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Another essay by Ray Robinson, and once more about cricketers from a country other than his own. In cultural and geographical terms New Zealand is very close to Australia, but for too long did the latter nation act as a cricketing big brother. Only one Test, in 1946, was played between the two nations until sanity asserted itself in the form of a three-Test series in 1973. Still, the two countries play far less often than they might – a state of affairs that is a product exclusively of Australian arrogance. Which is why this tribute stands out as a rare example of Aussie generosity to the Kiwi. As I write, and you read, the New Zealand tradition of left-handed batsmanship rests secure in the person of its current captain, Stephen Fleming.
RAY ROBINSON
Southern Southpaws (1956)
Blindfold me and lead me to a Test ground where a teenage left-hander is heading for a hundred and my first guess would be that he comes from the land of the Maoris. Playing cricket left-handed there has become almost as traditional as rubbing noses. If there is anything in proportional representation, the country between Whangaroa and Raki-ura must carry more southpaws to the acre than sunnier and steadier lands. Either that or they are left in the majority because the right-handers migrate across the Tasman Sea to win the coveted racing cups and otherwise run the affairs of their antipodean neighbours, the Australians. A stocky Canterbury left-hander, Thomas Burtt, spun his slow and accurate way in 1954 to a total of 386 wickets at the age of thirty-nine, thereby erasing about the last surviving NZ record by a right-hander, W. E. Merritt, who bowled leg breaks.
When the New Zealanders began practice on their last tour of South Africa the Cape Times gave most of the top of its front page to a picture of five of them in a row like peas in a pod, all shaping up with eyes right, bats gripped tight, left heels to the rear. They were Bert Sutcliffe, New Zealand’s gift to the cricket-watching public, young John Beck and Eric Dempster from Wellington, much-travelled Lawrence Miller and Guy Overton, the Otago sheepfarmer – together as characteristic of their country as the lemon-squeezer crown of the NZ Army hat.
Put the clock back some years and other faces would appear in such a left-hand line-up under the black caps with the silver fern emblem. There is the ruddy face of Gifford Vivian, youngest of all Test century-makers. A bank clerk barely eighteen, Giff was unknown in first-class cricket when he made 87 in his first match for Auckland so brilliantly that three months later he was chosen in the first New Zealand team to play Test matches in Britain. Already he was well developed, stood 5 ft 10½ in and weighed 12 st 3 lb. As the youngest cricketer his country ever sent abroad his Test chance came at the age of 18 years 267 days, when a leg injury prevented New Zealand’s greatest batsman, Stewart Dempster, from playing against England at the Oval in July 1931. The fast bowling of G. O. Allen, which took 5 wickets for 14 runs in 13 overs, wrecked New Zealand’s batting on a rain-affected wicket, but in the second innings Vivian clinched his place by outscoring his older companions with 51.
Having shot rapidly to the top, he did not make the mistake of thinking he had mastered the game of cricket in eight months. Any hint dropped by more experienced teammates was heeded and tested. Every leading English cricketer he met was plied with eager questions. Yet the youngster did not allow older men to flag him down to a cautious speed, as older men are prone to do. His first century in England, 135 against Oxford University, came inside three hours and he caned Yorkshire’s bowlers for 101 in 100 minutes, with four sixes and a dozen fours. Next match he took five Lancashire wickets with spinners that floated in with his arm and turned back. He completed the tour with 1,002 runs and 64 wickets in first-class matches two months before his nineteenth birthday.
In his first international match in his own country, 121 days after he turned nineteen, Vivian walked in at Wellington to hit up a round 100 against South Africa. He followed that up by taking 4 wickets for 58 in 30 overs and making 73 in the second innings. For skill and stamina, his is the finest feat on record for a Test teenager – and for temperament, too, because every run he made and every ball he bowled were for a struggling team which, despite his efforts, lost by 8 wickets . . .
Another day Vivian’s teammates saw him reach 100 with a six over the bowler’s head, then collapse in mid-pitch with a knee cartilage trapped by the bone. In wartime he was aboard the Georgic, reported sunk by a U-boat, and nobody knew his fate until one day he opened the door of the family home in Auckland.
