Isolation lockdown has taken priority over live sports these last few weeks, slowly and ominously at first and then all of a sudden. No dramas. We do what we’ve gotta do and with any crisis comes opportunity (or crisitunity as Homer Simpson once said). Normally there isn’t time to stop and smell the roses and rewatch the wonders of sporting excellence that we’ve witnessed along our merry rowing down the river of time. Can’t do it because there’s always something new happening, particularly if you’re in my position trying to write about all this jazz. That’s, umm, not such a roadblock at the mo’.

Hence I spent my last night before national lockdown sinking a stockpiled brew after dinner watching Nathan Astle score 222 runs off 168 deliveries with 28 fours and 11 sixes against England at Jade Stadium (RIP) back in March of 2002. What Nathan Astle did to the English bowling attack that day in Christchurch was instantly iconic. In fact I kinda reckon that knock was the definitive moment of Blackcaps cricket... up until the 2019 World Cup final, at least. But I’ll come back around to that theory at the end.

Obviously Sky Sport NZ had to get in on the same nostalgia bandwagon that we’re seeing from so many other broadcasters all around the globe, between that and the free movies there’s not much else they can do to stop the mass cancellations. I was hoping that this one’d be a full replay of the Astle innings but what it actually was was a doco that had been (kinda cheaply) put together back in the day called Master Blaster. Which either sounds like some kind rival product to Wet & Forget or something you might get on your free PornHub Premium whatchamacallit during quarantine. You can buy the DVD online.

First came the context. Extended highlights of the entire game up until the Astle innings interspersed with the weirdest talking head bits ever, as Nate Dogg spat some chunky rhymes at the camera... no actually he spoke in a boring kiwi monotone answering inane Gavin Larsen questions all along the lines of “how did it feel when...?” and “what were you thinking when...?” with, and I can’t stress the hilarity of this last point enough, a lone indoor plant over his right shoulder. It doesn’t get any more public access television short of Gav uttering the words: let’s roll the tape. Thankfully it didn’t come to that.

This Test was the first of the three-match series (which NZ would recover to win 2-1), coming after a 3-2 series victory in the ODI stuff – Nathan Astle also scoring a memorable hundy in the one-dayer at Christchurch as well. England batted first after New Zealand won the toss and we unleashed our not exactly devastating pace bowling trio of Chris Cairns, Chris Drum, and Ian Butler. Cairns was class but would famously bust his knee in the second innings while Chris Drum never played another Test after this series (16 wickets at 30.12 in his Test career) and Ian Butler was on Test debut (24 wickets at 36.83 would be his eventual numbers). Then there was Dan Vettori, naturally, with Nathan Astle and Craig McMillan to add to the mix when needed.

You wouldn’t call that a fearsome bowling lineup by any stretch and even less so after Cairns could only get through four overs in the second innings. Not a lot of pace on offer either if the old-timey yellow-pages-sponsored speed guns were to be believed. 135km/h was a mythical mountaintop. By the way, if you were wondering the same as me, Shane Bond had made his Test debut a few months earlier in Australia but series figures of 3/289 and a busted foot would keep him on the outer until the following summer while Daryl Tuffey was injured and would only play the third Test... where he was man of the match with nine wickets including 6/54 in the first innings. Dion Nash had played his final Test in Oz earlier that summer. So, in short, a rather rubbish bowling attack. But some things never change and medium pace in Aotearoa takes wickets on day one and despite a wonderful Nasser Hussein century, England were skittled for 228, Cairns and Drum each taking three-for.

In response the Blackcaps were skittled for 147. Daniel Vettori top scored with 42 runs, most of them early on day two after he’d come out as a nightwatchman after Matthew Hoggard, who was swinging it around corners, caught Mark Richardson plum in front late on the first day. Hoggard would end with 7/63 and only a few hefty blows from future batting coach Craig McMillan on his way to 40 kept the Caps from total shambles territory. Ol’ Macca always knew where the boundaries were. His commentary stuff’s pretty grating and he was never the kind of technical craftsman at the crease you’d consider a natural future coach... but damn was he fun to watch bat back in the day. But yeah we got rolled good and heavy. England only used three bowlers in that innings, it wasn’t pretty.

