New Zealand captains under the microscope

New Zealand Test Cricket Captains by Matthew Appleby. Published by Reed.

Some countries appoint Test captains as often as the Italians change prime ministers. Not so New Zealand. Only 25 men have led teams bearing the silver fern onto the Test arena and seven of them did the fewer than five times.

Their task was regularly thankless. Just 12 experienced the pleasure of leading a winning team. Only three - Geoff Howarth, Jeremy Coney and Stephen Fleming - have won more Tests than they have lost.

In his new book New Zealand Test Cricket Captains Matthew Appleby presents portraits of them all, beginning with Tom Lowry, the Hawke's Bay farmer with the trappings and attitude of an English gentleman cricketer.

With a historian's expert touch, expatriate Englishman Appleby mixes primary and secondary sources skilfully. He draws on the judgments of writers from Neville Cardus and RC Robertson-Glasgow onwards.

But this is much more than a scissors-and-paste job. The author has done a lot of leg work himself, having interviewed a good number of the captains and a collection of informed witnesses.

Though most of the anecdotes have appeared in print before, many will be unfamiliar to general readers, for whom the book will be an entertaining introduction to New Zealand Test cricket history.

They will discover that the national team could go more than two years between Tests, but that when they toured, their schedules made modern itineraries look like package holidays.

Walter Hadlee's 1949 tourists to England, for example, played 32 first-class games plus a clutch of other fixtures. In photographs the bespectacled Hadlee looks like a vicar on his day off rather than the shrewd planner and man manager that he was.

Appleby has mined deep seams in the photo archives of the Christchurch Star as well as drawing on private sources in England to find these and other photographs. The results are striking images on almost every page, some in print for the first time. It is a treat to find a book with such high production values, in contrast to some of the shoddy stuff that comes out of the UK these days.

Defiantly jutting jaws are a feature of the immediate pre and post-war eras. Necessary as they are, helmets drain the personality from photographs of the players of the last 20 years, though Howarth probably wishes that something had covered the late-70s perm cruelly featured on page 123.

Of all the captains, Howarth is the one who comes across as the biggest enigma. He is presented as instinctive rather than thoughtful and a throwback in terms of attitudes to coaching and man-management.

It is tempting to conclude that his excellent record came down to the presence of Richard Hadlee. Yet when his team won in England for the first time, at Headingley in 1983, Hadlee did not take a wicket. Howarth usually inspired decent performances from the walk-on parts.

Appleby deals in individuals rather than trends. He resists the temptation to nominate the best or to choose a favourite. Readers will find it difficult to be so self-denying, given the evidence at their disposal.

For this reviewer the three that stand out are: Walter Hadlee, for dignity and intelligence; John Reid - New Zealand's Keith Miller - for sheer force of personality, if not results; and Fleming.

Though the book is bang up-to-date in statistical terms, Appleby could not have anticipated that by publication Fleming would have added skills as an industrial negotiator to his impressive CV, after playing the decisive role in ending the recent player's dispute.

Fleming comes out well in contrast with the under-achieving early-90s. The chapters on these years read like the synopsis of a soap opera. Martin Crowe did not think much of Howarth. Neither did Ken Rutherford, who was also suspicious of Crowe and was replaced by Lee Germon, who was resented by many of the players, though not as much as Glenn Turner. Walk-outs and drugs also feature.

Presented here as a working-class boy made good (you would expect an Englishman to bring class into it), Fleming is now international cricket's most experienced captain, respected at home and abroad. A challenge to Allan Border's Test captaincy record is not out of the question, especially now that Fleming has overcome his allergy to three-figure scores.

He is firmly in the tradition of New Zealand's jaw-jutting pioneers, whose story is well told by Appleby.