Neil Wagner’s retirement: Committed bowler summed up remarkable era for Black Caps

The defining mental image of the past decade or so of Kiwi cricketing strength hasn’t featured one of the marquee stars. It’s not Brendon McCullum assaulting bowlers with a baseball slug through covers, nor is it Trent Boult tearing through a top order or even Kane Williamson raising his bat after yet another metronomic century.

It’s Neil Wagner doing literally anything on the field. Bowling. Batting. Chasing down the ball from fine leg. Carrying the drinks. Waving to the crowd.

Those who deal with Wagner off the field find him to be a lovely bloke. But when the most determined New Zealander to ever pull on whites went into action something changed. He went about his business with an expression of utter focus that left no doubt of his commitment to the cause. Famously, he bowled a spell against Pakistan that won a series and took the Black Caps to the top of the world test rankings for the first time – all while charging in with two broken toes.

In cricket – test cricket in particular – it’s easy for a player’s attention to drift; the focus dims. Imagine how motivated Wagner’s teammates have been to stay on target, to match his remarkable levels of commitment. Could you sit in the changing room after a match and look a bowler in the eye while his two broken toes are wrapped in ice and quietly think to yourself that you could have given more?

And now he’s gone.

The 37-year-old departs the international game with figures that make him arguably our second best ever bowler. In 64 tests, he took 260 wickets at 27.57 with a strike-rate of 52.7. Only Sir Richard Hadlee has a better strike rate in tests among New Zealanders who have taken more than 100 wickets.

He wasn’t the quickest, he wasn’t the tallest, he didn’t move the ball much. Wagner’s stock left-armers came off something shorter than a nagging length that many batters simply hadn’t faced much elsewhere in their careers – for the perfectly understandable reason that bowlers not-quite-quick-enough and not-quite-tall-enough don’t tend to launch barrages of short-pitch bowling.

With stats fuelled by accuracy and near-demented willpower, Wagner was more than the sum of his parts.

One of sport’s hoariest cliches is the idea of an athlete “giving it 110 per cent”. The maths is clear, folks: all of your effort adds up to 100 per cent of your effort. You can’t give more than 100 per cent of a thing.

But when Neil Wagner steamed in – red-faced and wild-eyed like a belligerent drunk – 110 per cent effort made perfect mathematical sense.

At today’s announcement, there was no sign of the howling inner rage he brought to the field. Just warm, understandable, lovable tears.