Some other 2002 ponderings:

• Shout out to the dude dressed as the Pink Panther in the Barmy Army. Haven’t seen that costume out in aaaages.

• At least three LBW decisions in this game would have been overturned by the DRS.

• Sunglasses in 2002 were abysmally awful, just the worst. I blame the relatively recent motion picture release of The Matrix.

• The commentary team was magical. Martin Crowe before he got too enamoured with the word ‘stunning’. Mark Nicholas before he sold his soul to satan. Ian Smith being his usual Ian Smith, can’t fault Smithy’s consistency. Jeremy Coney before he departed the television landscape for radio waves. And Gavin Larsen... because you can’t win them all. That crew was stacked though. Stacked, I tells ye.

• I kinda love those old blue and yellow Sky Sport graphics.

• The major sponsors here? Clear and the National Bank. Plus the game was at Jade Stadium. I met a traveller from an antique land...

Anyway, then England came out to bat, Chris Cairns did his best Chris Cairns impression by getting injured, and then with the score at 85/3 came one of the most haunting moments of the match: Graham Thorpe nicked one to slips second ball...and Nathan Astle shelled it. Wasn’t even a tough catch, he just dropped it. There was some strange symmetry in this game and Astle grassing that one was right up there, inspiring a legendary Barmy Army jingle...

“Nathan Astle, Nathan Astle

You nearly won the match

But even though you scored two-hundred

You dropped a vital catch”

Altogether now!

We did get a couple quickies after Mark Butcher stepped on his stumps but then Freddie Flintoff strolled to the crease at 106/5 with a lead of 187 and he and Thorpe completely took the game away from the Blackcaps. Flintoff belted his way to his first Test century while Thorpey went even further. The pair put on a record sixth wicket partnership for England against any nation of 281 runs. It took another 14 years for that one to be beaten when Ben Stokes and Jonny Bairstow added 399 for the sixth wicket in South Africa, the buggers also breaking Kane Williamson and BJ Watling’s world record in the process. England declared at 468/8 when Thorpe flicked a leg glance for one to bring up his double hundred off the bowling of Nathan Astle. Another dose of symmetry.

Thus the Blackcaps were set exactly 550 runs to win in the fourth innings. For some context, there’s still only ever been one instance of a team scoring more than that in a fourth innings and that was in 1939 in a timeless Test which lasted 10 days (including one rained off day and not including two rest days because Sunday is for The Lord) between South Africa and England that only ended, with England at 654/5 after 218.2 overs and needing another 42 runs to win, because otherwise the Poms would’ve missed their boat back to Blighty. That was the last ever timeless Test and the longest ever Test match fullstop. The highest ever successful run chase is 418/7 by the West Indies against Aussie and that wouldn’t happen for another year after this game. To say the Blackcaps had no chance is only saying it how it is. There was zero historical precedence for them to get anywhere near that total.

They started alright though. Mark Richardson scored a relatively free flowing, by his standards anyway, 76 but then he copped a ripper of a bouncer from Andy Caddick which caught his glove on the way through to the keeper. NZ were 119/3 as Nathan Astle strode to the crease. He and captain Stephen Fleming put on 70 runs for the fourth wicket but then Flem fell for 48, failing to bring up a half century that he could then have failed to convert into a hundred. Annoyingly the doco then stopped showing the other wickets and only focussed on Astle so there wasn’t as much of an emphasis on exactly what a state the team was in, heading towards inevitable defeat, as Craig McMillan went at 242/5, Adam Parore followed at 252/6, then Daniel Vettori departed at 300/7 and Chris Drum went straight after for a duck at 301/8. All the while Astle was chipping away with positive intent, passing 3000 career runs in the process. He was 83no at the tea break with NZ six down. Then came the fireworks.

