Lifelong passion for cricket takes root in feeble turf

Yet another international cricket team is here. Australia.

That's three in seven weeks.

When I grew up praying for visiting international cricket teams, my little red autograph book hungry for scrawl, we were lucky to get one a year.

And yet one thing has remained constant through all that time: the sporting public still expects New Zealand cricket teams to underachieve, collapse and lose.

I am sure this congenital belief derives from that 1950s decade when I was developing my lifelong passion for the game.

I first went to Carisbrook in 1958, when Otago needed a first innings win over Canterbury to win the Plunket Shield.

John Reid scored 201 and the Shield was ours.

I was hooked.

And John Reid's large signature, as large as he was a player, was top left on page one of my autograph book.

I was an impudent autograph hunter.

I once went to Alec Moir's house in Sheen St to get his, and I shockingly thrust my book into the glowering face of Jack Alabaster as he reached for the gate after being dismissed without scoring.

"Don't you know what it's LIKE?" he thundered at me.

Well, no.

I had never been dismissed for a duck at Carisbrook.

The wretched 1958 tour of England was naked torture for a 9-year-old cricket fan.

We were torn apart in every test.

I remember sitting in the Rose Stand at Carisbrook with my grandfather, who seemed to know all the famous cricket people, and listening to the father of one the young batsmen on that tour telling how he marched into the England dressing-room and berated their fast bowlers for bullying his son with bouncers.

The game's scions accidentally revealed many great stories back then, thinking the little bespectacled boy with his hands placed politely on each white knee, couldn't possibly be listening.

Three years before, England had bowled us out for 26, still the world record test low.