The discourse presented here examines the evolution of New Zealand cricket, with a particular focus on Kane Williamson, who has recently announced his retirement from international cricket. Our dialogue with special guest Michael Wagener elucidates the remarkable journey of New Zealand cricket, charting its trajectory from a historically underappreciated team to one that has achieved significant accolades on the world stage. A salient point of our discussion is Williamson's profound impact as both a player and a leader, highlighting his remarkable batting prowess and strategic acumen, which have been pivotal in guiding the team to unprecedented heights, including their triumph in the inaugural World Test Championship. Additionally, we delve into the systemic changes within New Zealand cricket that have bolstered its competitiveness, including advancements in coaching methodologies and player development. This episode ultimately underscores the nuanced interplay between individual brilliance and collective effort that defines New Zealand's cricketing ethos.

Hello and welcome to the Last Wicket.

I'm your host Benny.

Thank you for joining us.

And folks, as always, I'm joined by my co host Mike.

Hey Mike.

Hey Benny.

And returning for the first time in five years we have Michael Wagner from New Zealand.

Michael, nice to see you.

It's lovely to be back.

Yeah.

But I'm just curious, just something that's been on my mind recently.

You know, England have had or are still having a fascination with coaches from New Zealand, you know, even before Stephen Fleming, you know, obviously Brendan McCollum.

But they had Jeet and Patel, Tim Saudi, they really seem to admire coaches from New Zealand.

And now with Stephen Fleming being made the coach of the Test team, it seems like the New Zealand, New Zealand ex cricketers are kind of taking control of English cricket.

What do you feel about that?

We were running the place for a while with Ben Stokes as a captain and McCullum.

That's true, that's true.

And I think, I think also the head of the English Players association was a Kiwi and one of the, a couple of the, the executives of the English and the ECB were Kiwis as well.

That we, we certainly, in some ways it makes sense that there's a, there's, there's something in common because we are both island nations, we have similar climates, we, we have a really defined season.

That is not the case so much in the rest of the world.

You know, Australia can play year round pretty much.

South Africa can play year round.

The subcontinent, I mean there are times it's too hot to play but there's, you know, in New Zealand you cannot play in early spring, you cannot play in winter.

It just, it, you know, they, they, they play the odd first class game in early spring and you know, both teams are bowed out for less than 100 because the pitches just, they're too damp.

You just can't do it.

And so you know there's, there's some similarities there that, that we have some climates, similar shaped grounds and so there is some, it's a more natural crossover than some of the other.

Some of the other connections, you know, when we've had, you know, so there's some, there's some sort similarities there, but it's also, you can go over and have a season in England and then come home for the summer, whereas if you're coaching other places, you come home for the winter.

Not quite so exciting.

Yeah.

And I'm curious how Stephen Fleming is going to do.

I know he, he's had experience in, you know, English county cricket, but for the last decade and a half he's been in India.

Well, he's obviously he's, he has coached other, you know, Super Kings franchises across the world, but his major role really over the last decade or the last two decades really is with Chennai Super Kings in India.

And now it's like a hard shift to test cricket and that to most of it in England.

Do you have any thoughts on his elevation to the new.

Being the new coach of England?

I, I think it's a surprising pick because I don't know that there's a huge crossover between IPL coaching and test coaching in terms of what you need to do it.

I mean, look, saying that McCullum, you know, for, for all the criticism that's leveled at McCullum, he took a team that was poor and made them reasonable and that's despite losing their three best players.

They lost their three best players and they improved significantly.

And one of the things that he did do that he hasn't really got enough credit for it is he completely redefined how teams chase big scores.

Before 20, 21, there was something like only 4 or 5% of run cases over 270 were successful, a tiny percentage and was 50, 50 with those in the teams he's coached.

50, 50 In those big run chases.

No other team has, has done that.

And what we've seen is now other teams have, have taken his approach of trying to move the fielders around, trying to attack the bowlers, hit them off their leaks in the fourth innings.

And you're seeing fourth innings chases.

And now a 270 chase used to be almost a lock in that you, that you've won the game.

If you, if you, if a team's chasing 270, they're not going to win.

Now you look at 270, you think they've got a reasonable chance.

This is a reasonable chase.

You're now looking at around 320.

The line has moved where a chase becomes unreasonable to about 323, 30.

And that's happened.

And then suddenly it changed as a strategy has changed, tactics changed and that was really, McCallum was a huge driver of that.

