Exploring The Big Ol’ Disparity Between Blackcaps Home vs Away Performances
The thing about Test cricket is that it’s a lot easier to win games at home than it is away. Sorta goes without saying, really. Conditions are familiar, everything’s nice and comfortable, the fans are all there cheering you on (unless you’re playing India)... and of course there’s the extremely obvious fact that if your team is at home then the other team is playing away. And playing away is harder, et cetera, et cetera.
Despite that it’s a constant theme on The Niche Cache’s cricket content, both articles and especially podcasts, that people seem to forget this when it comes to the Blackcaps. The kiwi sports media adores them when they win at home and then freak out drastically when they lose away, missing the essential link between those two. This current Blackcaps team is pretty good. They’ve won a lot of Test matches recently and have been flirting with the top of the ICC rankings. They’ve even had a couple lovely results outside of Aotearoa too... but not very many. This team is still unproven in foreign conditions. No dramas, they’re moving in the right direction and the Aussie tour disaster has shaken out any sense of complacency in the wider squad... but at this point, yeah nah, gotta acknowledge a rather drastic difference home vs away.
Let’s take the last four years as a scope. Four years is the length of a World Cup cycle so it can be the same length for an accurate peek at the Test team too, why not. That takes us back to when Pakistan came here to tour, the series where Colin de Grandhomme and Jeet Raval made their Test debuts. Here are the Blackcaps’ home Test matches starting from then...
Beat Pakistan by 8 wickets (Christchurch, Nov 2016)
Beat Pakistan by 138 runs (Hamilton, Nov 2016)
Beat Bangladesh by 7 wickets (Wellington, Jan 2017)
Beat Bangladesh by 9 wickets (Christchurch, Jan 2017)
Drew with South Africa (Dunedin, Mar 2017)
Lost to South Africa by 8 wickets (Wellington, Mar 2017)
Drew with South Africa (Hamilton, Mar 2017)
Beat West Indies by an innings and 67 runs (Wellington, Dec 2017)
Beat West Indies by 240 runs (Hamilton, Dec 2017)
Beat England by an innings and 49 runs (Auckland, Mar 2018)
Drew with England (Christchurch, Mar/Apr 2018)
Drew with Sri Lanka (Wellington, Dec 2018)
Beat Sri Lanka by 423 runs (Christchurch, Dec 2018)
Beat Bangladesh by an innings and 52 runs (Hamilton, Feb/Mar 2019)
Beat Bangladesh by an innings and 12 runs (Wellington, Mar 2019)
Beat England by an innings and 65 runs (Mount Maunganui, Nov 2019)
Drew with England (Hamilton, Nov/Dec 2019)
Beat India by 10 wickets (Wellington, Feb 2020)
Beat India by 7 wickets (Christchurch, Feb 2020)
That’s an unbeaten home run of thirteen Tests and just a single defeat in the last nineteen. Yet in all that stretch of time the Blackcaps have only played three away series. The midyear of 2016 was a busy one as they went to Zimbabwe (two wins), South Africa (one draw, one loss), and India (three losses) but they followed that by not playing an away Test in all of 2017 before finally hitting up the UAE for some games versus Pakistan. That was a thrilling 2-1 series victory despite 23 months between away matches (and technically that was a neutral ground venue)... since then there’s been a 1-1 split in Sri Lanka and then the embarrassment that was the 3-0 defeat by Aussie – where all three matches were lost by 200+ runs.
The thing is, this isn’t crazy unusual. The lack of away games sort of is but not the disparity between results. Across the same amount of time only India has a better home record than the Blackcaps however Australia, South Africa, and England have all still won twice as many home matches as they’ve lost...
Home Test Results – Last Four Years
(Pakistan aren’t listed here as they’ve only played one home series in that time, while Ireland, Afghanistan, and Zimbabwe haven’t been playing enough fullstop. Keep in mind a few of those draws will have been rain affected too).
Ah but you flip that into away results over the last four years however...
Away Test Results - Last Four Years
India is the only team with a winning record. Aussie’s record is a complete mess, don’t forget this encompasses the Sandpaper Series and the subsequent bans (how could you forget!). Australia are barely better than the West Indies in terms of their win ratio in away matches, damn.
When it comes to New Zealand, we’re probably not as good as it looks here because it was easier to ask Statsguru to just take the last four years to the calendar date so this does include the Zimbabwe tour and those two wins. We’re also the only team whose batting and bowling averages both decrease by at least eight runs in away tours - we’re 16 runs better per wicket at home with the bat, eight runs better per wicket at home with the ball. India for example, their batting plummets on tour but their bowling only drops half a run. Meanwhile South Africa’s batting average is pretty average either way but their bowling at home is significantly better. Yet the Blackcaps cop it hard in both aspects when they travel.
