Ha! I was so sure there was going to be some kind of mathematical answer :).
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I do leave myself on 63 far too often.
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I’m going to be playing darts for Mandatory Work Team-Building Fun soon. I’ve thrown darts maybe… twice before? We did just do Axe-throwing though, so I’ll take darts instead.
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I just watched the first T20 cricket match between NZ and the touring West Indies side.
With 3 overs remaining, NZ were 9 down and 55 runs behind, and it seemed like the game was very much a done deal.
Santner and Duffy then put on NZ’s highest 10th wicket partnership for T20s, and my goodness that made for an exciting finish. We still lost – but only by 7 runs.
I’m sure Duffy must be incredibly bemused to be a part of that partnership statistic, because in his innings he faced 1 ball and scored 1 run :). Santner faced every ball of those last 3 overs, and hit 4, 6, 4, 4, 4, 1; 4, 4, 4, 0, 0, 1; 0, 0, 6, 2, 0 4. Not the usual fireworks for the 5th of November, but some fireworks nonetheless!
I have to note that the penultimate dot ball was one of the most egregious failures of an umpire to call wide for height that I can ever remember seeing, meaning that in the last over we really should have had one more ball to face with 6 runs needed to win!
The Windies deserved their win – they defended a low total, with only 6 of the NZ batsmen making double-figures – but they will be breathing a big sigh of relief that they actually hung onto it. I’m just glad I was still watching after it all seemed done and dusted!
I also learned that, in ODIs, NZ has a crazy home-win rate over the past several years. I think it was 24 ODIs played in NZ since 2020, with 22 wins and 2 losses. I saw a table comparing this with other countries, and no one else came close to that proportion. Maybe it’s the jet-lag? 
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I once watched NZ play England in 20 20. NZ played a really bad innings and there were a lot of gloomy NZ faces. I reassured them that they haven’t seen nothing yet. England played SO badly and of course played an even worse innings. Cue lots of cheering Kiwis…
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Good grief, the same thing just happened in reverse in the second match a day later.
NZ batted first and scored 207 (including a 78 from 28 balls) which looked like a winning total, and had the West Indies falling behind the curve for the first half of their innings; but then their lower order went crazy with constant boundaries (including a 45 from 16, a 34 from 16, and 29 from 13), and they ended just 3 runs short!
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I used to hear the bbc cricket reports on the overnight world service broadcast. I was always struck by how sensible it sounded, even though it is clearly just word salad designed to confuse Americans.
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The (ongoing) series against the West Indies has been crazy-close.
After four T20 matches (would have been five, but one was rained off) and three ODIs, we’ve had five results effectively decided in the last available over! The first three T20s and the first two ODIs all went right down to the wire, with chases falling short by 7, 3, 9, 7 runs, with the 2nd ODI (which was reduced to 34 overs each due to the weather) being the only successful chase out of those five, with NZ crossing the line with 3 balls remaining.
(The other T20 and ODI went NZ’s way with larger margins – although we made harder work than I would have liked chasing a low total today in the final ODI.)
So while the West Indies have won only one match (the first T20) since arriving, most of these could have easily gone either way. It’s made for some quite stressful viewing :).
The Test Match series is still to come – it’s been nice to see a good-sized tour by the visitors, with 5 T20s, 3 ODIs, and 3 Tests on the schedule.
Some interesting stats (mostly about the West Indies captain).
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We’re late in the fourth day of the third and final test match of the West Indies tour of NZ and, on a batting-friendly ground, the NZ openers (Tom Latham and Devon Conway) have produced some extraordinary figures:
- Respectively 137 and 227 in the first innings, and 101 and 100 in the second.
- The first opening pair in international first-class cricket history to have scored a century each in both innings (by a hair, granted :), but they were looking to accelerate the scoring at that stage).
- Their combined partnerships totalled 515 runs, which is an international record by 100 runs! (for the 1st-wicket).
- Conway is the tenth player internationally to score both a century and a double in the same test (of whom Gooch and Sangakkara have a century and a triple!).
(Statistics being statistics, though… I’m sure there must be plenty of matches where a massive total by the opening pair resulted in them not having to bat twice. And the top two single innings partnerships in this list are both pretty near to being 1st-wicket statistics for all practical intents and purposes.)
NZ scored 575/8d in the first innings, and the West Indies responded with 420. NZ then put on 306/2d and have left themselves a day and a bit to bowl out the visitors (who have a probably-unreachable target of 462).
Lots of talk about timing of the declaration. If the West Indies can survive the last session of the day’s play without losing any wickets (which is what they did in their first innings), they’ll be in a pretty good position to drag out the draw tomorrow, but the wicket is definitely a trickier proposition for batting at this point, so it’s going to be interesting.
At present, the WI openers have the bemusingly disparate figures of 0/16 and 35/27…
This whole tour really has been fascinating cricket in all kinds of ways…
And it’s all wrapped up. The Windies openers held out yesterday and for the entire first session today, which was a very solid effort; but after a breakthrough early in the second session the wickets fell pretty rapidly. So there was one drawn test, and then two wins to NZ to conclude the tour.
Fast bowler Jacob Duffy was player of the test series, getting a 5-wicket bag in each of the three tests, and bowling a gruelling 43 overs during the West Indies’ 2nd innings of the first test, when two of our seamers were unable to do their share after getting injured. (The man is a machine – he seemed to take that workload in his stride, and never really slowed down. It’s not on the scale of these examples, but still very impressive.) We lost yet another pace bowler in the next test, so the series has been a test for the depth of the squad as well! (The WI team then suffered injuries in the third test, including one of their quicks, so it ended up being a rough series for both teams in that regard.)
All in all a really enjoyable and extremely competitive series of matches, played in the sportsmanlike manner I always want to see from any team. Good stuff.
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My wife and I left our daughter in the hotel room to go have a drink in the bar. When we came back, she was watching the cricket channel. It’s still incomprehensible.
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Went to bed at 2:30am elated. Woke up at 7:30am deflated. Oh, Bo!
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