Proud to be everyone's second favorite team. The feeling of playing the game in a way that neutral fans enjoy. But there is also a bigger truth there. Everyone picks their number two team for one reason or another. Yet, while it is generally accepted that one side has that spell, there are usually a few key reasons. They are seen as good, safe and non-threatening. Even if they beat your main team, they won't affect it much, and over time you'll find that you'll still win more than them. Their victories are good, there is honor in their losses, and they are easy to get back in the friend zone because they are beige.
In the case of New Zealand, literally even more.
In 1930, New Zealand played its first Test against England. At the same time West Indies played a Test in the Caribbean. Both the teams were playing against England.
For the longest time New Zealand was the second team of cricket.
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According to the broadcast, New Zealand had a 27% chance of winning on the sixth and final day of this final. One chance, but not much. But Kyle Jamieson turned it into a spell. Not even for the first time in this game, the man with the golden bowling average destroys the best batting line-up in the world.
Jamieson is a 26-year-old who started off as a batsman before becoming a bowler. So he made a late start by New Zealand's standards in the international team. Yet he has embarrassed teams in his first eight Tests. He looks too good to be true. A tall, smart swing bowler who can hit sixes too. A pick-your-own-cricketer kind of player.
For generations, New Zealand all-rounder Bob Kunis was like that quote, neither one thing nor the other. Jamieson is not like that.
Not that he is the best cricketer he has produced. This is Richard Hadley's country. But as extraordinary as Headley was, his raw talent came from New Zealand. Much of this respect has come from county cricket. Jamieson is 100% New Zealand Cricket.
The natural talent with him is evident, but Jamieson is a product of the New Zealand system. Coaching was needed to convert this young batsman into fast bowling. That entire wrist had to be trained by skilled trainers. And he needed a professional system to keep him around when he could be missing in everyday working life when he didn't break the national team early.
For the first time, New Zealand had a system worthy of the players they had always produced. Jamieson is a combination of hard work on and off the field.
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John R. I got a story at the time of Reed's death. It was written on a long-forgotten cricket forum or blog, and was about Reid's preparations for the tour of England when he was the captain of New Zealand.
Reid worked at a service station, and to warm-up before the tour, he asked volunteers to come downstairs and bowl in the local nets. One of them was a young 12-year-old boy who tried his best to help Reed. The pitch he had was solid. Reid was going against great England cricketers in the era he dominated, the kids bowling him over a solid wicket.
There is amateurism, there is corruption, but New Zealand was not playing a game like England at that time.
And this amateur part haunted his cricket for a long time. Like in 2002 when their domestic cricketers went on strike, except if you don't have a job it's not really a strike. You saw that when the T20 era almost halved his team. And you can see that in the 1970s when Glenn Turner was gone.
Turner was an avid professional playing for a happy amateur nation, and that would never last. He transformed himself into an incredible player in county cricket and then returned to the amateur world of New Zealand. And in 1977, Turner resigned as captain. He was 30, clearly in his prime as a batsman, and he dominated county cricket.
In all, Turner would make 103 first-class centuries, seven for New Zealand. In all, he played 41 Tests in a career spanning 14 years.
We pay a lot of attention to the small population of New Zealand, but we don't care how many players they have lost during the journey.
Stevie Dempster played 10 Tests for him, and averaged over 65.
It is unbelievable luck to find a player as good as Dempster for a new Test team. But he was soon recruited by Sir Julian Kahn, an eccentric millionaire. The latter hired prolific cricketers for his personal cricket team, in which he played. Dempster moved to England, and when not playing for Cannes, he would have an illustrious career for Leicestershire, scoring over 10,000 first-class runs. There were less than 1000 for his nation.
If Dempster wasn't New Zealand's best cricketer at the time, it was Clary Grimmett. The New Zealand-born and bred legspinner took 216 wickets for Australia, many of which happened after New Zealand were promoted to Test status.
And it continued. Jack Covey was an exceptional bowler whom New Zealand brought to the tour of England in 1937, where he took 114 first-class wickets at an average of 20. He toured England again in 1949, and in total, he played seven Tests there. Throughout his career, he played nine matches as the war devoured his best years. He averaged 21.53 in those nine Tests. His first-class record was 359 wickets at 22.28.
Cowwey was accompanied by Martin Donnelly on that 1949 tour. Like the Cowie, he made his debut in 1937 and played his last Test in 1949. He averaged 53 in Tests in those two tours of England. And that was the average of his career, as he never played a second Test. He averaged 47 in 131 first-class matches.
He was one of the first four great Test players to not have played more than ten matches combined, playing a total of 26 Tests.
And the absence of those players actually shows in the win column. That first test was 1930 and his first win was 1956 when he defeated West Indies in Auckland. He won three of his first 80 Tests. They lost twenty by an innings.
