However, it’s a shame. Those who love spin bowling were gobsmacked by the Black Caps’ momentous 3-0 pasting of India in India. Nearly all wickets were taken by spinners Mitchell Santner and Ajaz Patel (not forgetting Glenn Phillips) – so much so we hanker to see the same at home.
Yet we find a talent like Patel (10 wickets in an innings against India; 14 wickets in the third India test this year), and what do we do with him? Park him in a cupboard for long periods and deny him a central contract.
There’s an argument that bringing him out of the cupboard for specialised tours is the correct use of Patel. Now 36, he didn’t get a national call-up until he was 30, by which time he’d been the highest wicket-taker in domestic first-class cricket for three years in a row. Now he’s taken 85 test wickets in only 21 tests, taking at least four wickets in 11 of them and 10 twice. Not bad.
However, spin just isn’t the Kiwi way; we feel much more comfortable with a phalanx of medium-fast bowlers. It’s what home test records say is the best recipe – despite the fact England happily smacked them around Hagley Oval in their first innings.
So it’s a shame neither Santner nor Patel was selected; they might have made a difference, especially as the New Zealand quicks leaked bundles of runs through the point-to-third slip sector and which no one did anything to address. About 60 of Harry Brook’s 177 runs alone came through that area.
Boycott was right about a couple of things – England are not good against spin and they love a flat track, as they have demonstrated in this test. New Zealand (Kane Williamson and that astonishing series against India aside) are also not champions against spin, so that was the other thing wrong with Boycott’s spin theory; the Kiwis could have found themselves hoist by their own Patel, so to speak.
However, the irony was that England’s equal leading wicket-taker in the first innings of their eight-wicket win in Christchurch was 21-year-old Shoaib Bashir, a green offspinner working away on a green-tinged pitch supposed to benefit the pacier guys. Bashir is a project for the future and, watching him, it was easy to wonder if the Black Caps’ brains trust would ever invest in such a youthful spin experiment.
You also wonder what sort of fate England are heading for in next year’s Ashes if they field this bowling crew. The remarkable Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad have finally retired, Mark Wood and Jofra Archer – the two real speed demons – are injured. None of Brydon Carse, Gus Atkinson, nor Chris Woakes have yet looked likely to influence a series in Australia, though Bashir might.
That said, the Black Caps batters made the England pace attack look good at the start of the second innings, with two of the three early wickets down to shots that did not need to be made.
Meanwhile, the Black Caps pace bowlers toiled unhappily through two days of dropped catches – eight of them, surely an infamous record. Newcomer Nathan Smith looked useful, robbed of five wickets on debut only by the catching. Maybe a decent spinner (with apologies to Phillips) wouldn’t have made much of a difference but then again, Bashir did.
Going back to Boycott, the old barnacle (now 84) is still more active in the media than he ever was as a batsman. He had only one weapon – defence, fuelled by an immovable stubbornness to occupy the crease, so much so that (as was famously written) he sometimes forgot his job was to score runs. A genuine cricket dinosaur, his batting style is just as extinct these days.
I remember two stories from his career – one from the UK media when a 17-year-old reporter was dispatched to interview the unsentimental Boycott on the eve of being selected for England as a 23-year-old. Boycott sent him packing, saying: “No brass [money], no interview.”
The reporter learned two valuable lessons: some celebrities wanted to be paid for their time (mercifully absent in New Zealand) even back then. No interview also meant “no brass” – his editor declined to reimburse him for a cup of tea and a ham sandwich on the long train journey to Boycott’s home.
The other strong memory was the rookie Ian Botham deliberately running Boycott out in the second test against the Black Caps in 1978 (the year England lost their first test to New Zealand) because he was scoring too slowly – something else you don’t much see these days.
Like Ajaz Patel.