And so while people laugh and joke about basball and you know what, it actually worked in a lot of ways in some things, despite England not having nearly the bowlers that they had in order and bowlers win your test matches, they lo lost their bowlers but they managed to win games through batting.

And that's something that Test history actually hasn't happened very often.

So you can say that the, while the experiment, you know, didn't get them the results they wanting with series wins in India and Australia, that didn't happen.

It did actually work in some ways in terms of it made the team better despite having lower quality players.

And so Fleming perhaps are looking at that and they're saying, well it worked for McCullum.

Fleming's got a better record in the IPL and tactically is probably more astute than, than McCullum.

Perhaps having him come in will, will fix up some of those gaps and maybe the IPL isn't a terrible pathway for Test coach.

Listen, under Stephen Fleming, Chennai Zipper Kings played like a Test team sometimes.

So he might be a more natural fit.

Well, they did.

And, and I mean one of the things that they, they did do is they played sort of attritional cricket a lot more than most IPL teams did.

You know, they tried, they, they often made the conditions hard for the opposition team and then played to their strengths.

And that's a really good thing for right in Test cricket that want to do, It's a little bit boring for fans sometimes, but it's, but no one cares about being bored if you're winning.

That is true.

I, I, I don't know what that feeling is anymore.

It's been a while as a Super Kings fan, but I think it'll be an interesting pair with Joe Rude because I, I can see them kind of gelling together.

But again, too early to say it will be interesting regardless of how it turns out.

But you know, one team that has done pretty well against basball right from the beginning is New Zealand, ironically.

Because didn't they, you know, that series in New Zealand, didn't they secure the, the draw or was it a tie?

Am I misremembering it?

Yeah, the, I mean, yeah, there was the one one the run, one win.

He sort of done all right against England, but I think we're a better team than them so we should do well against England, you know, and the fact is that, that England beat us in a number of tests that we really should have won just through, you know, the besto fireworks or some of their attacking play that, you know, we got them in a position that they shouldn't have won from and they still managed to beat us.

And it was very frustrating as a New Zealand fan watching some of those games where, you know, we got a first innings lead and then put up a, a good score, made them chase 3:30 and they knocked it over with five, only five wickets down.

You think, how, how did this happen?

How did we, how did we lose this game that we should have won?

And that happened a few times that, that they, they totally basballed us.

And I think the other thing that, I think the biggest weakness with McCullum's coaching is that he didn't put enough emphasis on the fielding.

If you look at those tests in Australia, every single one that they lost, they dropped multiple catches.

And in fact, over the course of the Ashes in Australia, England created more chances per run scored than or per run conceded than Australia did.

They just drop so many catches that they gave Australia lots and lots of extra chances and they cashed in the, the batting and bowling is what lost England the Ashes.

What lost England the Ashes was the fielding.

And you know, they're criticized for being overly attacking and, and you know, Australia dug in.

No, they dropped catches.

That's really what happened.

And if you continue to give teams 14 or 15 chances they will score big against you.

I, I have to say one thing I'll disagree a little bit with you, Michael, is I do think, you know, I mean, as exciting as basball was and we as Indian fans felt the same frustrations you did with 370 being chased down multiple times.

So, yeah, I don't even want to remember that.

But, but I think the, the, the reason why I always doubted Basball in terms of, you know, long term effectiveness across conditions was at the end of the day, like we saw in the Ashes.

I believe it was the first Test where they were comfortably ahead.

They were like 100 for 2 in the third innings.

They did not need to do anything fancy.

They, they were playing against Boland, Stark and then a bunch of, you know, newcomers, and they still decided to attack Boland and lost three wickets in a hurry and then lost that Test and then never recovered.

So I think there's like positions like that where it felt like they were taking way more risk than needed.

I completely agree with you that the Chases and even in Pakistan, you know, when they scored, I don't know, some ridiculous 500 runs in a day.

Completely changed the way Test cricket, you know, or our bowlers are looked at.

But they were just so much.

There are so much, so many situations where risks were not needed, but they were just so stuck in their ideology that they kind of gave it away.

Yeah, I think there were situations like that, but I think for everyone, there was.

There was also the situation where they attacked when it wouldn't have normally attacked and it came off.

So, you know, you take the rough of the smooth a little bit, right.

But.

But regardless, McCallum's gone and Fleming's coming in and I think he's going to have a quite different approach.

I think you're going to see England getting a lot more in the face of their opposition.

You know, McCullum was very much where the nice guys were going to play later in his career.

