ball) is a function of shoulder strength, and shoulder strength is one of the ways in which men are stronger than women by the greatest amount.
There’s a lot of skill in batting, but there’s also a lot of strength. Williamson and Kohli might trade on skill but they are far from weaklings. No woman could realistically compete with either player, much less the heavy hitters like Martin Guptill, Chris Gayle, David Warner or Brendon McCullum.
As in the two categories of cricketer above, there’s a lot of skill in spin bowling, but in this regard there is no benefit at all to being strong.
In fact, having big muscles might be a disadvantage. Muttiah Muralitharan, the single most successful spin bowler in the history of cricket, had famously rubbery wrists, extremely flexible, which enabled him to sling the ball with a whipping action that imparted incredible turn.
It’s known that women are more flexible in the wrists, elbows and shoulders than men, which is partially a function of having less muscle mass. This flexibility ought to make it possible for female bowlers, like legspinner Amelia Kerr (see video), to put more spin on the ball for the same reasons that Muralitharan could.
However, the big thing when it comes to spin bowling is smarts. The bowler is trying to deceive the batsman, trying to make them play down the wrong line or put their feet in the wrong place anticipating spin in, for example, the other direction.
To this end they need a lot of variations. It seems like Kerr already has most of the variations – and speaking of variations, very few international men’s cricket sides will have faced a bowler as short as Kerr, and therefore they will not be used to the trajectory her deliveries come from.
All this raises a question. Kerr currently has 20 wickets in women’s ODI cricket at an average of 22, and it might be that the coaches of the Black Caps decide that her cunning, guile, variations and unpredictability make her more dangerous against the Black Caps’ next opponent than the best legspinning male. Should Kerr then be eligible for the Black Caps?
Some might argue that the Black Caps are specifically a male representative team and so it doesn’t make sense to pick a woman to play in it, in same way that no-one would select a man to play in the Silver Ferns.
Others would argue that the sport of cricket was only gender-segregated in the first place because of the unlikelihood that any given woman could compete with men, so if a woman is good enough to compete with the best men there is no reason to enforce segregation.
In any case, this column predicts that if Kerr would get the chance to bowl in a net with the Black Caps, the men would learn a thing or two from her.
“Just give me one that swings thanks Kane, and we’re going to No. 1.”
There’s something you can see right now that hasn’t been seen for thirty years. It’s not a rare comet: it’s an official Test cricket rankings that has New Zealand higher than Australia. It might come down to decimal points – both teams are on 97 overall ratings points – but the Black Caps are in fourth, the Baggy Greens in fifth. Do the Black Caps deserve to be considered a better Test side than Australia? This article has a look.
We will comparatively examine the relative strengths of either nation in the positions of established opener, junior opener, No. 3, No. 4, No. 5, allrounder, wicketkeeper, first seamer, second seamer, third seamer and spinner.
This article will compare them at all positions, championship boxing style, with an advantage in one of these positions worth a one point win and a knockdown advantage worth a two point win, to be judged along eleven rounds.
Established opener:Tom Latham vs. David Warner
On the briefest glance, this looks like a hands-down win for Warner. He boasts a Test batting average of 47.94, with 20 centuries, compared to Latham’s Test average of 38.84 with six centuries. Warner’s overall average, however, masks the stats of a home track bully.
Although Warner has a considerably higher average than Tom Latham, the two players have a similar average when batting away from home: Warner averages 36.81 away compared to Latham’s 38.46. This is the reason for Warner’s reputation as a home track bully – Latham averages about the same at home as away but Warner averages 59.12 at home.
In all, you’d probably have to give this one to Warner on the basis that he is more likely to play an innings of matchwinning destructiveness once in than Latham is, and that Latham is yet to play a definitively excellent innings against a top-flight team yet.
New Zealand 9, Australia 10
Junior opener: Jeet Raval vs. Matt Renshaw
Jeet Raval is a batsman in the style of Mark Richardson, and in a seven-Test career has functioned an average of 44, the same as Richardson. An average of 44 for a second-choice opener is incredible by recent Black Caps standards, and if Raval can keep his concentration and stick to his simple, AK-47esque simple brutality, he could be excellent in the future.
Matt Renshaw is even less established. He does have one Test century, which Raval has yet to manage, and it’s a big one: a 184 against a visiting Pakistani side this January. Apart from that, he’s not shown too much, maintaining a decent but unremarkable average of 36.64 from ten matches.
This one might be marginal, but it’s still New Zealand’s.
