McCullum proof the way you do it counts

Brendon McCullum hits a six during the second test against England at Headingley last month. ...
Brendon McCullum hits a six during the second test against England at Headingley last month. Photo by Reuters.
Since the days when our hair was still brown, signing up as a Black Caps supporter was akin to taking holy orders.

The rewards were to be misery and penance. Sound thrashings, humiliations, and innings defeats.

Just occasionally, the cricket gods would drop a small crumb of joy, but this was merely to tease.

It got about as bad as it could get two years ago when the Black Caps were bowled out by South Africa for a cringing 45. They were bitter, back stabbing times.

Coaches came and went. Players bitched and plotted. And the genial Ross Taylor was so messily knifed as captain that Martin Crowe announced he'd burned his New Zealand blazer.

In Cape Town, Taylor's successor, Brendon McCullum, could reasonably have demanded a personal food taster. He was bowled for seven. I must be honest.

It seemed to me then that McCullum - gum chewing, aggressive, and tattooed to breakfast - was exactly the man to lead Black Caps cricket somewhere even worse. They'd join Australia as another bunch of bullying buffoons but minus the talent.

I've been known to be wrong. (I remember an occasion in 2003, but others will point to as recently as yesterday). However, I've never had it more magnificently cocked up than in the case of Brendon Barrie McCullum.

McCullum has led the Black Caps into a new life where, as a world class team of crowd pleasers, they are also admired for the personal qualities sports lovers see in their approach.

''This is a New Zealand side full of decent people as well as decent cricketers: players with a healthy perspective on life,'' Jonathan Liew wrote in London's Daily Telegraph.

Do you recall a sentence like that about modern professional sportsmen?More than any other game, cricket has seen itself as representing the human decencies. To the English, it's meant to sum up the old fashioned qualities of being British. We can snigger, but when we do, we're being narrow and cynical about the founders of the game.

England, in the midst of its conquest by alien armies of immigrants, is struggling to remember what it was like to be English. Maybe the Black Caps, playing to delighted, sell out crowds, have helped them recall? (They've certainly inspired the English team to).

The British media knows there is more to the Black Caps' revival than some run of form - that the team had reached inside itself to change. McCullum, now constantly interviewed on this subject, keeps returning to another word not much found in sport - ''Soul.''

He had a Road to Damas cus moment during the misery of the South African tour. ''I loved playing cricket [as a boy]. That is why I got into the game,' he explained to Liew.

''Just because there is more at stake now, doesn't mean you should lose the innocence of why you played the game in the first place.

''For a long time I had lost that, and I think our team had lost that, too.''

Scyld Berry, the former editor of Wisden - cricket's version of the King James Bible - wrote: ''New Zealand cricketers used to be dour and defensive underdogs, forever overshadowed by their neighbours across the Tasman.

McCullum, bold and attacking, has pumped his team with self belief, and made them as aggressive as Australia, without the boorish excesses.''

In the arts, at work, and in sport, the two things which make success worthwhile are enjoying what you do while achieving it, and then having others appreciate it. That's another way of saying that the way you do it does also count.

McCullum and his team may have started a revolution in players' attitudes to international cricket, which seems to have taken grip in England as well as New Zealand.

''Thank you Brendon McCullum for all you have done for Cricket these last few weeks. A Knighthood please!'' John Cleese tweeted last week.

If the gong's inscription is ''For services to cricket,'' there's no man in the present game who is within cooee of Brendon McCullum.

John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.

 

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