At the start of his career, he was pretty aggressive.

But whereas Fleming was always someone who wanted to make life uncomfortable for the opposition, he would always go out of his way to make people not want to be there and he would find any little angle to attack someone on.

He'd attack their strengths rather than their weaknesses.

So he'd say, you know, we're going to stop you from.

We're going to turn your strength into a weakness.

He was.

He was very good at getting into people's heads as a Test captain and it'll be interesting to see how he goes as a Test coach.

Yeah.

And maybe Joe Root will discover the joys of captaincy under Fleming.

You know, we'll see how that shapes up.

But let's turn our focus fully to New Zealand cricket because, you know, for the longest of times, if not always, New Zealand seems to be the perennial underdogs when it comes to not just their performances, but even just players in terms of stardom.

They're always like, not necessarily.

They don't grab your attention or eyeballs.

At least from a perspective of a non New Zealander, you may feel different, but.

Yeah, let's talk about their performances in Test cricket and Mike, why don't you.

Yeah.

Take over.

No, I think that's.

I think, including the England series.

Now they're at 59 deaths.

So it's really been a very, very positive last decade or 15 years for new Zealand cricket.

Well, I think it's true that the halfway point in terms of our wins was fairly recent, but there was a long time where we were terrible.

And part of that is because there wasn't anyone else that wasn't very good that we got to play against.

You know, there was only five teams playing or six teams playing.

And so you always had to play a top team, whereas now you get to play against Bangladesh or, you know, Ireland or, you know, Zimbabwe, you get the games that aren't quite so difficult, and so the numbers look better, even if the team's not a huge amount better.

You know, in some ways, the introduction of Sri Lanka was one of the best things for New Zealand cricket because we were no longer the whipping boys.

Now someone else got that wrong.

But there was, I mean, there was a real peak for New Zealand in the 80s, so.

And that was really coincided with Richard Hadley.

So seven tests in, in 60 years, less than, you know, roughly one test, one word every 10 years.

Now, when you add in Richard Hadley, things change a little bit because we, he won a lot of tests pretty much on the, on, on the power of just him alone.

But that was really it.

We had Hadley and Crow, an era with them where we won a bunch.

We managed some drawers in amongst that.

You know, it wasn't, it wasn't completely.

We weren't completely getting thrashed every time, but wasn't.

It was really.

There was the Headley and Crow era and then there was the, I guess Fleming, Richardson, Cairns era.

We beat England in England, we had a, we drew a series in Australia, we drew, I think we drew a series in South Africa.

It was a, it was a series where we went really quite well and.

But that fell away pretty quickly again.

And then we had the, the era where we didn't have a coach for a little while, which was.

We had an assistant coach and a captain and it was all sorts of craziness going on in New Zealand cricket for a while when Daniel Vettori was there and, and, and then really what happened was Mike Hessen got picked to coach the team and his first series, I was there on the first series, we went to South Africa and we got destroyed.

I had some issues with security getting in, which was not uncommon because I didn't work for a major organization and they always struggled to figure out if I should be in the press box or not.

And so I got detained by security for about an hour and interrogated before they finally let me into the ground.

And so when I got in, New Zealand were eight without loss, and 40 runs later we were all out.

So I got to see 10 wickets for 40 runs and then South Africa scored 500 odd, then bowled us out for 55 or something.

It was.

It was one of those performances.

I then went to the second Test and that was also over in two days.

And I got to go on safari in Port Elizabeth because there was.

There was nothing else to do.

The cricket was all done.

So it was not a total loss.

Yeah, it's not a total loss.

Yeah, I got to go.

Yeah, I got to go and see some elephants.

It was great.

But.

But it was not much on the cricketing to end.

Mike Hesson was his first tour in charge.

There was a lot of internal ructions where there were basically two camps within New Zealand cricket and Mike Hessen was very much in one of them.

And the other one was the Ross Taylor McGoldrick camp.

So you had a couple of managers that.

That looked after a bunch of the players.

And there was a lot of political infighting behind the scenes.

And the decision to drop Ross Taylor as co as cap was leaked to the media before, while the team was in the air, the media manager was in the air.

So there was no one to respond to it.

And there was all of this drama.

It dominated the airwaves in a way that cricket hardly does in New Zealand.

Normally, it's rugby that takes the media like that, but there was a lot of people that were very upset about the Hess and McCollum combination.

And then the first two are going so badly, didn't help matters.

