Ten Years back – Zimbabwe v New Zealand 2nd Test
Second Test, v New Zealand, at Harare Sports Club; 7, 9, 10, 11, 12 November 1992. NEW ZEALAND 335 (M J Greatbatch 55, M D Crowe 140, K R Rutherford 74; D H Brain 3/49) and 262/5 dec (M D Crowe 61, K R Rutherford 89, D N Patel 58*). ZIMBABWE 283/9 dec (K J Arnott 68, A D R Campbell 52, A J Pycroft 60; M L Su’a 5/85) and 137 (D N Patel 6/50). New Zealand won by 177 runs.ScorecardZimbabwe were the only Test team ever to survive their first two Test matches without defeat, but they lost their third after, by their own admission, being conned into chasing an unrealistic target on the final afternoon.The first day was notable for an outstanding century by Martin Crowe, and Zimbabwe quickly resorted to guarding the boundaries and keeping him away from the strike at all costs. He had scored 140 by the time he eventually allowed his patience to expire and hit a catch in the deep. He shared a century partnership with Ken Rutherford, but only three of the New Zealand batsmen scored more than 20.Dave Houghton: "Martin Crowe batted absolutely magnificently, I remember that. Eddo Brandes made a bit of a comeback at last and got a couple of wickets in both innings, but again they played really well. We bowled them out for 345, which wasn’t a bad effort, and they scored it quickly. Martin Crowe was outstanding and that really was a fantastic innings."Dave Brain: "I remember him (Crowe) hitting old Traics time and again with the slog-sweep shot."Andy Pycroft: "The highlight of the Test match was Martin Crowe’s knock, which was absolutely outstanding. There were a couple of spells where Eddo Brandes bowled very quickly, and swung the ball, and Martin Crowe played him absolutely beautifully. In fact, if he hadn’t played so well, and Rutherford played with him for a time, they would have been in trouble. Eddo bowled well; his figures of two for 49 don’t necessarily show that in 22 overs, but he was quick and hostile, and an excellent line and length."Again we bowled pretty well at them; Traics bowled a lot of overs but wasn’t as effective against New Zealand as I thought he might have been. But, as you’d expect without a lot of venom in the attack apart from Eddo, the wickets were shared."Dave Brain: "I got pretty friendly with Mark Greatbatch and I got him out quite a few times on that tour, twice in this match. They were actually a really good bunch of guys, until that final innings, when I was batting and got chirped big-time, but that’s what happened. But Greatbatch was a good player – he could blast it."After the first day’s play, there was a mercifully unique experience in Test cricket as the Test match stopped so that a one-day international could be played in front of a big Sunday crowd. Ian Robinson said, "That was a crazy situation. The umpires were at pains on the first day to keep the players off the strip that was to be used for the one-dayer."Zimbabwe were not far behind on first innings, with fifties from Kevin Arnott, Alistair Campbell and Andy Pycroft, who it turned out was playing in his final Test match.Kevin Arnott: "I enjoyed my innings for the fact that it was a lot more fluent than some of my previous innings. By then I had found some form. I also discussed my batting with a person I had a great admiration for, Mark Greatbatch. I think he was a wonderful sportsman, and even though he was a more aggressive opening batsman he and I discussed my ability to play some more positive shots, and I think I started to show a little bit."Andy Pycroft: "Kevin Arnott was quite unsung; he played four Tests while I played three. He got a hundred in the second Test and runs in this one as well; he played very well. I got a sixty in the first innings, 30 overnight and another 30 the next day. I was well set and should have got more than that."Alistair Campbell played well; in fact, if you take him now and compare him to how he played in the early stages of his career, is that he didn’t play strokes all around the wicket. He had them all, but he played more to his strengths. For the middle part of his Test career, until about a year ago, he was trying to play shots all around the wicket and not selecting them properly. But as a youngster, when he first came into the Test arena, he looked a very good player indeed. I think he’s a lot like Marcus Trescothick, but Trescothick plays better to his strengths than Al does."Dave Houghton: "Fifty-odd behind wasn’t a bad effort and we actually declared. We were a little bit influenced by Martin trying to get us to make games of things."New Zealand aimed to build on their lead, with Crowe scoring 65, despite suffering from leg strains. They declared just before lunch on the final day, setting Zimbabwe a target of 315 in 71 overs. Perhaps overconfident after playing two Tests without defeat, the Zimbabweans decided to go for it – with disastrous results."The Second Test is probably one of the biggest regrets I’ve had in cricket," Andy Flower recalled, "We played some reasonable cricket; again, watching Martin Crowe bat was something special, as he got a hundred. Then they set us about 300 to win in less than a day, on the last day."I remember John Hampshire and Dave Houghton, coach and captain, telling us that we were going to go for this target, and I couldn’t believe it because I thought 300 in less than a day, on a Harare Sports Club pitch, with a very heavy outfield, was unrealistic. I honestly believe they felt the pressure of Martin Crowe’s constant moaning about us playing negative cricket, and I think we were conned into chasing the target."They