By then the baton had been taken in the left hand of Martin Donnelly. It probably changed hands in a low-scoring, rainy Test match at Manchester, where Vivian, 50, and Donnelly, 37 not out, put up the only resistance in New Zealand’s second innings of 134. Tom Goddard took 6 wickets for 29. Pitching his off breaks in two patches outside the off stump, he spun out six right-handers for 2 runs; the other 27 were made by the two left-handers.
Unlike Vivian, bare-headed except when there was a trying glare, Donnelly never liked batting without a cap. When his own was mislaid he appeared in some bizarre creations which almost amounted to camouflage. Youngest of the three sons of a farmer at Ngaruawahia (pronounced with the g silent, as in Cholmondeley), Martin Paterson Donnelly used to toddle around the Waikato province of Auckland with his oldest cricketing brother, Harry. Martin knew all about runs before he went to school to learn about the other three Rs at Eltham and at New Plymouth High School. In the high-school nets G. G. Bottrill taught the boys to concentrate on the ball and never play a slipshod stroke even at the feeblest practice bowler.
In his last year at high school, the first Donnelly saw of English cricketers was the terrifying sight of Hopper Read rushing up to bowl for Errol Holmes’s team against Taranaki. The waiting batsman could see the soles of Read’s boots, all sprigs. Martin survived the onrush of the human harrow but was stranded when he swished at a slow ball that Jim Sims turned the wrong way. Between innings Joe Hardstaff gave the eighteen-year-old country boy this tip: ‘If you have difficulty in picking the wrong ’un, play down the wicket as far as you can with a dead bat so that the ball, if nicked, won’t carry as far as slip. Do that and hang around and you’ll soon find it.’ Donnelly did that, and his 49 in the second innings saved Taranaki and staked his claim for the tour of England a year later.
When selection time came he was in poor form but the selectors must have been judges of quality, because they gave places to Donnelly, nineteen, and sturdy, right-handed Mervyn Wallace, twenty. The two under-twenty-one members of the team headed the batting, Wallace with 1,641 runs and Donnelly with 1,414. Once I asked Martin how he accounted for two strangers to English conditions out-batting experienced teammates. His reply: ‘Perhaps this is the answer to that one: Youths are so chockful of confidence that ordinary reverses do not throw them out of balance. Only a little success is needed to make them feel right.’ Something for selectors to paste in their hats.
Donnelly is the youngest New Zealander to have played in a Test match at Lord’s. At 19 years 252 days, he made his Test debut in the same match as Hutton, just twenty-one, and the same year as Compton (seven months younger), and Washbrook, twenty-two. Like Hutton, he began with 0. He tried to sweep the first ball from James Parks and was lbw when it drifted back. It might have been 0 and 0. When Verity bowled in the second innings with two short-leg fieldsmen Donnelly seemed almost mesmerized. A ball rolled from his bat but, instead of starting for his first run in Test cricket, he stood while his partner sprinted up the pitch calling: ‘Run! Run! Run!’
Once that was over Donnelly was cool as the summit of Mount Cook. Coolness was needed, because only three wickets stood between New Zealand and defeat. One of them belonged to Jack Kerr, usually an opening batsman, whose chin had been gashed earlier in the game but who came in with two hours to go to save the match. To make sure he did not retreat from the first international fast bowler he had faced on a Test wicket, Donnelly stepped across to the off as Alf Gover delivered the ball. It worked, because the ball was seldom far enough up to find h
im out and his movement put him in position to hook. Donnelly watched all the bowlers closely for clues to their intentions. As Gover came up with his long run, all knees and elbows, Donnelly detected the shoulder movement that warned of a coming bouncer. It flew near his ears (the smallest in Test cricket) but the left-hander had already taken up position and he hooked hard. The ball grazed Hardstaff’s curly hair at short leg before he could duck and reached the boundary before cold sweat came out on him. That stroke gave Donnelly confidence, though England’s captain, Robins, crowded the batsmen with infielders and Voce’s lively left-arm bowling hit the pitch with four short legs and three slips ready for the slightest error.
