Blackcaps vs Bangladesh: Where’s Ross Taylor and Is Everything All Good There?
There’s a T20 international series going on at the moment. Maybe not the finest example of the sport but you don’t need another essay about the merits of international Twenty20 right now. The point is that the Blackcaps are in the midst of a 3xT20 series against Bangladesh and Ross Taylor, for some reason, is not there.
There are a few ways to process that information. One is that maybe they don’t really care about chucking King Rossco in for this particular spectacle, which would be fair enough. Except that they’ve still selected Kane Williamson. They’ve selected Mitch Santner, Corey Anderson and Trent Boult and until he got injured Martin Guptill was gonna be there too. So it’s hardly a second string team. Having said that, they've rested Tim Southee and Trent Boult skipped the first game. Just a New Year refresher for Rossco then? Give Tom Bruce a taste of the international stuff and everybody wins?
Nope, it wasn’t that either. Nor was it a fitness thing despite Taylor only recently coming back from relatively serious eye surgery. All eye surgery is pretty gruesome but take a scroll down his tweets for the pic he shared, very yuck. If they thought he wasn’t ready to return from that then no worries about it, that’s all they had to say. Ross Taylor: Out injured. Instead this is what Gavin Larsen, Blackcaps selector, went and yapped to the media:
Gonzo Gav: “No, it’s not eyes. It’s performance related. We feel that on balance that we’ve got a couple of guys in this squad that are better suited at the moment to be playing T20 cricket for their country.”
Performance related? The bugger hasn’t hardly played for a month! To be fair, he’d been having a nightmare in the test matches ever since carving up in Zimbabwe with scores of 173*, 124* and 67*, chasing that outstanding lot with a total of 4 runs in South Africa (3 innings) and not doing much better against India either.
But, having said that, his last innings before the surgery was a resurgent 102* against Pakistan in Hamilton. His ODI efforts have consisted of five games in and against India over the last 11 months and he struggled there too but still averaged 29.75, hardly the worst player on that tour. And when the T20 squad was picked the only innings he’d had since his return was a Super Smash game for the Stags in which he pummelled 8 sixes on the way to 82* from only 41 balls against Auckland. Performance related? Really?
By the way, he followed that up with another 80 against Canterbury, this time with a mere 6 sixes and off a pedestrian 50 deliveries. Two innings and 162 runs. Yet when Martin Guptill was ruled out injured, it was Neil Broom who got the call-up, not Ross Taylor. Broom deserves it too after what he did in the ODI series (batting in Taylor’s spot) but still… huh?
Like, all Larsen had to do was say that Taylor was injured. He’s looked good in a few spare opportunities but we don’t think he’s ready to return yet. Literally nobody would care, most of us probably weren’t expecting him anyway and this way you’re not publically calling him out (unless that was the point?). But when you contradict a reporter to deny his absence had anything to do with the injury then you kinda need to be held accountable for that.
Larsen effectively admitted that he and the selectors rate Bruce, Anderson, Munro, Neesham and Broom ahead of Taylor for T20s and that’s weird. Some of those guys have destructive power and a couple offer something with the ball as well (though not Anderson, who’s been picked strictly as a batsman), which makes them perfectly suited for some cheeky international twenty over stuff. Plus if there’s ever an occasion to give a lad like Tom Bruce a well-deserved run then this is it, after all it’s only a few Twenty20s. The drama isn’t that Taylor’s been excluded… the drama’s that he’s been conspicuously dropped. Again, Larsen was asked specifically if it was the eye that led to Taylor’s omission and he said no, it was ‘performance related’. He didn’t have to say that.
Of course it might have been nothing more than a slip of the tongue – he meant to say one thing and under pressure it came out wrong. Those things happen all the time and get misquoted. Also NZ Cricket in recent times haven’t been the best when it comes to their PR and Gavin Larsen has been known to throw out some very odd justifications in the past. I guess when it comes to Ross Taylor we’re all just a little bit more suspicious because of that whole captaincy debacle a few years ago. Brendon McCullum may be gone but Mike Hesson remains.
Despite Neil Broom’s recent scores, you’d be a madman to think that Ross Taylor doesn’t belong at number four in both the Test and ODI full-strength XIs. Gavin Larsen and Mike Hesson know that too, surely. You can bet your arse that Kane Williamson knows it – he and Taylor average a 56.76 run partnership every time they meet at the crease in test matches with 2611 runs coming in those combos – easily the highest mark for either of them (no surprises, really, when they’re the core of our batting line-up and have been for several years). New Zealand cricket needs Ross Taylor if the Blackcaps are gonna keep climbing those international rankings.
Hence it’s a bit weird to see him treated so tactlessly.