In 1946 there was only one innings defeat to Australia. He did not score 100 runs in the match; They did not consider it a Test at that time and Australia did not play against New Zealand again for 10,136 days.
In 1955, New Zealand went 46 runs behind England in the third innings. England won the match by an innings and 20 runs.
This is what John R. Reid once said: "I told a lot of lies. We would gather as a team, and naturally, I would try to stay as positive as possible... I would try to encourage my teammates, to explain. For that everyone is human, that they all panicked, failed. But you had the wisdom in your mind that, all things being equal, we were in a difficult time."
One thing was true in the early stages of New Zealand cricket, they lost their best players and they lost.
And yet, through the loss, something always shone through.
In 2011, a mini-series was made in New Zealand in which cricket was shown called 'Tangiwai'. It's about how a train disaster struck a Test vs South Africa.
The disaster killed 151 people, including Nerissa Love, whose fiancé Bob Blair was in Johannesburg in the middle of a Test match. On one side of the world New Zealanders were in hospitals because of the accident, on the other they had as many batsmen in the hospital as they did in the middle as Neil Adcock kept hitting them.
Burt Sutcliffe himself left the field to undergo medical treatment, and after losing consciousness twice, he returned to the field to fight for New Zealand.
The image of Sutcliffe walking back to bat at Ellis Park looks more like a picture of war than a cricket. His head is covered in a bandage. He has a big lump on the back of his neck. According to Richard Book's 'The Last Everyday Hero' "[Captain Geoff] Rabon and some of the first aid men ran in the middle to fix the kiwi strips, which were weeping with blood during the exchange. Finally decided to tape a white towel around his head."
If Sutcliffe had been killed again, it is likely that he would have been dead. But instead, he made a comeback in South Africa. Taking Adcock, Hugh Teefield destroyed and he took him behind the follow-on with a six. When the ninth wicket fell, Sutcliffe was left alone, and he and the South Africans began to walk off the field. No one believed that New Zealand's No. 11 would be walked out.
Let's be clear, neither man should have been out. The pitch was dangerous; One was clearly hurt, the other was not concentrating properly. But he batted adding 33 runs.
New Zealand will be 84 runs behind in the first innings and will have to face defeat by 132 runs. And yet here we are, still talking about it.
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There will be a long queue of people to say this victory doesn't count. New Zealand hardly plays outside the home. The final takes place under the conditions that suit them. If Kovid had not killed, they would not have been eligible. Australia lost points at a slow over rate. The World Test Championship helps teams playing short series. India is a better team. They can't beat Australia. The South African players keep moving forward to strengthen him. And then in this final, they had a result-free two-Test series in English conditions to prepare for. England also helpfully dismissed their three front-liners.
It couldn't have been much different from his 1949 tour, where his batting was so weak, he almost picked an inexperienced player from Fiji, IL Bula to strengthen his team. And his whole plan on that tour was to draw all four Tests, to prove to England that they deserved the five-day Test. They achieved their goal and here we are.
So if this championship was lucky, unsettled, or things went their way, no team has ever deserved more than this. They fought against generations of superior teams, professionals and dynasties while trying to survive as a cricketing nation. It took them 26 years to win a Test and 39 years to win a series. He already had all the misfortunes.
And outside of a win in Kenya for a tournament we now know as the Champions Trophy, New Zealand's biggest success was losing and then losing two consecutive World Cup finals. They were a great team in the 1980s, there were others that were even better.
There has always been someone else winning; There has always been someone bigger. That's just the world they live in.
But look who had Kane Williamson, New Zealand's greatest batsman in the end. There are a lot of cricketing cultures in the world, but Williamson could have come from nowhere; His lineage is evident in all the wise quiet leaders before him. A product of a professional environment, he is homely, homemade and undeniably great.
And what I'm talking about would sound like ancient history. For many of you, New Zealand are just another team. But they are not, and they never have been. And facing that last ball was living proof of that. Ross Taylor made his first-class debut in the 2002–03 Plunkett Shield season. That was the year New Zealand's domestic players went on strike. Taylor started his career as an amateur.
Such as Stevie Dempster, Hadley Howarth, Jeremy Cooney, John Wright, Nathan Astle, Bob Kunis, Blair Pocock, Richard Colling, Burt Sutcliffe, Chris Harris, The Headleys, The Redmonds and The Crows. All of them. And what they achieved in so many losses, respectable draws and then unbelievable victories could have led players like Tim Southee, BJ Watling and Tom Latham to the World Test finals. It was not a victory for any one team; It was a victory for the cricket culture that took generations to build.
Like Taylor, this team went from amateur to professional, taking 26 years to win a Test, 39 years to a series win and 91 years to become champion.
New Zealand is no longer an amateur; They are professionals. They may still be cricket's second favorite team, but now they are something else, number one.