To be fair the numbers are a bit blown out by nature of the India and Australia series... although that’s not really an excuse. Winning those series would have been damn near impossible under the various circumstances but we didn’t have to be quite so bloody awful. There’s also a smaller sample size compared to the other good teams due to the lack of NZ’s overseas tours in recent years (and this includes the UAE). Also, like... comparatively speaking we’re not even that bad in away matches. Mid-table. So this is equally as much about the Blackcaps being extremely efficient at home.
Which makes you wonder which players thrive on that foreign stage compared to the home turfers, right? You’d expect the statties to reflect that the best dudes at home would also do the best (but slightly worse) away from home and to a large degree that’s true. The consensus three greatest kiwi batsmen of the modern era are Martin Crowe, Ross Taylor, and Kane Williamson. At this point if you’re picking an all time XI and you don’t have those three in some order batting from 3-5 then you’ve gotta lay down the crack pipe for a few days and take a cold shower or something. So for the sake of conversation here, this is what that trio are up to home vs away...
Martin Crowe in NZ: 52 INN | 2401 RUNS | 50.02 AVE | 8 100s | 7 50s
Martin Crowe not in NZ: 79 INN | 3043 RUNS | 42.26 AVE | 9 100s | 11 50s
Ross Taylor in NZ: 79 INN | 3665 RUNS | 55.53 AVE | 12 100s | 14 50s
Ross Taylor not in NZ: 99 INN | 3773 RUNS | 39.26 AVE | 7 100s | 19 50s
Kane Williamson in NZ: 62 INN | 3149 RUNS | 58.31 AVE | 10 100s | 18 50s
Kane Williamson not in NZ: 78 INN | 3327 RUNS | 45.57 AVE | 11 100s | 14 50s
First off: wow.
Second off: it’s just as you would have guessed, averages above fifty at home and dropping by a chunk away yet still sitting in a tier which is whipping on most other Blackcaps batsmen in history.
Interesting that each of them have played a decent amount more away innings than home ones. Those numbers are also exacerbated by the team being more likely to need to bat in both innings in away matches, as well as each having been around long enough to have played in some pretty downbuzz eras. But mostly what you’re seeing there is what greatness looks like. The great ones cash in when they can. Their best averages will be against the weaker teams of their time even if the most memorable ones will be against the better sides. That’s just how these things work. What you don’t normally get are careers like, say... Stephen Fleming’s...
Flem in NZ: 89 INN | 2947 RUNS | 33.87 AVE | 2 100s | 21 50s
Flem not in NZ: 100 INN | 4225 RUNS | 45.92 AVE | 7 100s | 25 50s
Look at those centuries. You can’t blame all of it on his legendary 274 not out, the numbers scream too loudly for that simplicity. Fact is that Flem was consistently a better player outside of Aotearoa... and a bit bang average in home conditions. It’s a shocker but it does sneakily fit with his reputation as a player who rose up for the tough occasions and there’s probably a bit of his place and time counting against him too. After he he did play at the time when the kiwi popgun seamer on a grassy kiwi wicket cliche was at it’s most real.
Finding similar cases to Flem though, that’s tricky. There are outlier fellas who only played a handful of games so they don’t count. In terms of top tier kiwi cricketers... of the 23 men with at least five total Test centuries, most were comfortably better at home, some were only slightly better at home, two were marginally better away but not by enough to really matter (Bevan Congdon and Mark Burgess)... and then there were a couple old dogs in JF Reid and Bert Sutcliffe who bossed it in away series although that’s pretty massively affected by playing at a time when New Zealand had way more away Tests because a) travel here was awkward, and b) we sucked.
John R Reid scored 1031 runs at 25.14 at home & 2397 runs at 38.66 away
Bert Sutcliffe scored 793 runs at 36.04 at home & 1934 runs at 42.04 away
(Reidy scored five Test tons outside of Aotearoa. Along with Crowe, Taylor, Williamson, and Fleming... the only others with five Test centuries beyond these noble shores are Nathan Astle and Tom Latham).
We could maybe chuck Lou Vincent in this yarn too. He missed the cut as he only scored three Test tons but one came in Australia and one came in India which goes a long way towards explained how he averaged only 28.33 at home yet scored them at a chunky 43.46 away from home. Only played 23 Tests in total though... of which all but one of those matches came under the captaincy of Stephen ‘Away Days’ Fleming.
