A Tribute To BJ Watling, New Zealand’s Best Ever Test Wicket Keeper
BJ Watling is a stats man. Whether he himself cares about the numbers all that much, dunno, but he’s one of those players whose excellence is right there for all to see on his Cricinfo profile. Nearing on 4000 Test runs with 8 centuries. 73 matches played. A batting average of 38.11. Not to mention a New Zealand record 257 dismissals as a wicket-keeper (plus ten more as a regular fielder). There are ODI and T20I stats in there too, he’s an All Formatter after all, but it’s in Test matches that he’s gone above and beyond (though the guy does have more than 10,000 first class runs to his name, which also feels like it’s worth a mention). And he’ll have three more opportunities to add to those numbers over in England, two against England and then the Test Championship final against India, before he steps gently into retirement like his punchy cover drive after an over full of forward-defensives.
His iconic and beloved role as a gritty middle order keeper-batsman in the Blackcaps Test team has become so familiar that it’s a little easy to forget that BJ Watling initially made the team as a stroke-playing opener. The opening stuff didn’t go so well and the 60no that he got on debut in 2009 against Pakistan was the only time he passed fifty in his initial 12 Test innings. At that stage Watling had an average of 24.50 and was kinda in and out of the team (his opening batting partners: Tim McIntosh and Martin Guptill), only playing one Test in 2011. But around that same time Brendon McCullum’s knees made the fateful decision that they couldn’t handle the extended stress of Test match keeping and the gloves were up for grabs. BJ Watling figured he liked them odds. The rest is history.
Actually McCullum stopped keeping full-time in Tests in March 2012. Gareth Hopkins then got a go for a tour of India before Reece Young kept wicket for the home summer. But when Zimbabwe came to town in January 2012 for a lone Test match something significant happened: BJ Watling kept wicket. He batted at seven in the order and he scored 102 not out (Ross Taylor also tonned up while McCullum scored 83 as an opener). Watling didn’t get a dismissal in the first innings as Zimbabwe were bowled out for 51 in response to NZ’s 495/7d but he took four catches in the second innings on the way to a follow-on victory in a lovely glimpse of what was to come.
That match is still the last time that Zimbabwe played in Aotearoa, nine years later and counting. It also proved to be a false start for BJW-WK as Watling would have to wait nearly a year before his next opportunity to keep in Tests. The gauntlet had been laid down, the reinvention was for real, but a hip injury allowed Kruger van Wyk to step in and take over for a wee while. Nine Tests with one fifty averaging 21.31 didn’t quite do it for KVW though and his fellow naturalised-South African citizen Watling had won the spot back by the time of the tour of South Africa in early 2013. He got a golden duck first up in that embarrassing 45-all-out debacle but a pair of fifties in the second Test set the tone for battling run-scoring and partnership building which would serve him the entire rest of his career (assuming he doesn’t bottle it in these last three games).
Watling had kept wicket before so he wasn’t a complete novice. This isn’t some story about a random kid hanging out in the food court one day and a Hollywood agent sees them and next thing they’re starring in a Marvel movie or something. But the amazing part of this yarn isn’t that Watling was able to settle into a specialist WK role after he’d already had a couple years of international cricket in a different version of himself... it’s that he settled into being one of the very best wicket-keepers in the world... with bat and with gloves alike. The dude has been nothing short of brilliant. In the last decade of Test cricket there have been 54 different international WK’s and Watling has the most dismissals of any of them (click to enlarge the pics, if needed)...
And he also has the most runs as a designated keeper across that span...
That’s that kind of all-round production that has earned the bloke entry into that peculiar paradox of sportsdom where anything he does comes with a claim of how *underrated* he is. Just check out the reaction to his retirement. It’s spreading like covid at a Republican donors convention. No word of a lie.
However not sure how underrated you can be if you’re your country’s best ever wicket-keeper. Which BJ Watling certainly is. He’s played more Tests as NZ’s designated keeper than anyone other than Adam Parore and if he plays all three Tests in England then he’ll pass Parore’s record (plus Watling has already kept in more individual innings than AP: 123 vs 121). He’s long surpassed Parore’s 201 Test dismissals as keeper (it goes Watling 257, Parore 201, McCullum 179, Smith 176, Wadsworth 96). What’s more is that Watling’s rate of 2.089 dismissals per innings is easily the best of any Blackcaps Test keeper who wore the gloves in more than two innings. As for runs as designated keeper, he’s crushed that one too. 3381 at 39.77 with seven tons. Exceeding Brendon McCullum’s records in all three of those categories (excluding averages for fewer than five innings).