But McCullen and Hessen sat down and thought, what are we doing here?

We're trying to play like Australia.

Why don't we try to play like New Zealand?

And that was really the decision they had.

Why don't we try to be ourselves rather than trying to be someone else?

And so they made some decisions about how they do the game, but one of the things was they wanted to actually have fun when they played.

A lot of the fielding drills, when I got along to watch the teams fielding, they were all players getting shouted at for not doing Things right?

And what Mike Hessen did is he brought a bunch of fun games.

They were challenging each other to try and everything was competitive.

They were always trying to beat each other and they were always trying to win.

And they were celebrating success rather than punishing failure.

Which is an interesting switch because in cricket you actually have a lot of failures.

If you're bowling, you've got four or five.

If you have a day where you get five successes, that's a great day.

Most of the time, most of the deliveries you bowl don't get the outcome you're after.

And when you're betting, most of the time you score less than Your average about 60% of the time, 70% of the time, you score less than your average.

So you fail a lot more than you succeed.

So moving from a punishing failure into a rewarding success mentality had a huge impact on the morale of the team.

And you saw it at the trainings, instead of the players having their heads down and trudging off afterwards, they were all enjoying each other.

They're high fiving.

There was just a change in the atmosphere and that they then went to the UAE and beat Pakistan in uae.

I think only the second team to do that, to beat Pakistan and uae.

They were formidable there and then went on to go on a run where they actually became quite a good team for a while.

And part of that was the rise of Kane Williamson.

Part of it was the fact you had Bolt, Southey and a little bit after that, Neil Wagner coming through.

First of all, it was Chris Martin doing that job, but then Neil Wagner took over.

And the other thing that really made a big difference in that team, a guy that doesn't get a lot of credit, but it was Colin deGrom.

When he came in, what he did is he added an extra bowling option that meant that you didn't have to give Neil Wagner the new ball, because Neil Wagner bowled the ball into the pitch, damaged the ball and admitted the Bolton south, he couldn't get any swing.

So the rule was that that once deGrom came in, there was no more Neil Wagner.

For the first 40 overs.

He wasn't allowed to touch the ball until it was already not doing anything for South.

And then he got the ball after that and.

And that worked really well for him because the softer, older ball started to play tricks and as he banged it in, some of them went up, some of them went low, some of them went left, some of them went right.

Often he didn't know what they were going to do.

So the batsman had no chance of knowing what was going to happen.

And his, his ability to continue delivering those long spells with a softball misbehaving meant that New Zealand became a threat for the full 80 overs.

And so De Gram came coming in and the other thing he would do is he had score ridiculously quickly, near the death, you know, the as, as the bowlers were getting tired, suddenly Degr was coming in and hitting.

I mean, his test strike rate I think is something like 78, you know, and, and, and it just, things like that.

BJ Watling was the other one who did the opposite.

He came, but it just, and just occupied the end and tied the batsman out the bo.

And then you'd have the bowlers come in and try and smack the ball.

And it worked.

There was this thing where it was celebrating everyone's successes and everyone's strengths and people were enjoying doing their roles.

And then we've transitioned out of those, those top five players.

But you know, the, the new guys have come in, have probably, if anything, done better, you know.

Absolutely.

And, and I mean, you mentioned Hadley and Crow, of course, you know, the greats.

I think, to your point, like, obviously there were quality players that New Zealand always had likes of Nathan as Stephen Fleming himself, Dan Vittori.

But I think all the names you just mentioned, or they were probably top quality, but at the same time they all came together.

So it wasn't a couple of really solid players with a number of role players or support players.

Suddenly it was five, six players who had, who were very, very good at what they do and they sort of peaked at the same time.

Yeah, like that was, that was a big part of it.

You had, you had, I guess the, you had a lot of star stars all coming together at the same time, whereas we, you know, and we had that a little bit in the 80s that you had, you had sort of five or six good players together.

Before that you'd had the odd guy.

You had J.R. reed.

I mean, there's a, I, I, he's a guy that doesn't get a lot of love because he did a lot of what he did when no one was watching.

But you know, there was a famous story about a game where he was hitting South Africa's all over the park and a young South African offspring.

It was his first game.

He said to the captain, what do I do here?

He's just smacking everything.

And he said just keep pitching it up and pray to God that he misses one.

And the young bowler said, I think God's a bit busy to answer that.

Looks like he's batting right now.

Jre was just a magnificent player.

Bold, fast and spin, great fielder, some ways the right handed version of Sobers and, and he was magnificent.