Also worth a mention is the great Martin Donnelly, New Zealand’s first truly great Test batsman whose career was severely interrupted by the travesty of World War II and who only played seven Tests all up. In those seven Tests he bagged 582 runs with one hundy at an average of 52.90. That hundy was a reportedly stunning and elegant 206 at Lords. It’s a small sample size because of the circumstances and we can’t split the home and aways because... well, he never played a home Test match. All seven came on two separate tours to England, one in 1937 and one in 1949. With a war in between.
And if we wanna flip the scripts a little, shout out to these notable home track bullies...
Brendon McCullum: 47.88 AVE (8 100s) home | 31.10 AVE (4 100s) away
Craig McMillan: 47.56 AVE (3 100s) home | 30.81 AVE (3 100s) away
Jeremy Coney: 42.88 AVE (3 100s) home | 32.11 AVE (0 100s) away
Scott Styris: 42.76 AVE (2 100s) home | 33.22 AVE (3 100s) away
John Wright: 41.86 AVE (10 100s) home | 33.24 AVE (2 100s) away
For the record, Tom Latham, Henry Nicholls, and especially Colin de Grandhomme are all showing similar tendencies at the moment... but they’re not really deep enough into their careers for it to count quite yet.
Rightio, can’t let the bowlers go hungry. You can already guess the kind of trends we’ll be looking at here and you’d be right: kiwi seamers love kiwi conditions. Many of them still hold their own away, many of them do not. On the other hand spinners mostly prefer bowling outside of Aotearoa... to the surprise of absolutely nobody.
Here are the top twenty Test wickets takers for the Blackcaps all-time, ranked by those total wickets...
Spot those aforementioned trends? A few in particular to peek at are Chris Martin, Richard Collinge, Lance Cairns, and sweet jeezus how about DK Morrison!? As much as ol’ Danny loves spending time in India these days he never did as a player, averaging a Bradman-esque 88.66 from four Tests there and he didn’t fare much better in Australia or England either. New Zealand was the only nation in which he averaged under 43 with the ball.
Quick moment to bow down before the moustachioed legend that is Sir Richard Hadlee who indulged in copious wickets wherever he happened to lay his head at night. Keep pausing in recognition... and there we go, carry on. Tim Southee and Trent Boult are obviously more effective at home but it’s pleasant to see they only dip to 31ish away which is still more than useful. Meanwhile Neil Wagner reliably takes wickets irrespective of the conditions he bowls in.
Tell you who deserves a bit of credit here and that’s Dion Nash. His numbers are largely on the back of two excellent tours to England but he also took 16 wickets at 27.43 in India. The wonkiest one is surely Jimmy Franklin. Not sure how to explain that other than that he did once take a Test hat-trick in Bangladesh plus he only ever bowled 45.2 overs in Australia and India combined which also helps. Franklin became a worse bowler as his career went on but remember he was a wicked left-arm swinger in his early days. Speaking of kiwi seamers, here are three more...
Daryl Tuffey: 57 wickets @ 25.08 home | 20 wickets @ 50.75 away
Jacob Oram: 41 wickets @ 18.75 home | 19 wickets @ 63.89 away
Kyle Mills: 28 wickets @ 29.64 home | 16 wickets @ 38.93 away
Which brings us to the spinners and you only have to look at that bowler’s chart to see the expected trend there. Daniel Vettori first and foremost. Bruce Taylor is another who loved an away tour. Keep in mind that these seam vs spinner stats are interconnected too – Dan Vettori took fewer wickets at home because the seamers were taking more... and vice versa. John Bracewell is an interesting case because he took a lot more wickets away but at a much worse average, and his best overseas numbers were in England which are the closest to kiwi conditions. But Hedley Howarth’s left arm tweakers had the opposite effect, terrible in NZ and really good elsewhere. He took 28 of his wickets at an average of 19.32 in Asian conditions. And check out Dayle Hadlee’s splits: 26 wickets at 50.23 in NZ versus 45 wickets at 24.06 away from NZ (and 21 of those at 15.90 in India and Pakistan).
The funny thing about this is the great spinners all tended to take plenty of wickets here. Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan each averaged in the teens. Phil Tufnell and Harbajan Singh were in the mid-20s. Bloody Derek Underwood took 24 wickets at 13.54 here in the 1970s. Plenty more have been rubbish but there’s at least enough evidence there to suggest that a major factor in all of this is that kiwi batsmen are shocking against spin bowling. As far as New Zealand spinners in New Zealand conditions go, that might have to be a topic for another day there, friend. Otherwise we’ll be here all day.
Also whack an ad whenever you read a good one. Or even if it’s not a good one, just whack an ad. Have you whacked an ad yet? Many more thanks
Keep cool but care