Given the state of Blackcaps spinnership over Watling’s span, as well as the dominance of our seam attack, it’s no surprise to see that only eight of his 257 dismissals were stumpings. One off Mitchell Santner, two off Ajaz Patel... and five off Mark Craig. Only one of those was in Aotearoa and that was way back in 2015 – in the same Test as he and Kane Williamson put on that world record partnership. In the second innings of that match he’d gotten Suranga Lakmal stumped for the final Sri Lankan wicket off the bowling of Mark Craig. Went for a big slog and missed it. Watling fumbled the ball at first then knocked one of the stumps clean out of the ground in taking the bails off.
Dimuth Karunaratne was playing that day and he’s the batsman that Watling has dismissed the most times (7). Followed by Azhar Ali, Angelo Mathews, and Alastair Cook (all 6). As you’d guess, the bowling split is pretty even between the three kings, although Tim Southee has the clear lead what with his outswingers targeting those edges whereas Trent Boult tends to target the stumps more while Neil Wagner targets the batsman’s face. 71 of Watling’s catches have come off Southee, 55 off Boult, and 52 off Wagner. Kyle Jamieson is already fourth after only five Tests together with 13.
You often hear these yarns about keepers who score more runs after giving up the gloves and they’re usually whipped out as a talking point as a solution for a drought of form. The same thing happens with captains. Like, oh maybe if we take away that burden it’ll free them up to produce with the bat again. Kumar Sangakkara is genrally used as the prime example seeing as he averaged 40.48 as keeper and 66.78 (in 86 Tests, no small sample size – and entire career in itself) when he wasn’t keeping. Brendon McCullum was one of them too with an average of 42.94 as a batsman vs 34.18 as the keeper. But BJ Watling had no such dramas. In fact his batting average went up significantly when he started adding that (wk) next to his name on the scorecard.
BJ Watling as WK: 98 INNS | 3381 RUNS | 205 HS | 39.77 AVE | 42.27 SR | 7 100s | 18 50s
BJ Watling not WK: 16 INNS | 392 RUNS | 120 HS | 28.00 AVE | 45.79 SR | 1 100 | 1 50
It’s chat like that which earned BJW a reputation for doing his best work when the chips were stacked against him. The tougher the situation, the more he thrived. His batting average goes up by a run and a half in seconds inningses. It goes up by much more than that – 34.00 vs 40.89 – when his team wins the toss versus when they lose the toss, plus his home vs away numbers are extremely close when there’s usually a solid gap towards home comforts for most players. For the last decade BJ Watling has been the one-man solution to the old worry of batting collapses. He’s got a talent for batting with lower order batsmen, both protecting and empowering them, as well as getting the most out of being that Last Recognised Batting Partner for the top order. Just have a peek at his biggest partnerships...
Two 350+ efforts absolutely glitter at the top of that list yet 127 for the last wicket with Trent Boult back in 2013 sure stands out too. One of three times that he and Boult added 50+ for the tenth and final. The two styles of a BJ Watling partnership.
Both of those 350s were world records at the time. It’s a bloody travesty that Ben Stokes and Jonny Bairstow have since topped them (399 for the sixth wicket vs South Africa in 2016, the buggers) but still. Especially that first one where the Blackcaps were dismissed for 192 in the first innings against India and were still 152 runs behind at 94/5 in the second innings when Watling strode to the crease. Watling scored 124. He and Brendon McCullum took them through to a 200 run lead. Jimmy Neesham came in next and scored 137no, he and McCullum adding another 179 runs for the seventh. McCullum scored 302. A legendary Blackcaps performance in which BJ Watling didn’t get headline status but in true BJW fashion it wouldn’t have been possible without him.
There are still only 46 instances of 350-run partnerships in the history of Test cricket. Only fourteen batsmen have been involved in multiple of them and it’s basically a procession of legendary names. Don Bradman, Len Hutton, Mahela Jayawardene, Ricky Ponting, VVS Laxman, Kumar Sangakkara, Garfield Sobers, Javed Miandad, Michael Clarke, Rahul Dravid, Graeme Smith, Bill Ponsford, Kane Williamson... and BJ Watling. Jayawardene and Bradman are the only chaps with three of them. Watling has been involved in four of the sixteen 250+ partnerships for New Zealand... and incredibly he’s done so with four different partners. Williamson, McCullum, Santner & Taylor. He also has a 201 with Neesham. Just take a second to remember where he bats in the order and then read this paragraph again.
