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What a feeling. This is right up there with the WTC final. WTC was for a world championship so that's really special, and I think I would have ranked the WTC win higher if that had ended up a 2-1 (or 2-0) series. But to be better than India, in India consistently across three tests is a phenomenon achievement, so I'd rank it as the block caps best ever result.
My son was born on the 30th of September. Black caps haven't lost a test since!
@dogmeat said in Cricket: NZ vs England:
We have 6 guys averaging 40+ with the bat and 3 less than 30 with the ball.
Quite often a batsman will start off well and their average slowly declines but even CdG has played 28 innings - next lowest is Nicholls with 42.
The three bowlers have 693 wickets between them!!!
Our two "passengers" are Santner and Raval - hardly surprising as openers and spinners are our biggest traditional weaknesses but look at the match Santner had and Raval has the 7th best average of any Kiwi who has opened in 20+ innings and is our 11th highest scorer as an opener He also almost invariably succeeds in the main job of an opener - he sees off the new ball and thus makes it easier for the classy batsmen who follow.
We have won 32 tests this decade. It took us until March 1994 to record our 32nd test victory in our history!!!!!
Two CWC Finals as well. I never imagined we could have it so good. Hadlee's 17 year career only encompassed 22 victories - Fleming had 31 in 14 years
Raval is the kind of opener that would be singled out and dropped in past black cap team for 'not scoring fast enough' or 'creating pressure' while we ignore the fact that our middle order might look great but are wildly inconsistent.
In this team Kane and Ross protect Raval by being consistent enough to take advantage of the hard graft Raval does. He's the kind of role player that does the dirty work most don't really notice but is key to our wider success. I'm sure both Ross and Kane will average more with Raval and Latham opening.
He remains the tempting candidate to drop for the up and comers (Will Young), but I hope we resist the temptation to slot a promising middle order bat in as a makeshift opener. If an opener is bashing down the door by all means try him out, but we need to recognise that being a test opener requires a specific set of skills that not all batsmen will posses.
At the risk of the jinx, Latham is a bloody special player. He's almost certain to be our best ever test opener by the end of his career (excluding Dempster) , and is possibly there already.
But what really stands out to me is that about two or three years ago when the South Africans were here, he was in a real deep trough form wise, and I can remember watching him gradually pulling back, filing off his edges and getting back into form, particularly around reducing the balls he was flashing at outside off stump.
It was a fantastic display of self awareness and discipline and convinced me that he had what it would take to excel as a test cricketer.
@nzzp said in Indian Cricket Tour of NZ 2020:
@canefan said in Indian Cricket Tour of NZ 2020:
@No-Quarter said in Indian Cricket Tour of NZ 2020:
@canefan said in Indian Cricket Tour of NZ 2020:
@No-Quarter said in Indian Cricket Tour of NZ 2020:
What an absolute shellacking. Great stuff.
Puts the aussie fiasco into context. We've totally dominated India
It makes me even angrier about the Aus fiasco. We're so much better than the shitshow we put together for that tour. We just had our tactics all wrong, which I've talked about already on here
Forget the rankings. Aussie in Aussie is the hardest challenge in cricket. But I agree we didn't help ourselves on a host of levels
India in India would be right up there now. Those two, then daylight.
New Zealand in New Zealand looks like a handful too.
The more that result settles, the more satisfying it becomes.
To get an innings victory after a team has scored over 350 batting first feels like a significant win.
There were at most two periods inthe game where the English were ahead (just before Stokes got out and when Kane got out) and in the first case when we got an opening we were pretty ruthless and in the second we kept calm and pretty much the entire middle order stepped up.
Finally, Watling's innings was a truly special one and belongs in the pantheon of the all time great NZ innings. He looked like he could have batted another day if the match situation hadn't asked him to hit out. It was particularly special since it contributed to a win. Too many of our great innings are rear guards that delay the inevitable or force a draw.
Our second innings also went from 149 for no loss to 167/3.
Blundell is quietly building himself a pretty bloody handy record. 4 tons, an average of 45 from 40 innings with only 4 not outs.
I remember after Parore retired we had a real period of purgatory until Baz settled the wicket keeping position down, and since then it feels like we've had a bit of an conveyor belt with Baz, BJ and Blundell all looking absolutely world class.
Neat little bit of trivia. England's innings in the first time in an ODI every player has made double figures.
Meanwhile no NZ batter finished in double figures.
Nice start to the tournament and a great boost to nrr. Comp format looks decent this time, everyone plays everyone then top 4 into semis. Nrr could be important here.
