John Roughan has fallen out of love with cricket. Photo / Getty Images
Great as the game was on television it was 100 times more lovely at the ground.
There are one or two things I have loved that I would like to love again. One is cricket.
I don't know what happened. Once, no other sport, except rugby in a different way, captivated me like cricket. Watching it that is — playing it was too hard. I doubt there is anything harder in sport than having a ball hurled at you from 20m with a split second to decide how to hit it. When bowling, though, I made batting look easy.
But like most lovers of the game, incompetence only heightened my appreciation. I listened avidly to radio commentaries of provincial cricket through every summer, and was engrossed by five-day tests.
Great as the game was on television it was 100 times more lovely at the ground. The first sight of white figures on a sunlit green sward at Eden Park was always breathtaking. To watch the first ball of a test was one of life's truly tingling moments.
The one-day game when it came was just as good. It had colour, crowd excitement and a fascinating calculus of its own. It brought the unforgettable World Cup in 1992, Greatbatch heaving sixes off quicks, Crowe majestic at the crease and marshalling his fields to strangle batsmen of his class.
I wonder what might have been if Crowe had been fit to take the field in the semifinal. I can still see him standing, watching from the tunnel at Eden Park as Wright, a more conventional captain, had no answer to Miandad and Inzamam.
That was years before cricket lost me. I've never known why or precisely when that happened. Stephen Fleming and Shane Bond were still playing for us so I can't blame a loss of inspiring performers. And it happened before the advent of 20/20 so I can't blame a change in the game.
I've never watched the 20-over variant on television, don't even know its rules, but in glimpses of tests and one-dayers it appears to have made a difference to New Zealand's batting.
We've usually had one batsman of Kane Williamson's class and one or two big hitters, but now all the middle order have a new attitude.
They appear to expect to hit every ball hard unless it presents a very good reason not to. That was how Australians, West Indians, Pakistanis and most others used to bat in days gone by, but not us. Our players tended to hunch and prod and wait for one they could hit safely. Now they face up, step out and crack it around.
Sir Richard Hadlee told the crowd at the World Cup opening ceremony on Thursday night that today's cricketers were more skilled than those of his day. Overall, I can believe it. We seem to have more capable hitters than we can fit in the team.
The Black Caps have had a summer of success such as we have never seen, yet still I didn't watch very much. Why?
Maybe it happened when we started to get too much international cricket. Tours, hosted at home or our team away, used to be the main seasonal event, keenly awaited and closely followed.
But at some point they became practically continuous. One series followed another for no apparent purpose beyond keeping the players employed.
It must be soul-destroying. I suspect that playing in empty stadiums for the sake of Indian television and a pay cheque is the reason some have succumbed to bookmakers.
It is not quantity that matters in sport, I think, it is the prize. Jaded commentators say the Super Rugby season is too long. I don't agree. It has a prize that teams and supporters want.
I like long-form sport that lets you see how fortunes can fluctuate in five sets of tennis, four days of golf, 14 weeks of rugby.
Television prefers contests that are quickly decided. Australia has proposed a shorter version of tennis for TV, reducing sets to four games with a tiebreaker at 3-3 and deuce decided by a single point.
It can be tedious watching top players trade service games, especially if one has dropped serve early in the set, but sport should require some endurance.
Watching is more rewarding if it requires some endurance too. The world cups of rugby and cricket are those sports' only international prize of popular interest in our part of the world, which makes them a mixed blessing. Both sports badly need more meaning for their international contests three years out of four.
Cricket's need is greater. I suspect I'm not alone in falling out of love with it. I'll watch this World Cup, but even if we do well, I doubt it can rekindle the old flame.