The last over came with Kerr (38) and Donnelly (21) still there. With the match saved, the youngster exuberantly flashed a square cut at the last ball and snicked it into Ames’s gloves . . .
Clambering from a tank in Italy when the war ended, Donnelly flew to Britain, read history at Oxford for his Bachelor of Arts degree, scored six centuries for the University in his first season and became captain in his second. By playing rugger for England against Ireland (at centre three-quarter instead of his usual position, stand-off half) he joined the few who have attained international rank in two sports. The Maoris of his homeland have produced many fine footballers but they leave it to the paler pakeha to uphold New Zealand’s name at cricket . . .
As the only New Zealander (with a West Indian, a South African and eight Australians) in the Dominions XI which beat England in 1945 he played an innings of 133 which is remembered with Keith Miller’s epic 185, a few weeks after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. Next year he came to Lord’s to make the pavilion ring in praise of his 142 for Oxford against Cambridge at almost 50 runs an hour. Next year even greater acclamation was earned by his even faster 162 not out for Gentlemen against Players, with its windup of 50 in 40 minutes. In his last Test at Lord’s, in 1949, he set a record for NZ with a chanceless 206 (26 fours), fighting three and a half hours for the first 100, then exacting the last 106 from England’s bowlers in an hour less. With those centuries for his university, the amateurs and his country he equalled the three-sided record of a larger left-hander, Percy Chapman, for Cambridge, the Gentlemen and England.
First sight of Donnelly at the wicket gave no promise of the treat to come. He bent at the knees and waist, back far over, stern jutting insultingly towards short leg. His front shoulder twisted around to point wide of mid-on, the elbow poked towards midwicket and his body rocked. He resettled his feet, and his sloping bat tapped the ground restlessly behind his left toecap. Though the bottom hand was an inch or two up the handle, the general impression was of a hunched attitude, more pronounced as body and bat sank lower as the bowler approached.
The moment the ball was bowled there was a transformation. Donnelly came up to play it with ease that charmed the eye. Feet and body glided and turned into position naturally, whether he was cutting, cover-hitting, driving, hooking, flicking the ball off his toes or using his own specialty, a confident nudge wide of mid-on to the boundary. This stroke was a bugbear to bowlers, making them wish for an extra fieldsman, but was not a good shot to play against Bill Johnston’s late swing. In playing spin bowling from either side Donnelly drove with less concern for the crease line than any post-war English batsmen except Compton and Edrich in their prime. Strokes made with horizontal or diagonal bat never spared a short ball. His cutting involved fewer of the risky slices expected of left-handers. For short-arm hooks his back foot went close to the stumps, his bat was never far from his waist and his whole body spun into the shot as he cracked the ball to the ground. He swung in English, not Australian, manner at balls outside the leg stump . . .
From Donnelly the baton in New Zealand’s southpaw relay passed into the safe hands of Bert Sutcliffe, though sticklers for conventional batting regarded those hands as rather unsafe. This was not because of anything wrong with his strokes except his eagerness to play them. When Sutcliffe strode in to open the innings and began to hook in the first over, orthodox believers felt that he would soon be sent back to his pa (Maori for pavilion). Instead, he has stayed in to make and break more records than any other post-war batsman . . .
Bert comes from Dunedin in Otago province, about the last port of call before Antarctica. He was thirteen when he made his first hundred at Takapuna Grammar School, nineteen when he scored a thousand runs in a season for Parnell Seniors. After two years at Teachers’ Training College he went to war. As Sergeant Sutcliffe he put up the highest score, 163, in the battle of El Alamein between an Empire side and a United Kingdom team – a sideline to the main contest in which Field Marshal Montgomery, in his own words, hit Rommel for six out of Egypt. Within two years of the war’s end Sutcliffe made himself the first New Zealander to score two separate hundreds against a visiting MCC team, 197 and 128 for Otago at his first sight of Bedser, Voce, Pollard, Wright, Yardley and Edrich. The first innings was marred by two slip chances but at 96 he lifted Pollard over the fence for six. Sutcliffe is probably the only man who has completed his first century against English bowling in such cavalier manner.