knocked us over really easily in the end, at about teatime on the last afternoon. Guys had gone in and played big shots, a couple of them caught on the boundary, a couple caught in the slips having huge hits outside off – it was silly cricket, and very disappointing to lose our first Test. I remember being very downhearted afterwards."I don’t think they had a good bowling attack, to be honest. Murphy Su’a was fairly quick, but inaccurate; Willie Watson was just a steady little seamer; Dion Nash a good away-swing bowler. Then I thought Patel was a good off-spinner, but nothing special, and their left-arm spinner Haslam was fairly ordinary, no huge mystery about him. In reality it was a nice gentle way for us to be introduced to Test cricket."Then we had the incident of Martin Crowe jumping on top of the Beverley tent and taking down the banner that was up there, which said, merely in jest, `Zimbabwe the only unbeaten Test nation’. He dragged it down with much glee written all over his face. The incident itself didn’t cause much hostility, but there was definitely a hostile atmosphere throughout that tour."Ian Robinson: "He made a very obvious point of parading it in front of the spectators to indicate that Zimbabwe had now been beaten. It was rather an aggressive move that riled a number of spectators there."Andy Pycroft: "I remember that banner irking Martin Crowe particularly. He was a decent enough guy off the field, and I got to know him reasonably well, but a funny guy, quite aloof, and that sort of thing could rankle him more than anybody – he was that sort of personality. They weren’t as friendly as the Indians were."Dave Houghton: "Although Martin Crowe hoodwinked us a bit then and talked us into being more positive, a lot of the things he told us then were things we actually used three or four years later when we had a bit more experience – about being more positive, about going into Test matches to win them – and I still remember his comment to me that you can play ten Test matches, and if you draw eight and lose two it means nothing, but if you lose eight and win two, everyone remembers the two you win. It’s very, very true." But Zimbabwe were still building their foundation then and were not in a position to do that because they had not learned how or had enough experience – as Crowe must have been aware."They gave us 315 to win in just under a day and left us to go chasing after it." He remembers the decision to chase it rather differently from Andy Flower. "We were foolish enough to do it – against Hampshire’s wishes, I have to say. We decided, in our wisdom as novices, to have a crack at this, and we failed miserably. I think Hamps let us have our head so he could say afterwards in the changing room, `I told you so.’ And he did!"We played all sorts of silly shots. We learned a lesson – but we also walked into the changing room and thought, `Well, we were in with a chance of winning the game.’ In only our third Test match we were actually going at a target to try and win. It cost us the Test match, so we learned a lesson from that, but we still felt pretty pleased with what we had done."Kevin Arnott: "Unfortunately, on reflection, we adopted a bad strategy in our second innings, to reach certain totals by a certain time, which led in my view to our downfall. That was our first step in a learning curve, but it brought us down to earth, because we had been a side that by most people’s expectations should have been hammered in our first Test match. It was good for us because there are no short cuts in Test cricket. I only played in one Test match after that, in India, but I certainly enjoyed it, learned a lot from it and met some good people."Mark Burmester: "We lost it in one session after we had done all the hard work. We hadn’t pegged them back that badly, but we knew it was a score we could get to. We didn’t bowl well for a session and let Greatbatch and Crowe score quickly, which took the game away from us. It meant we had to bat for too long a time to hold on to the game. But I enjoyed batting in that last Test match; I got 30 not out in the first innings and ended up in the second innings putting on 46 with Gary Crocker for the ninth wicket – in a losing match, but it gave something to watch for those guys who came late on the Thursday and at least it wasn’t over too early. It gave me time at the crease and if it wasn’t for an injury soon after that, who knows? Maybe I could still be playing."Dave Brain: "We made one major blunder. They left us over 300 to get on the last day and I remember how Dave Houghton came and said, `Let’s go for it.’ We were never going to get it; we should have told him to shove it up and just batted it out! I remember when I came in to bat getting chirped by that little guy Rod Latham, how he was going to see me at the cocktail party later and they had given us such a hiding."Andy Pycroft: "My biggest memory of that Test was not so much the fact that we got beaten but the reason that we got beaten. It was inexperience, and going against the coach as well, in trying to win a Test match when we were so new into the arena, when we didn’t have the time to win it even if we were a decent side and had the ability to score at a big rate, where the pitch was playing a little slower than it had done."I remember being very disappointed that we had even tried to win it, and being a lone voice in the changing room, saying, `This is not on; we shouldn’t even be looking at it,’ and then going out and trying to play shots myself, which I knew I shouldn’t be doing, and got out, as a few of