New Zealand's cricketers show us what matters

PAUL EDWARDS: They understand the big things upon which lives depend; they can enjoy their cricket and excel at it without needing to believe that something similar should be at stake when we play sport

It looks as though the final of the World Test Championship will reach a damp and bedraggled conclusion. Even the addition of an extra day appears unlikely to make up for the loss of six full sessions and other interruptions. Only twelve wickets fell on the opening four days and the promise of unbroken sunshine on Wednesday may well mean that classic English weather is to be followed by classic English irony.

Neither of these things will be lost on Virat Kohli or Kane Williamson, both of whom combine patriotism with an understanding of their roles in the world game. But both men are likely to be disappointed if a game billed endlessly as The Ultimate Test turns out to be the ultimate frustration.

Some will argue that the WTC was an unnecessary invention in the first place and that the means by which the two teams qualified was haphazard and ramshackle. There is justice in both points. The whole affair was predicated on the need to give five-day cricket a context but everybody knows that proper Test series – let’s exclude two-match milk-the-cash-cow fripperies – supply their own context.

No one needed to be told that Clive Lloyd’s West Indies side or Steve Waugh’s Australian team were the best in the world; the fact that they annihilated most of their opponents most of the time proved the matter. The game’s shorter forms lend themselves to tournaments; Test cricket does not. Even in an era addicted to shorter formats, it justifies itself.

But even a draw at the Hampshire Bowl would offer spectators one pleasant sight in addition to the obvious skills on display from both sets of players. It would permit them to see New Zealand’s skipper with his hands on at least a share of a trophy and they could then applaud the very many abiding merits of his country’s cricket.

At which point I should confess to a slight but firm partiality: although I have a healthy contempt for national stereotypes, it has often seemed to me that New Zealanders have been the pleasantest and most civilised of tourists to the United Kingdom, keen to win yet always aware that coming to terms with losing is an essential component of a sportsman’s education.

^{Kane Williamson is leading his New Zealand side in the World Test Championship final against India}

But then Williamson and his players have no illusions about themselves; they come from a country where cricket will always be the number two sport, not just a long way behind rugby union but placed in a different category altogether. It is a reality they accept with self-effacing humour and typical good grace. To be an All Black is to have accepted a sacred calling; to be a Black Cap is to be a serious professional sportsman but you are, after all, playing a game.

Such a relatively relaxed approach has never been available to Virat Kohli and even less to Sachin Tendulkar. Cricket is India’s national sport and a secular religion. Whereas one imagines Ross Taylor or Tim Southee can walk wherever they like in their own country, such freedoms are surely unknown to Kohli or Ishant Sharma. For all the wealth the game has brought them one can only feel a degree of sympathy for such sportsmen. Were they gods they would not be worshipped more devoutly; were they known criminals they would not be observed more incessantly.

A decade since Test cricket met Virat Kohli

“We’re a team from a country of five million people taking on a side from a country with a population of 1.4billion,” observed Taylor with a wry smile before the Ultimate Rain arrived at Southampton. I may have paraphrased very slightly there but the New Zealand batsman went on to comment on the importance of cricket in India and the adoration that can be visited upon a country’s sportsmen.

Having played in the IPL and observed the emotional capital invested in the All Blacks this is something he understands without ever having suffered it directly. But it raises an ancient and fascinating question about the importance of sport in human life. More specifically it invites us to consider the place of a game which reveals character like no other and upon which thousands of people depend for their incomes and yet which can be reduced, like many other sports, to balls and bats.

^{New Zealand could hardly have come closer to winning the 2019 World Cup}

Whenever such issues are raised I frequently turn back to the opening words of a chapter in RC Robertson-Glasgow’s autobiography 46 Not Out, a book published in 1948.

“I have never regarded cricket as a branch of religion. I have met, and somehow survived, many of its blindest worshippers. I have staggered, pale and woozly, from the company of those who reject the two-eyed stance as Plymouth Brethren reject all forms of pleasure except money-making. I have never believed that cricket can hold Empires together, or that cricketers chosen to represent their country in distant parts should be told, year after year, that they are Ambassadors. If they are, I can think of some damned odd ones.”

That mention of empires dates the extract but the opinions are timeless. Most of us who make at least part of our living from the game have suffered in the company of those who can talk of nothing else but cricket and who believe that because the game is endlessly fascinating their conversations about it should also be without conclusion.

And yet people like me do derive much of our income from the game, we do fill our shelves with books about obscure cricketers and – this is the really important thing – we do see how many lives would be so much poorer without the clubs that allow people to play the game and share opinions about it. And to take matters onto a bigger stage, we do not need to worship Joe Root to admire his wide-ranging understanding of cricket or applaud his willingness to play for Yorkshire whenever he can.

“Some people take cricket too seriously, others not quite seriously enough,” observes Gideon Haigh on the opening page of his collection Inside Out before going on to quote the views of Montaigne that “children at play are not playing about” and that “their games should be seen as their most serious activity.”

^{Williamson and Virat Kohli prepare for the coin toss ahead of the final}

And perhaps this quest for balance helps to explain my long-time fondness for New Zealand cricketers, a fondness which, at its most trivial level, is seen in my wish that the 2019 World Cup should have been shared when the final was tied.

More seriously, though, it can be linked to the fact that Kane Williamson and Trent Boult, while being among the best cricketers on earth, also see that what they do needs to be placed in its proper perspective.

But then they come from a country that has offered the world quiet lessons in how to cope with an earthquake, a massacre and a pandemic. They understand the big things upon which lives depend; they can enjoy their cricket and excel at it without needing to believe that something similar should be at stake when we play sport.