New Zealand 10, Australia 9
No. 3:Kane Williamson vs. Steve Smith
Steve Smith is currently at the top of the Test batting rankings, and there’s few who could really dispute that based on the numbers. He sits at 936 ranking points right now, befitting his stratospheric average of 59.66.
Unlike the days of Ricky Ponting, however, New Zealand boasts a No. 3 in the same league. Kane Williamson is not far behind Smith on the ICC rankings, at 880. Coming off a series in which he scored two hundreds in three matches against the excellent South African attack, Williamson can lay claim to being at least a pretender to Smith’s throne.
Smith is almost universally regarded as superior but here’s a curious statistic: since the start of 2015, Williamson averages 68.37 compared to Smith’s 67.79. Smith has certainly accomplished more in this time frame, but that’s primarily because he has played 15 more innings than Williamson has.
Smith has scored centuries at a marginally higher rate than Williamson during this time: 13 of them from 56 innings for a 23.2% chance per innings. Williamson has scored 9 centuries in 15 fewer opportunities than Smith, which works out to a 21.9% chance.
So in terms of who’s better right now or in the immediate future, on balance it goes to Smith but only by a whisker.
New Zealand 9, Australia 10
No. 4:Ross Taylor vs. Peter Handscomb
Over the last three years, Taylor has averaged 51.21 with the bat. That’s good enough to see him ranked 14th in the world, ahead of Tamim Iqbal, Dean Elgar and Faf du Plessis. He’s been a world-class presence at No. 4 for the Black Caps for many years, and is one behind Williamson and Martin Crowe on the all-time New Zealand Test century scorers table.
Handscomb has only played in 10 Tests, and cannot really be considered an established player. He has a 50+ average, which is very good for ten Tests, but his First Class average of 41 suggests that this will come down a fair bit.
If you consider that Ross Taylor scored the highest ever Test score by a visiting batsman to Australia – 290 in Perth – this is a knockdown win to the Black Caps.
New Zealand 10, Australia 8
No. 5:Henry Nicholls vs. Sean Marsh/Hilton Cartwright
Henry Nicholls could be considered semi-established at No. 5. He hasn’t been excellent so far in Tests – averaging 31.94 from 21 innings – but in his last series it looked like he had turned a corner. On a pitch and against a bowling attack that Kane Williamson could only manage three runs in two innings against – in the second Test against South Africa – Nicholls came in at 21/3 and played a rearguard 118 to take New Zealand from the brink of obliteration to a semi-competitive total. He’s got the goods, it’s just a question of consistency.
Australia’s choices for No. 5 are yet to show either the goods or consistency. Sean Marsh has been unable to make that spot his – despite averaging 50 there over ten innings, Marsh has scored almost everything at home, and Hilton Cartwright, heralded by many on account of his First Class average of over 50, is yet to establish himself here (or anywhere).
This one seems like New Zealand’s as well, thanks to Nicholls’s 2017 average of 48.66. This ultimately suggests that the Black Caps batting is better than the Baggy Greens batting overall. This may be the first time this has ever been true.
New Zealand 10, Australia 9
Allrounder:Colin de Grandhomme vs. Glenn Maxwell
Lord Colin de Grandhomme is now officially considered the Black Caps’ premier allrounder. In six Test matches he is yet to play a really good innings with the bat, but has on several occasions had an important impact with the ball. The most notable of these was a 6/41 against Pakistan that won New Zealand a low-scoring shootout.
Maxwell, in comparison, seems like a straight-out gamble that hasn’t paid off. Despite being one of the best pure hitters in any format of the game, he has only managed to pass 50 once in 14 Test innings. Although a batting average in the mid 20s compares favourably with what de Grandhomme has hitherto achieved, his bowling returns of 8 wickets @ 42 are much poorer than de Grandhomme’s 16 wickets @ 25.
This one goes to de Grandhomme on the basis of his bowling being considerably better.
New Zealand 10, Australia 9
Wicketkeeper:BJ Watling vs. Matthew Wade
Since the start of 2015, BJ Watling has not only given excellent service with the gloves but has scored over 1,200 runs at 42.56, with three centuries. In this regard he has been world-class for the Black Caps and probably the fourth name on the team sheet after Williamson, Taylor and Trent Boult.
Matthew Wade, by contrast, has struggled to dominate in the role and could be said to be picked by default. Over his last 10 matches he has averaged 20 with the bat and so this is fairly another knockdown victory to the Black Caps.