The Blackcaps were still 217 runs behind when Ian Butler was dismissed and the ninth wicket thus fallen. At that stage nobody actually knew for sure if Chris Cairns would bat or not and looking at the match situation he didn’t really need to, it’d only prolong things. But Astle was going all guns blazing so Cairnsy padded up for a bit of a whack around and brought his old mate Lou Vincent along as a runner. Because a) you could still have runners in those days and without them this incredible innings probably wouldn’t have been possible and b) Lou Vincent was the fastest dude in the team and c) those two always had a great, shall we say... understanding? Nah better not say that. But pretty hilarious that fate would be so cruel.

Adam Gilchrist had set the world record for fastest double ton on 23 February 2002. It took him 212 deliveries, beating Ian Botham’s record from twenty years earlier by eight balls. Nathan Astle absolutely demolished that. Incredibly he didn’t even flick the switch until after the tea break as the wickets tumbled around him and to hear him speak in his Between One Fern segments he never really flicked the switch at all, he was only looking to play positively. Well, there’s positive and then there’s putting Andy Caddick onto the roof on two separate occasions. He wasn’t just clearing the boundary rope, he was clearing all visible landmarks. He was putting that little red bastard on the 5:15 bus outta town. At one point Andy Caddick went for seven consecutive boundaries including three sixes in a row. Matthew Hoggard didn’t get off any easier. After taking 7/63 at an RPO of 2.95 in the first innings, ol’ Hoggy had figures of 1/142 at an RPO of 5.79 in the second.

But then you already know about all that, right? It’s common knowledge in Aotearoa. Numbers like 222 and 153 have a special significance in this country. Astle and Cairns put on 118 runs for the final wicket in just 10.5 overs before Astle edged one behind off a Hoggard slower ball with 99 runs still to win. In the end we still got beaten by nearly a hundred runs, losing that last wicket just as it was starting to feel like perhaps there was the slightest possibility of a miracle. The runs were ticking down so quickly. Even the commentators seemed to feel there was a contest going on despite still having so far to go. Somewhat surprisingly that partnership isn’t even top three for the Blackcaps for the last wicket, even more surprisingly (but in the other direction) is that nobody’s beaten Nathan Astle’s record yet all these years later. It still stands. And long may it remain.

You know what lingers most about that innings? It’s that we lost the match. The greatest cricketing instance of my formative cricket-watching years and it was in a losing effort... just like so many others. When Bert Sutcliffe and Bob Blair did their thing back in the 50s in South Africa it was in a loss. The heroics of that partnership transcend the sport itself but we still lost that game. The Underarm Ball, that was another formative event for a whole other generation and it was another famous defeat. Even beautiful wins like the Hadlee-inspired first Test victory over England in 1978 and the series win in Australia in 1986... maybe chuck in the 1999 Test win at Lords and first series win in England too, those were all famous relative to the fact that we normally lose.

It took 26 years and 45 matches before we finally won our first Test match way way back. Old mate Bert Sutcliffe literally never experienced a Test victory in his career. The greatest spell of fast bowling I ever saw in a Blackcaps jersey was Shane Bond vs Australia at the 2003 World Cup... he took 6/23 and the rest of those buggers still couldn’t bowl the Aussies out as we crumbled to defeat. Even his legendary VB Series emergence in Australia, we knocked those jokers out of the comp but lost comfortably to South Africa in the final.

Perhaps that Grant Elliot six down the ground at Eden Park in 2015 breaks the chain. Perhaps... although we still got thrashed in the final. There is that Champions Trophy triumph in 2000 which remains the only major trophy the Blackcaps have ever won, though that should’ve changed as the Blackcaps lined up at Lords on 14 July 2019 against England in the ODI World Cup Final. It should have changed but it didn’t, through bad luck, bad rules, a couple instances of bad cricket and probably a bit of bad game management too. But definitely no bad karma. We’d suffered for that winning moment for so long and that’s probably why it hurt so damn much when we still didn’t win. The Blackcaps are always the lovable underdogs, everyone else’s second favourite team because of the spirit of how they play their cricket. Even in our greatest moments we usually still lose.

Shout out to Nathan Astle though, that innings was unquantifiably brilliant.

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