But he didn't have anyone with him, you know, like he was the lone star in that team.

Jack Cowie, probably the best bowler in the world.

But you know when he was bowling he averaged 25 and the guys at the other end averaged 68.

You know, so like he had no support and suddenly we're getting support.

You've got, you know, Bolton south opening up the bowling and you know you're going to make an argument that neither of them would make New Zealand's all time best team.

But as a combination they, they were unmatched.

And then you had, you know, you didn't have the pressure ease because then you had, well first of all Chris Martin and Doug Bracewell and then later on Kyle Jameson and Col de Gr come and you always had pressure because we had multiple players that were playing at that high level.

The same with the batting, you know, you had Latham and whoever happened to be opening with them at that time.

First of all it was Jeep Reval and then.

But the guys opening with them tended to be able to hang around even if they didn't score many run like Jeep Raal I think has seen.

He, he, there was some record like he got got to lunch more than any, at a higher percentage than more than any other opener playing at at the time he was playing in terms of he saw off the new ball, got to lunch, they bought on the spinners and he got out because that's what he did.

Second you put it off.

Second you put a spin bowler on cheap reel, got out.

But you know, that was what he did is he saw off the new ball.

And so then it created room for the guys like Ross Taylor and Henry Nichols that perhaps didn have such a great technique against the new ball, were able to dominate against the older ball.

And so you know, guys like that, those sort of role players who did their role very well came in with the star players, you know, and, and a big part of that as well is that New Zealand went to having a full double round of the Plunket Shield for a number of years.

So they'd gone from playing four or five first class matches a season to play 10.

And so the standard at domestic cricket improved.

There was a real move to improve the pitches of domestic cricket.

And so New Zealand cricket spent a lot of money training the groundsman and doing that made a big difference to how the quality of players coming through.

I was going to say that obviously you've touched on the leadership, Both Mike Hesson, McCallum, his leadership and of course coming together of all these talents.

But at the end of the day, these talents balance come through when there's work at the grassroots level.

So I'm glad you mentioned the fact that, you know, domestic structure was changed.

I think in India story it's a similar case where BCCI started spending a lot more money on curators and started preparing a lot more bowling friendly wickets.

And suddenly we've seen a rise of, you know, fast bowlers.

In India that was pretty much a rare quantity.

We would have one good fast bowler in every team and now we have three four who are, you know, maybe not right now, but, you know, in the recent past we've had three four who are really, really good.

And they're all, you know, Mohammed Shami, Shant Sharma, Jaspreet Bumra, of course, they were all like right there and thereabouts.

So it really does take, you know, a grassroots level change to eventually bring this.

Of course it takes leadership and, you know, some luck that all of this aligns.

But that grassroots piece is often missed and I'm glad you highlighted that aspect as well.

Yeah, look, I think it's easy to ignore that, how important that grassroots level is and the development pathways.

One thing New Zealand cricket are working on at the moment, New Zealand's quite diverse in terms of our population and our cricket team isn't so much.

You look at our cricket team, they are pkeh, white, European, New Zealanders, South African immigrants and Indians.

That's pretty much who our team is made up of, you know, and that's not a flare of a fair reflection of New Zealand society.

So one of the things with they were using Ross Taylor a lot to try and get cricket into the Polynesian communities because it's about a quarter of New Zealand's population of Maori or Polynesian, maybe not quite that much.

And it's about that in Auckland, a little bit less than the rest of the country.

And yet we've seen Ross Taylor, Murphy Sewer, and that's about it in terms of Pacifica cricket players.

So there's, we've got East Asian, a huge proportion of our population, maybe 10% of the population are from East Asia.

And we've seen Mark Chapman and that who's, you know, that's, that's it as far as our East Asia.

Now we're seeing Max Chu is coming through, who's a wonderful player, plays for Otago and you know, you see him coming through and there's, there's a few others starting to.

East Asian players starting to turn up in club cricket, which is one wonderful seeing that, that diversity.

So there's been a real push to try and get more inclusive and one of the things that we have discovered that we didn't really know is that there's this incredible talent in Maori fast bowlers.

So the, the indigenous people, New Zealand, we, we.

For years there was no Maoris play for New Zealand.

Adam Prairie was the first one to ever play for New Zealand.

But since then Shane Bond, Kyle Mills, Trent Bolt, Doug Bracewell, Ben Wheeler, there's a few others Ben Stokes is moulding as well.