New Zealand 10, Australia 8
Right-arm seamer:Tim Southee vs. Josh Hazlewood
Since the start of 2015, Josh Hazlewood has taken 109 wickets @ 25, cementing him as one of the world’s premier Test bowlers. Only Jimmy Anderson is ahead of him of seamers on current rankings, and it’s easy to see how Hazlewood’s mean accuracy and unpredictable bounce has him at the top here.
By every measure, this is a long way ahead of what Tim Southee has achieved. Southee has 70 wickets @ 34 since the start of 2015, with the only truly matchwinning performance a six-wicket bag to destroy Pakistan’s first innings in Hamilton in 2016.
Southee, even with all his experience, is a much weaker bowler than Hazlewood and Hazlewood is still improving so this would have to go down as a knockdown victory to Australia.
New Zealand 8, Australia 10
Left-arm seamer:Trent Boult vs. Mitchell Starc
Mitchell Starc and Trent Boult have a similar career bowling average of about 28 runs per wicket. Starc has, however, been much stronger over the past 3 years. Since the start of 2015 he has taken 103 wickets at under 25 per wicket.
Boult has still been very good, with 84 wickets @ 30, wrecking England twice, Australia once and South Africa once during that time. One also gets the feeling that he has been unlucky recently, with long periods of sustained pressure inexplicably not ending with wickets.
In the end, though, Starc has a legitimate claim to world-class status whereas Boult is probably at the level below still.
New Zealand 9, Australia 10
Third seamer:Neil Wagner vs. Pat Cummins
Neil Wagner is the highest-ranked Black Caps Test bowler at 10th place. It’s easy to see why – since the start of 2015 he has taken 72 wickets at 24.41, with a sub-50 strike rate. Unlike his teammates Boult and Southee, Wagner doesn’t need as much assistance from the conditions to be effective, and he’s a genuine weapon anywhere.
Pat Cummins is an excellent bowler, but it’s not clear that we’ve seen enough of him to argue that he’s better than Wagner. He came back to the Test arena this year after six years of injury-enforced layoff, and he looked good in taking 14 wickets at just under 30.
Perhaps in five years Cummins will be decisively ahead on this count, but for now Wagner has much more proven effectiveness.
New Zealand 10, Australia 9
Spinner:Mitchell Santner vs. Nathan Lyon
This one is interesting because Santner is clearly the better batsman and Lyon clearly the more effective bowler, it’s just a matter of how to split the balance.
Lyon averages 28.73 with the ball since the start of 2015, with 135 wickets and a couple of Man of the Match efforts in there. This is only three runs per wicket more than Shane Warne averaged, but in a more batter-friendly era. Santner, by contrast, averages just under 40 with the ball and has only claimed 31 wickets so far.
Santner does however average 26 with the bat. Lyon, by contrast, is a genuine tail-ender, with a high score of 40 from 69 Tests and an average of 11.
In the end, you have to say that bowlers are there to bowl, not to bat, and so Lyon’s advantage here ought to be decisive in his favour.
New Zealand 9, Australia 10
Summary: New Zealand 104, Australia 102
Even if it’s agreed, on the basis of the above analysis, that the Black Caps are stronger at Tests than the Baggy Greens, the margin is extremely slim. The Black Caps might be genuinely stronger with the bat, for the first time in the history of Test cricket, but both of the Australian opening bowlers are stronger than their Kiwi counterparts and so is their spinner.
In the Australians’ favour it could be argued that good bowlers are more important than good batsmen and so the difference between Hazlewood and Southee ought to weigh heavier than the difference between Taylor and Handscomb.
If the two sides would play each other on neutral soil in a Test match now there might be a slight advantage to the Black Caps. That there might be a slight advantage is the most you can really say.
At the turn of the century, many commentators believed that a total Polynesian takeover of the All Blacks was inevitable – what happened?
The All Blacks team for this Saturday’s Bledisloe Cup clash against the Wallabies has been named. A curious aspect of the teamsheet is that it is one of the whitest All Blacks teams named in decades. This means that a lot of the race-panic rhetoric at the turn of the century turned out to be grossly misguided, and this article looks at why.
In the opening years of this century, the All Blacks back row was made up of the “Great Wall of Samoa” in Jerry Collins, Chris Masoe and Rodney So’oialo, with the Tongan-born Sione Lauaki playing a part-time role. All three of these players typified the “big hit” culture of Polynesian rugby, and they earned the “Great Wall” epithet from their uncompromising defensive style.
