Niche Cache Cricket Crew: Second-Tier Contracts (Batsmen)
Will Young is a favourite of ours, so it's only right he's part of the Niche Cache Cricket Crew.
A week or so ago, the New Zealand Cricket contracts were handed out to Aotearoa's best cricketers. These contracted players are blokes who form a pool of players from which most BLACKCAPS squads will be selected from which is lovely. It gave me a bit to write about and all but it only takes a look at the cream which has risen to the top and with a general BLACKCAPS squad making up much of that contracted list, there's little funk to really enjoy.
This is why I've decided to provide the funk with a Niche Cache Cricket Crew. The name sounds cool and all but this group is effectively a second-tier group of cricketers, players who may or may not make that jump to international cricket, notably Test cricket.
Of course, this is only what I think. This isn't a strict list of Aotearoa's 'next best' cricketers as we've all got different opinions on how that might look; whether it's youth vs more seasoned battlers or a fondness for this style or that style. This is merely a group of cricketers that I, as the Diggity Doc, cricket coaching extraordinaire, want to work with and a group that I'm confident that when I get my coaching mitts on them, I can take them to a new level in their cricketing development.
And that's an important note to make before I get onto naming the Niche Cache Cricket Crew's batsmen, as that we can all have opinions which are fair and justified, is a sign of the times with kiwi cricket. We have many cricketers throughout Aotearoa who deserve recognition, who could be in the mix for higher honours after putting numbers up in domestic cricket.
A greater spectrum of cricketing opinions means we have more players worthy of stepping up, that's fabulous.
You will notice that my Niche Cache Cricket Crew are all fairly young and that's just my personal preference. I'm interested in cricketers who can build on top of the solid foundation that we have right now, who can take what Brendon McCullum has done in leading the BLACKCAPS side and take this team further, under the guidance of Kane Williamson. Let's not stop there, let's think further into the future as we want consistent and prolonged success in Test cricket especially.
Batsmen: Will Young (CD), Bharat Popli (ND) and Ben Smith (CD).
In Test cricket and general international cricket you need runs. There's something about a batsmen who simply scores runs and while the joy in Test cricket is that batsmen can be great thanks to mental fortitude and technique in defence, I'm excited to work with young batsmen who have stacked up the runs. Will Young is widely known as one of the most talented young batsmen in Aotearoa and at 23-years-old, he's already got five domestic seasons to his name and in three of those seasons he has had a First Class average over 40.
Young only has two centuries in FC cricket, while he has 20 half-centuries which could be a negative but as he grows I expect that to change. 16 of those half-centuries have come in the last two seasons, two seasons which have seen Young average 53.47 and 47 so there's no reason to think that Young won't keep on improving, especially under my tutelage.
While Young has established himself at FC level, Popli burst onto the scene last season with three centuries, seven half-centuries and an average of 67.58. Right now, I want to see if Popli can make improvements on his game and whether there's scope there for Popli to truly emerge as a Test option in the middle order. What we have with Popli is a seed that has been planted and thanks to the sheer weight of runs that he put up, there's no reason to think that this seed won't grow and blossom ... that's all part of the fun, right?
I've known about Young for a number of seasons and while I've known of Popli for a similar amount of time, he's only broken through the clutter recently. Ben Smith is more of an unknown in that I've seen his name on scorecards and I've seen footage of him batting but in all honesty, I haven't paid much attention to Smith's work with Central Districts.
This is why I want to work with Smith as he's not only stacked the runs up, but he's an unknown package to an extent with me and I'm gonna say that he's definitely an unknown package to the kiwi cricket fan. I guess there's something about taking a bloke who's name isn't widely celebrated across Aotearoa and putting him up there in the spotlight, mainly because Smith is a young batsman (25yrs) who deserves that; the runs are on the board.
Smith has six seasons in domestic cricket and even though he only played one game in the 2010/11 season, Smith has at least a half-century in each of those six seasons (one game, two 50's in that 10/11 season). The last three seasons have seen Smith get more consistent game time (10 games, 6, 9) and Smith's experience in domestic cricket is building nicely towards greater productivity with the bat. Last season Smith was second only to Popli in run-scoring (1,149 runs vs 917) and when you consider that Smith only faced 1,770 balls to Popli's 2,266; it was a fairly handy season for Smith.
These three batsmen will be joined by few bowlers - keep an eye out for that in the next few days. The key thing about Young, Popli and Smith is that they are three batsmen who excite me as a kiwi cricket fan, however they still have a wee way to go before they will be in the mix for Test honours. All three have laid a foundation for themselves, it's now up to them as players, myself and our staff to see if the Niche Cache Cricket Crew can extract that little bit extra out of them to fire them into the Test cricket arena.