When New Zealand toured Britain in 1949 he shattered the accepted doctrine about how innings ought to be opened. Early, he was caught a number of times when he did not connect properly with hooks but, like Harvey, he never lowered his colours. In height, 5 ft 8 in, weight (an athletic 10 st 4 lb), southpaw stance and outlook he is like the Australian, and post-war cricket has been lucky to have two batsmen of such genius flourishing simultaneously. After playing against both, England’s Freddie Brown ranked the New Zealander top left-hander. That, in my estimation, was tantamount to awarding him second place to Len Hutton among the world’s batsmen. Sutcliffe hits more sixes than Harvey and for his size I doubt whether there has ever been a batsman who could land the ball over the fence so often . . .
Like most people in Africa, India and the West Indies, few New Zealanders ever saw Bradman bat. Sutcliffe was disappointed at missing the sight by a couple of days when the NZ team passed through Sydney in 1949 and had to be content with meeting Sir Donald in mufti. Donnelly, so often Sutcliffe’s partner in success, believes that had the Otago left-hander been an Englishman or Australian and enjoyed their greater opportunities he would have outstripped all rivals and have been almost another Bradman. How little patriotism has exaggerated here is shown by Bert’s figures and Sir Donald’s after the same number of innings:
A significant difference was that Bradman was not quite twenty-six when he played his 166th innings, whereas Sutcliffe was thirty-one. As the first New Zealander to make 2,000 on a tour of England, the left-hander amassed more in a season (2,627) than any other visiting player except Bradman (2,960 in 1930). Sutcliffe’s seven centuries on tour are a New Zealand record and include the highest score for a Maori-lander abroad, 243 against Essex. With 100 not out in the second innings against Essex he made himself, at twenty-five, the youngest cricketer to have scored two separate centuries in a match four times. The only batsmen who have done this more often, Hammond (seven times), Hobbs (six) and Fry (five) played hundreds more innings. Hammond made his fourth set of twin centuries at thirty, Fry at thirty-three, Herbert Sutcliffe at thirty-four, Hardinge at thirty-five, Jessop at thirty-seven, Bradman at thirty-nine and Perrin, Hobbs, Hendren and Fishlock in the forties.
Sutcliffe holds the world’s highest score by a left-hander in first-class cricket, 385 for Otago against Canterbury at Christchurch in 1952, with 3 sixes and 46 fours. For fifty-one years the record had been the 365 not out by Clem Hill for South Australia against New South Wales at the age of twenty-three. Like Hill, Sutcliffe made his triple-century at the rate of 40 runs an hour. None of the other ten Otago players reached 30. Sutcliffe and Don Taylor (later of Warwickshire) are the only batsmen who have put up two double-century opening partnerships in one match, 220 and 286 for Auckland against Canterbury in 1948–9. Lancashire League clubs angled for Bert but he became professional coach of Otago Cricket Associ
ation.
On his passing acquaintance with Australian wickets in 1954 he was an instant and striking success. The New Zealanders played three matches and Sutcliffe scored a century in each – 142 against Western Australia, 149 against South Australia, 117 against Victoria. In Melbourne they are still talking of the centuries by Sutcliffe and his sturdy right-hand companion John Reid, with their refreshing outlook on the art of batting. Only once before had a man made hundreds in his first three matches in Australia – England’s Jardine, who had a rather different concept of how to use a bat. The New Zealanders were then on their way home from South Africa, where Sutcliffe topped their batting with 1,155 at an average of 46. Louis Duffus recorded that of 29 sixes by the team, 22 were hit by Sutcliffe (14) and Reid (8). The pair scored four of the side’s five centuries, made more than one-third of the total runs and, apart from wicket-keeper Frank Mooney, held most catches (Sutcliffe 15, Reid 11). Reid is the first cricketer ever to have scored 1,000 runs and taken 50 wickets in a South African season. In fact, only two, Vogler and Mansell, had ever coupled 500 runs with 50 wickets.
The Picador Book of Cricket Page 22