The back three was comprised of the “Flying Fijians” Joe Rokocoko and Sitiveni Sivivatu, with the rock-solid Mils Muliaina as the last line of defence. All three players were lightning-fast across the ground – a quality, we were told, deriving from the superior proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers in the Polynesian genome. No white player was going to be able to compete, ever again.
The idea that the All Blacks front row would sooner or later be permanently Polynesian was taken for granted in many quarters. After all, the squat, solid build of the average Polynesian was considered the ideal build for a prop, and some considered it just a matter of time until the heavier build of the Polynesians won out.
The last bastion of white All Blacks was expected to be the second row, on account of that the Polynesian genome seldom produced men taller than 6’6″, which is realistically the minimum height necessary to succeed as an international lock. But even then, with players like Ross Filipo on the rise, it seemed as if the entire forward pack would follow the backs in becoming entirely Polynesian.
This piece from The Telegraph, penned in the year 2000 and titled ‘White players shying away from All Black future‘, is typical of the rhetoric of the turn of the century. John Morris, the headmaster of Auckland Grammar School, explained that white pupils at his school were abandoning rugby union and turning “to soccer, hockey or even rugby league where there is a better chance for the smaller lad.”
This seemed reasonable for white kids, who, going through puberty later than Polynesians, often found themselves as boys against men on the high school rugby fields. Many thought that white kids would all turn to cricket, essentially abandoning rugby to the Samoans, Fijians and Tongans.
John Matheson, editor of New Zealand Rugby magazine, even went as far as to state “It won’t be too long before there is not a white face in the All Black team.”
Fast forward 17 years, to this weekend’s Bledisloe Cup match, and those predictions could hardly have been more wrong.
The player with the most Polynesian blood in the All Blacks starting XV is the half-Samoan Reiko Ioane. Sonny Bill Williams, at centre, is next. He is at most half-Samoan, with a white mother and a father with a Welsh surname. All of the other All Blacks are white or Maori – and there is not a single Fijian or Tongan among them.
Two half-Samoans out of fifteen players means that less than 7% of the All Blacks are Polynesian by blood – a lower proportion than the amount of Polynesian blood in the New Zealand population as a whole, and barely greater than that of Black Caps. And even then, Ross Taylor is a far more established player in his team than either Ioane or Williams is in the All Blacks.
So what happened?
Explaining this outcome – and how the white ethnomasochists at the turn of the century got it so badly wrong – is not straightforward.
First, genetics plays a role, in ways that were understood by few 15 years ago. Polynesians may have a higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, and that may make them quick across the turf, but this simply means that white players have a higher proportion of slow-twitch muscle fibers. Because rugby union is fundamentally a game of possession, strength trumps speed in many cases, in particular when it comes to the contest for the ball.
Players of European descent have an advantage in the upper body over Polynesians, especially when it comes to grip strength and shoulder strength. When it comes to winning the ball, this advantage is decisive. This explains why the All Blacks forward pack this weekend will be entirely white, with the exception of the Maori hooker Codie Taylor (who nevertheless has plenty of European ancestry).
The second major explanation is geographical. If one looks at the birthplaces of the current All Blacks squad, one striking pattern leaps out: very few of them are born in the big cities.
The lifestyle of people in Kiwi big cities is following the trends established elsewhere in the West: big city people are rapidly getting fatter, lazier, more obese. This means that many more All Blacks are from the minor centres than before – and the population of the minor centres is almost exclusively white and Maori.
The third major factor is professionalism. At the turn of the century, rugby matches were often won by turns of individual brilliance, as they were in the amateur days.
The game has changed a lot since then. It is much more structured now, which means that there is less room for individual flair and more demand for highly-coached, error-free play, which shifts the advantage to the middle classes because they are far more able to pay for the necessary coaching. In doing so, the advantage also shifts away from the working-class Polynesians and back to the white people who occupy the vast bulk of the middle class.
In summary, the breathless predictions of total Polynesian dominance of the top levels of New Zealand rugby turned out to be wrong. Rugby union is a fundamental part of Islander culture, this is true – but it’s a fundamental part of white Kiwi culture as well, and the Pakeha are not going to give the game up simply because they get smashed a lot in teenage years.
Predicting the racial makeup of the All Blacks in another 17 years is impossible. What can be said for certain is – as Sir Apirana Ngata believed – rugby union will continue to serve as the best of all cultural solutions for bringing out inter-racial harmony and co-operation in New Zealand, as it has done for over 120 years.