With three Tests left to play, there’s nothing much else to achieve on a personal level seeing as he already owns most of the Blackcaps wicket-keeping records. That ‘most matches as designated keeper’ one is there to be claimed as long as he plays all three Tests (hard to see why he wouldn’t, injuries aside – this news of course also has a flow-on effect of making it easier to drop Tom Blundell for Devon Conway seeing as the (pretty successful) TB-opener experiment would be coming to an end after this tour anyway when he assumes his birthright as ‘Caps Test Keeper).
There is the prospect of 4000 Test runs there for him if he can score another 227 of them in what’ll be a maximum of six innings. If he scores at his average then he’ll get there but only if he bats all six times which is unlikely. And it’s too big of a target to get there with one major score. Probably needs a hundy and a couple fifties so that might be a touch beyond him. He’s tenth all-time for the Blackcaps in Test runs which is where he’ll finish since Tom Latham is the next guy ahead of him and he’ll be churning them over in England too – Latham is 71 runs shy of 4k himself. And although Watling had a Test average above 40 as recently as the dreaded December 2019 tour of Australia, he’s since dipped low enough that he’d need to score 187 runs without dismissal to get back up there – plus 40 more for every subsequent time he gets out.
But there are some all-timer charts he could still give himself a boost on. His 257 Test WK dismissals are ninth-most in the history of the sport and with his average of two per innings suggesting a baseline of around twelve more to come, he’s definitely in range of Jeff Dujon (270), Brad Haddin (270), and Alan Knott (269). Particularly if the Blackcaps seam attack can get those Dukeys to swing around corners. Incredibly he’s not even halfway to the overall record which is Mark Boucher’s 555 – though to be fair Mark Boucher played 147 Tests, all as wickie.
Even still, Mark Boucher doesn’t top the runs scoring tallies as a designated keeper. There the legend Adam Gilchrist pips him by 55 runs despite having played 51 fewer Tests. Watling comes in at 11th on that list. Directly ahead of Brad Haddin, directly below Mushfiqur Rahim – who is still playing but has mercifully had the gloves taken away from him in recent years. Great little batsman but one of the worst regular keepers in recent times, sorry dude. If Watling gets his 227 runs then he’ll pass Mushie’s current tally and get within 26 runs of passing Rod Marsh for ninth. It’s not one to bet the house on but it’s possible, sure.
Also if he does get those runs on his farewell tour then he’ll likely climb up this one too. Highest batting averages in Tests as designated keeper (min 10 inns)...
As well as surely adding to this list...
Most Test Centuries as Designated Keeper:
Adam Gilchrist (AUS) – 17
Andy Flower (ZIM) – 12
Leslie Ames (ENG) – 8
AB de Villiers (SA) – 7
Matt Prior (ENG) – 7
Kumar Sangakkara (SL) – 7
BJ Watling (NZ) - 7
On the topic of hundreds, let us not ignore his highest score: 205 against England at Mount Maunganui in November 2019... the highest ever individual effort by a New Zealand keeper and one of only ten instances ever of a Test double-ton by a designated keeper. Andy Flower has the record of 232no. Again, typical BJ Watling. He came in at 127/4 with his team still trailing in the first innings by 225 runs and departed with them more than 250 runs ahead. BJ Watling being BJ Watling he also guided Mitch Santner to his first ever Test century in the process.
Brendon McCullum used to say that BJ Watling was his favourite cricketer and you can immediately see why a captain would feel that way about a player who (as well as relieving him of the gloves) fits that sporting definition of a Glue Guy so well. A player with whom it all sticks together. Linking the top order with the lower order. Batting in partnerships. Taking copious catches behind the stumps (not so flash on the stumpings though, as discussed). Scoring tough runs. Those are all traits of a player who values his role within a team and you get the feeling that, regardless of any individual accolades, no tribute would be greater for Bradley John Watling than to bow out of international cricket as a Test Championship winner alongside those teammates. Make it happen, fellas.
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