@mn5 said in Cricket - NZ vs Sri Lanka:
@cyclops said in Cricket - NZ vs Sri Lanka:
That was such an incredible innings. The Sri Lankans were unsure about celebrating and the commentators so lost for words when he out. To score so fast, with so much control and without chances is unreal.
I shouldn't be pissed off.....but I am.
The little legend has set the bar so fucken high on himself that he's a victim of his own brilliance in one sense.
I'm not angry, just disappointed.
Fitting to have Williamson and Taylor together at the end. What a send off for Watling, I'm so glad that this side finally has some silverware to go with their incredible on field results.
This result and the England tour just before it put this side clearly ahead of every other NZ side bar the 80s squad that won in Australia and I think that's too close to call between those two now.
God I hope we get another tour of Australia in the next couple of years.
I've said this before but Nicholls to me shows the growth of NZ cricket over the last decade or so. He has the kind of record that in the early 2000s would have made him first or second name on the team sheet. These days he's probably our 4th or 5th best bat (I have Kane, Latham, Mitchell, Conway ahead of him). It's good to have some guys (Phillips, Ravindra, Young) pushing for his place and there's a fair chance he'll lose out to one of them sooner rather than later, but my god it's nice to be having that debate rather than trying to convince ourselves that him, Matthew Bell and Daniel Flynn are a test quality top order.
Also worth noting, every time he plays domestic cricket he dominates, so it's not purely a guy that's the coaches favourite son, he genuinely earns his spot each time.
Black caps for me but white ferns T20 close second. Winning a world cup is a massive achievement, regardless of what happens in the other knockout games. Devine/Bates/Tahuhu storyline adds to it as well (three oldest players to win a T20 world cup).
But winning a test in India, against India by 8 wickets including absolutely humiliating them in the first innings is just the absolute pinnacle. Might be my second favourite ever sports victory behind winning the WTC. The only thing better than beating India in India would be beating the Aussies in a boxing day test.
Hurricanes were the better team by some distance for about 41 minutes minus two plays. And although their game plan didn't look quite right for the first 39 they were equal to everything the crusaders could through at them.
Amazing grit from the crusaders to cling on for the win. Robertson has a gift for building never say die mentalities in squads. I'm a bitwworried about Read and Goodhue. Both are still solid, but well down on their peaks.
Feel for the canes, did everything except win in the second half.
@mariner4life said in New Zealand V Bangladesh Test III:
good, been resting on his laurels, what's he done for us lately?
Apart from the runs, the leadership, the holding together of our batting order in tough conditions, and the occasional spin bowling, what's Williamson ever done for us!
We should be making the RWC bigger not smaller. I'm not saying that should be right now, but I think world rugby should have a 20-30 year plan to expand RWCs to 24 teams (4 pools of 6) and then 32 (8 pools of 4).
Segregation won't make the '2nd tier' nations better. To be fair, neither does the RWC alone. World Rugby need to enable regular international competitions at all levels on a regular basis. The first step for that would be expanding RWC qualification. Let's toughen up auto qualifications; following the football example and only allow 2 auto qualies - the defenders and the hosts. Everyone else has to qualify. Having qualification pools stimulate international competition giving teams more regular game time. Have tiers in the qualification pools based on RWC finishes to avoid absolute mismatches but only to a point. Put seedings on the line too. So you might get an Italy-Georgia qualification match where both teams are going to qualify but it means the difference between a softer seeding and a tougher seeding. Getting the teams at the bottom of tier 1 playing the teams at the top of tier 2 more regularly will make the biggest difference to overall quality.
Mitchell is quite the phenomenon. His first class record was decent but didn't really suggest that he was going to dominate at international level like he has. I never really saw him play before his black caps debut, did anyone see him playing before that and see signs of what was to come?
While Kane is out injured he has a decent claim to being our best bat. I keep expecting him to turn back into a pumpkin but he just keeps performing.
I love the work you're putting in, hope you keep it up. I figure the origin of most trophies is just a few people deciding it would be fun, so you're no different, those other people just happen to have had a hundred year or so headstart.
I guess it depends on how much you weight the back third or so of his career. He spent a lot of time figuring out his game, but in that last third his average was up into the mid 40s, he scored multiple doubles, the triple, the fastest test ton and became the first kiwi to score 1000 runs in a calendar year (Kane the only other batter to do it). It's beyond just a hot streak, he really turned himself around. On the other side, he spent almost twice as long as a guy who probably benefitted from a weaker depth pool. Late career McCullum walks into the current test team. Early career McCullum probably doesn't even make the squad.