Jarrod Gilbert: It's the cricket winter of our discontent

Trent Boult missed the first test through injury and hasn’t fired. Photo / Photosport

Opinion

Summer is cricket. And this summer promised to be a scorching hot series against Australia.

Instead it feels like we're suffering an Invercargill winter.

Some will remember, others will know by legend, the 1985/86 series when we took it to the Aussies and won our first and only series victory in the red country.

Australia is literally on fire at the moment and we all feel for those so badly affected, but our cricketers were not meant to be generous on the field. The Black Caps were going there to beat them.

Not on the hope that the lesser side might somehow beat the greater one — but because we were the better team. The ICC ranked us ahead of the Aussies. We all quietly hoped it was true.

In 1985 we had two truly great cricketers, Martin Crowe and Sir Richard Hadlee, who carried a team of some good players and some journeymen. This time we were better.

This time we had one truly great player, Kane Williamson, but a number of others on the cusp of greatness. The 2019/20 team is stronger than the '85 side. Yet here we are, in Invercargill in a blistering southerly and driving rain waiting for the New Year to arrive, and wondering what happened to the promised summer.

Williamson, who I've publicly stated I would marry after many winning performances, has not stood up.

Hadlee ripped through the Australians with career best figures in the first test in '85 and Crowe scored 188 during his first time at the crease. In 2019, Williamson failed to score 50 in both Perth innings combined.

In the first innings of the second test in Melbourne, Williamson played a shot to get out that you'd be embarrassed to see a kid play in the backyard.

Arguably our best bowler since Hadlee, Trent Boult, who was out because of injury in the first test, knocked the middle stump over with his fourth ball of the second test. And after that did nothing.

On winning the toss, Williamson's decision to bowl in Melbourne was risky but correct and the cricket gods teased the Black Caps with swing and edges but no luck.

Losing the recent Cricket World Cup final will hurt for a long time. We should have won that match, or at least shared the prize. It's churlish to talk about the bad losses and luck that got us to that final. We deserved to be there, and the Black Caps played so brilliantly against England that I will always be gripped by the injustice of the loss.

But this Australian series has shown we are not the test side we thought we were. This was the true measure of this Black Caps side. They said it. The press said it. We all said it. The greater the anticipation, the greater the deflation.

Sure, we lack an opener and a spinner, but most all we have lacked those players who could be seen as greats to show us why they ought to enjoy that title.

Pound for pound, the current side is better than the '85 team. And that's true. But to prove they were a great side, they needed to do great things at important moments on the biggest stage. They haven't. The summer is awash.

Maybe it's not Invercargill in winter, maybe it's one of those terrible rained-out Christmases in the Coromandel.

So terribly disappointed, we cricket tragics will cheer our side in the third test because what else can we do? But let's all doff our sodden summer caps to the '85 side — still, without question, the best.

Jarrod Gilbert is the director of criminal justice at the University of Canterbury, an avid cricket fan, and the lead researcher at Independent Research Solutions.

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