Just why has the game changed in New Zealand? Why does a land where it used to be difficult todifferentiate the pitches from the outfield, where the ball moved almost sideways, is seeing the death ofthe swing?
Just over six years ago, when India toured New Zealand and played a couple of Test matches in the December of 2002, they had scores of 161, 121, 99 and 154 – a grand total of 535, averaging 133.75 per innings. For the batsmen, the average was 13. The hosts weren’t scintillating with the bat either – 537 runs for 26 wickets in four innings, an average of 20.65.
In the current series, eight centuries have already been made in eight innings. India nearly matched their 2002 two-Test aggregate of 535 with the 520 in the first innings of the Hamilton Test.
Before the second Test at Napier, New Zealand had enforced the follow on seven occasions at home – and won each time. This time it just wasn’t possible. Gautam Gambhir played a remarkable innings, antithetic to the native splendour of his batting, and VVS Laxman again came up with a match-saver. But it must be said that the pitch was dead as a dodo. It had zero life. New Zealand captain Daniel Vettori said another Test match could be played on it, and he was probably right.
New Zealand, the dread of the batsmen, inhabited by moderately-gifted cricketers with a solitary man of genius in eachsuccessive team over the years, would defy the best in the world with whatever lay to hand – including the West Indies under the mighty Clive Lloyd.
For some reason, they’ve changed the formula; the cricket pool is still moderate, the geniuses aren’t exactly proliferating, but the pitches are not quite the same. They’re not killing fields for the batsmen, the swing and the movement off the pitch are gone. The batsmen can smile again in New Zealand.
What exactly is happening? Could it be that Mark Richardson, the New Zealand cricketer-turned- commentator, is right, after all? Before the series, he’d suggested that New Zealand Cricket Board’s poverty had made it greedy, that it would not provide pitches that could prove fatal for the Indians – and thus, to the prospects of New Zealanders making money through India and the Indian Board.
There are two reasons to dismiss Richardson’s views as ill-informed – first, the New Zealand Board can’t have sunk, even in its state of hardship, so low to make a travesty of a sporting contest. Two, it would appear that the nature of wickets in New Zealand has changed over time, not necessarily exclusively for the Indians just before this series.
Over the last five years, 300 has been topped 26 times in an innings in New Zealand – of that, three times by India in this series. Teams to have got over 300 in an innings have included, apart from the hosts and India, Australia, Sri Lanka, West Indies and England. Thirty-four centuries have been made, including two double centuries. This would indicate that batting isn’t as perilous in New Zealand as it once was.
The figures in One-day cricket are more revealing. Since 2003, runs scored per over have steadily risen – from 3.65 in 2003 to 6.16 this year. Runs per wicket, similarly, have risen from 18.52 in 2003 to over 40 now. That’s a tectonic change beneath the playing surface, suggesting that New Zealand wickets have taken a dramatic U-turn.
Clearly, by accident or design, pitches in New Zealand aren’t quite what they used to be. It’s possible commercial considerations are at play here – TV companies wouldn’t be thrilled by two sub-100 totals in one Test, or a Test ending in less than three days. But contrary to what Richardson and his ilk might believe, everyone’s reaping the harvest of flat tracks in New Zealand, not just the Indian batsmen.
