Chris Rattue: Why this Black Caps team is simply unbelievable

Kane Williamson's once-in-a-generation talent has helped take the Black Caps to a level of success that long-time fans find hard to comprehend. Photo / Photosport

OPINION:

Being ranked number one in the world is all very nice if you are talking rugby and New Zealand, football and Brazil.

In the case of the New Zealand cricket team, and especially for those of a certain age, it is nothing short of an absolute shock to find New Zealand are about to be, officially, the top test nation.

I'm not all that fussed on world team sport rankings. They're often a cross between a mathematical minefield and a crock of you-know-what.

They include the disingenuous rugby rankings, which both reflect and attempt to cover up inequalities built into the sport, and rugby league's pretence of being a world game.

But New Zealand, the number one test cricket nation, under any points system? Weird.

Kane Williamson's once-in-a-generation talent has helped take the Black Caps to a level of success that long-time fans find hard to comprehend. Photo / Photosport

I'd assumed that financial powerhouses Australia, England and India had locked up cricket so tightly that maybe only South Africa would have the ability to bust in.

Despite the temptation to go too patriotic on this, I don't actually believe New Zealand is the outright best test side in the world. There isn't a definite number one at the moment.

But thanks to the rise and rise and rise of the extraordinary Kane Williamson, and two stupendous swing bowlers in Tim Southee and Trent Boult, New Zealand can beat the crap out of almost everyone in home conditions. This, apparently, is good enough to propel them to the top.

Is this a dream?

As a child of the 1970s, cricket meant watching endless New Zealand batting collapses and the fielders spending a dangerous amount of time exposed to that hole in the ozone layer. A floppy towel hat kept the sun out, and could also be drawn over the eyes when the cricket action got too painful to watch.

You could take your own beer into the ground in those days, and boy did you need it.

The Aussies treated us with such contempt that they lined up their entire team in the slips one day, for a photo stunt.

Put it this way: the memory says my cricket-mad friends and I spent a large part of our early childhood watching Doug Walters batting.

Back in the day, New Zealand had one really good batsman and one really good bowler. And that batsman, Glenn "The Activist" Turner, was unavailable a lot of the time.

Glenn Turner. Photo / Photosport

They were (allegedly) so bad that Australia refused to play New Zealand prior to the '70s, and Sir Don Bradman missed an exhibition match here in the 1930s because he wasn't told the game was on.

And when they beat a fairly average England side for the first time, in the late 1970s, there was a national celebration.

I was a milk boy around Onehunga at the time, and as New Zealand closed in on a victory, I recall a lady standing on her doorstep yelling out the score. That's how big a deal it was.

All these years later some things haven't changed. Our increasingly revered cricketers are still spooked by the big-brother Aussies. But apart from that, wow, wow, wow.

There have been too many highlights to mention in recent years, but one experience sticks out.

It was a normal day at Eden Park, a couple of years ago, which meant the atmosphere was not much crazier than at a small town shopping mall.

History was already being made, because it was the first day-night cricket test in this country.

But it got way better than that.

Boult and Southee were ripping England apart with such skill and ferocity that New Zealand's record low test total of 26 – made against England at the same ground in 1955 - was under threat.

It was scarcely believable, particularly as this incredible bid to lower the bar on cricket's infamous mark was being greeted with the sort of sparse home ground applause you'd hear at Keith Hay Park. It was like someone was splitting the atom in a school science classroom.

Tim Southee (L) and Trent Boult (R) have proven a lethal opening-bowling combination for the Black Caps. Photo / Photosport

A very good England side escaped ignominy, when their number nine batsman Craig Overton broke the shackles. Perhaps the most deflating thing I've seen in sport was Overton stabbing the ball to the boundary, taking England past 26.

For anyone who was there it could have been the ultimate "I was there" story. The Boult/Southee demolition job meant England were well and truly bashed in the test, as teams often are when they come here these days.

There were, it must be emphasised, some very good days in the past, particularly when Richard Hadlee was prowling around.

In 50 years of watching New Zealand's peaks and valleys, nothing will match the series win over a peerless and frightening West Indian team in 1980. With Turner holding out, Hadlee, a few fellow professionals, some clever amateurs and a couple of rank outsiders brought the best team in the world – minus Viv Richards it must be noted - to its knees in an epic and drama-filled series.

But those were hit and miss days.

This relentless, ruthless, evolving New Zealand cricket team have come one heck of a long way. The older you are, the longer it seems.