us did in the top order. Once we had lost those early wickets, we were always going to lose that Test match. I put that loss down more than anything to inexperience, but also the mental and physical fatigue of every one of us. Three Test matches (and three one-day internationals!) played for the first time in Test cricket was too demanding for us, and I think with hindsight the administrators would admit that they should never have given us such a heavy schedule."Grant Flower: "We over-rated ourselves and we should never have gone for it, but we were talked into it by the New Zealanders. We didn’t play well enough in the second innings. Once again there was quite a bit of sledging. But we were outplayed by the better side in the end."Ian Robinson: "We showed our naivety, and I think we were still thinking in one-day mode. I think we thought we could probably have got that target, but you can’t do that in Test cricket."It has been suggested that it was perhaps a good thing that Zimbabwe lost this Test match, otherwise they would have finished the two tours with the impression that Test cricket was easy after all and been less prepared for the sterner tasks that lay ahead. "They may be right," conceded Dave Houghton. "India and New Zealand weren’t at the top of the rung then, by any means, but still it was probably a good thing to lose in our third Test match just to get the monkey off our back."We had to lose at one stage. We had achieved three games going five days and had got two good draws out of them, and we had lost a game trying to win it. I know Hamps and I sat back and said, `Well, we’ve done what we wanted to do.’ It would have been nice to win a game, but we did what we set out to do. We had two blokes with Test hundreds, we had a bloke with a five-wicket haul; Gary Crocker played really well; Andy Flower, Grant Flower and Alistair Campbell both got their Test-match fifties, so we had accomplished a lot.Dave also differs from Andy Flower in his memory of relationships with the New Zealanders. "It wasn’t the first time we had encountered sledging because we had played two or three New Zealand A sides, and Australian A sides. It was a little bit of a `sledgy’ affair – just as well it started then so the guys could get used to it because it hasn’t stopped. But New Zealand have always been one of the most vocal sides on the field. I think they realized they were the junior brother to the Australians and had been taking it for years, they decided to get a bit tougher and start handing a bit out."Ian Robinson: "There may have been sledging, but with the shift changes of umpires it was quite difficult to get a handle on this, because you don’t get a pattern; you’re just on for one day at a time and then not again until tomorrow. But this Test was well before the ICC Code of Conduct and match referees had only just started. We had Peter van der Merwe, but their role hadn’t been defined."Malcolm Jarvis: "This first New Zealand Test series I was involved in, they were a pretty sociable bunch. They were like the old school where they mixed, but they keep very much to themselves nowadays. The sledging wasn’t really a problem. I think what goes on on the field stays on the field. You’re there to win a game and if you play hard on the field that’s how cricket should be, and when you’ve finished the game you can go and have a few beers afterwards and it’s fine. I think that’s the way it should be played. It was maybe a big eye-opener for some of the guys to get the verbal treatment but at the end of the day I suppose that’s how cricket was. They were out to assert their authority on us."It was a great honour to have played at the highest level and I have no regrets. I just wish I could have played more Test cricket and one-day cricket."Andy Pycroft: "New Zealand were a lot more aggressive than the Indians on the field and I think they were more interested in showing the newcomers who was boss."Our fielding in those first three Tests was of a high quality, although we did drop catches, especially in the first innings of the First Test against New Zealand, but in general terms our fielding was top-drawer. That is one of the requirements: if you’re not one of the fancied sides in the arena, if you don’t have a fielding department that I better than anyone else’s, you are not going to make it."I don’t think our fielding today is anywhere near what it was then. If you go back to the eighties, 1982 to 1985, and it was Duncan Fletcher’s influence more than anyone’s, we were clearly the best fielding side in the world. And it didn’t come by accident; we worked harder at it than these guys do today. I know they play a lot more cricket and the demands on the body are heavy, but look at it the other way: we were part-time cricketers and we put in the hours. That’s the only way you become a decent fielding side."Overall the feeling that sticks out the most about those first three Tests was the tiredness. Too much in too short a time for guys who were out on their feet. That was unfortunate, because I don’t think we would have been beaten in that third Test match had we been able to take a break."Having said that, you’ve got to say that coming into Test cricket the way we did was a pretty good performance. People look at stats the whole time, but being part of it I can say there was a great deal of pride that we can say, `We got it there, we did our stuff, we showed the world that even though we had slipped in terms of the ability of the side from where we were perhaps five years earlier, we were a decent side and still had a lot of talent."