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East Auckland Hammer
9:39 Thu Mar 3
Re: Martin Crowe
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Good article on him here:
Martin Crowe was never loved by New Zealand in the way that Richie McCaw is loved. We love good buggers and stoics, men of the mud, leaders by example, narrow-eyed men who expand into three word sentences after a couple of beers.
Crowe was more interesting than that. He did not just want to be this country's greatest batsman, which he unquestionably was, he wanted his runs to be beautiful.
Crowe yearned to be an aesthete in a sporting culture which thought that a diphthong was something worn by chicks. And blessed be, not only did Crowe succeed in his aesthetic aim as a batsman, he also succeeded in later life as a man, something he undoubtedly regarded as a greater achievement.
For him perhaps it was, but for the rest of us, the Myth of Martin Crowe is a story of a man who compared with Viv Richards as one of the greatest batsmen of the modern era. Richards was Tiger Woods, a man of power who could make the impossible look commonplace. Crowe was Ben Hogan, the complete array of shots, eliminating mistakes, digging genius from out the dirt.
Peter Roebuck, Crowe's captain at Somerset, called it "the technique of sweet reason", an epithet that could just as easily have applied to Hogan. Roebuck also called Crowe "the leading long innings player in the world". It is easy to imagine the pair of them discussing their tortured souls over a glass of wine in a West Country bar, as they frequently did.
Crowe was not one of the lads and Ian Botham, unable to forgive him for replacing Richards at Somerset, to his shame called Crowe "a good club player". If anyone was the "club player" it was Botham, the bat a club in his belligerent, beefy hands. Crowe was much more subtle than that, his sumptuous straight drive through mid-on well beyond Botham's vocabulary.
John Parker says: "He was one of the great batsmen of all time. I never saw him make any ugly runs. He was probably a genius with the bat. He had a shot for every ball. He even got out nicely. He didn't really understand how good he was. He was a deep thinker, sometimes too deep a thinker, and quite emotional which is not true of many of the top players."
Although Crowe only averaged 45 in tests, it should be remembered he made his debut against Lillee and Thomson when he was far too young. The early years cost Crowe a truer average. He also batted on many a feisty pitch against attacks which contained the likes of Malcolm Marshall and Joel Garner, Wakim Akram and Waqar Younis, some of the greatest fast bowlers the world has known.
In 1985 Crowe scored 188 on a fiery pitch in Brisbane, a much greater innings than Ross Taylor's double century on a road in 2015, although Crowe took a mentor's pride in that knock. The same year, Crowe scored 188 in Georgetown against a Windies attack of Marshall, Garner and Michael Holding. Even Richard Hadlee always had a terrible time trying to get his countryman out.
Michael Atherton wrote: "Crowe was one of the most graceful and technically sound batsmen to have played in the modern era. His twin hundreds in the 1994 series against my England side, scored with a knee that Michael Vaughan would be proud of, were amongst the best I witnessed."
And yet the great sadness was that Crowe never felt the love in his own land until he was approaching the end. I heard him speak a couple of years ago in a room in Masterton and people were touched by his courage and decency. Quoting Martin Luther King, Crowe said: "We must live together as brothers or perish as fools."
Martin Crowe was inducted into the ICC Hall of Fame during the Cricket World Cup match between New Zealand and Australia at Eden Park in Auckland on February 28 last year.
Regrettably too many of New Zealand's sporting visionaries are left to perish as fools. Harry Ricketts, teacher, writer and cricket lover, memorably said of Crowe: "He refuses to enrol in the Sir Edmund Hilary School of laconic stoicism." It was his early downfall. And so, as John Morrison observed when Crowe was still a relatively young man; "The public believes he is a prima donna, spoilt and pampered, neurotic".
This was grotesquely unfair, but Crowe spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name. Ricketts calls him now "an uncomfortable hero … He could be portrayed as not a proper Kiwi joker. His strengths and weaknesses are inextricably linked. The fact that he cared so deeply made him great, but unappealing and nakedly self-interested to others."
It was only as he approached death that New Zealand learned to love Crowe. That was partly because Crowe wanted to make peace, but also because we knew how much we were about to lose. Crowe was not just New Zealand's greatest batsman, he should have been one of its great sporting leaders.
In 1992 he took the Beige Brigade to the brink of a World Cup final with truly innovative thinking and wept when his own injury pulled the team up short. Crowe's game 'Cricket Max' was the pioneer of T20 cricket. He mentored Taylor and Martin Guptill and fought until his death to improve standards in the game.
He called for the introduction of yellow and red cards to put an end to boorish behaviour, something that is now being trialled.
In his column for Cricinfo, Crowe observed a year ago: "Australia have reignited their patriotism under Darren Lehmann. The trouble with that is that he is a "boof". This means Australia will play ugly and behave immaturely. And if the other teams are self-destructing then Australia will gladly bully them down and stand gleefully triumphant."
How true that observation proved in the recent series, although it will have given Crowe no pleasure to have been proven right. It might have done in his younger days, but as he put his foot down the pitch for the last time, Crowe just wanted to leave a better world behind, a world in which his personal myth could make New Zealand proud.
We should be proud. Roebuck observed that Crowe had a Messianic streak that could challenge and disturb - but in the end Crowe made peace with himself and with us all. The parting, elegant shot is his.
"International cricket, nation v nation, is about patriotism and a bit of tribalism, but not hate. It does no harm to remind ourselves of why we play the game: for the love of entertaining every fan. We play to satisfy our pride of place, where we live.
"Someone wake me when it's done."
It's done.
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