But now we've sort of unearthed this pipeline of quality fast polars that we didn't know existed in our country.

And that's been really interesting to see how that's developing.

And there's a, there's a real effort to try and develop the game in some of those communities that haven't really taken to cricket in the past.

So that it's, there's a, there's some efforts going on by New Zealand cricket to try and secure the future pipeline and that's quite encouraging.

How much competition do you think cricket has in New Zealand from rugby for instance, which I would assume is the biggest sport in, in the country?

Yeah, so.

So rugby is number one and probably number two is rugby league, which is a similar sort of sport.

Those two are the most popular sports in terms of television watching.

The.

The next one is quite interesting is sailing because we win stuff in sailing and the America's cup, we've won it multiple times.

That it's nice when you, when you're really good at something, people like watching it.

So.

And, and it tends to be on free to air as well, which also helps.

So you.

That becomes a major focus of the country is when there's a big sailing event on.

But cricket is, is firmly our summer team sport that people watch and one of the things that happened that was, has been quite good for cricket is there was a second pay TV provider startup and they went under and they had the rights to the cricket and they sold it for, I think for a dollar to one of The Free to Wear television networks.

And, and so we've had cricket on Free to Air and it has really boosted the ratings because people have been going up and it's interesting talking to one of my workmates who's Maori, he said, I've never really watched cricket before but I've started watching now every day watch it, watch the, the T20 after, after the news, you know, and every night he's got the, the cricket on, is watching it and, and he's now talking to me about what's going on in the game and that's, you know, getting people watching is a really important step to it.

So I, I don't know what's going to happen.

They're talking about trying to make sure that there's still cricket on Free to Wear in New Zealand because it's been so big for the game having that on where rugby is being closeted away in the, you know, you've got to pay a lot of money to be able to watch the rugby and, and it's hurting.

Rugby is hurting a little bit because of it, whereas cricket seems to be doing quite well.

And again, it's also nice that we're winning.

You know, it gets a bit, a bit depressing.

I drove down to Napier, eight hour drive to watch a game and watch New Zealand get beaten by Zimbabwe.

They got to drive all the way back after watching that.

It doesn't, it doesn't and make you want to go and watch again when you're losing.

Right.

Games regularly.

But now once you start winning it becomes a lot more enjoyable to go and, and see the team and follow it.

Yeah.

And New Zealand does seem to have, you know, a much more, you just seem to have a much more professional setup, professional players.

The infrastructure seems to be just on point.

So I think, you know, definitely New Zealand cricket seems to have changed a lot in the last 30 years based on what you're saying now.

I did see something else in the news about, you know, I think it is related to T20 franchises or something similar to a T20 competition that is causing some sort of controversy.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah.

So this is the really interesting thing with this is a lot of it is happening behind closed doors and so we're only hearing things that are leaked or snippets that are coming out.

Every now and then there'll be a little bit more news.

We go, oh, what's that about?

You know, so there's New Zealand cricket are looking at bringing in a franchise league like the rest of the world have, whereas before, until recently we'd only had a domestic T20.

And so there's a thing called the NZ20 and there's, there's converse conversations happening behind the scenes at the moment about how that's going to work and what it's going to look like.

The Super Smash has not been as successful the last few years as it had been.

And so the idea is how do we make that become more successful?

How do we try and drive some revenue and also drive some viewership from that?

And so they're looking at the franchise model.

There's also talk about getting a couple of teams into the big bash and that would be that perhaps we, we fold into the Australian competition, which I think would be a mistake from both New Zealand and Australia to look to let that happen.

While it's been successful in other sports.

There's, there's New Zealand teams play in the Australian rugby league and basketball and football, there's a combined rugby union and netball competitions as well.

So there's, there's, there is some crossover.

But the first team that actually tried it was New Zealand, got accepted into the Australian One Day cup in the 70s and that was when they were, that was when they were still refusing to play us because they didn't think we were worthy, they didn't believe we deserved test data, so they refused to play us right up until the 70s.

So they, they let us play at state level and we went in and we thrashed everyone for three seasons.

We lost one match and, and then they stopped inviting us back because it got a bit embarrassing.

And then we got to play them at international level again.

Yeah, finally.

But the quality of cricket, New Zealand is much higher right now.

And if we were to have our internationals playing in two BBL teams, I think we would, they would end up being first and second quite comfortably and that would be a very difficult thing for the competition if that ended up happening.

So I think the BBL wouldn't want to do it.

But the other thing wouldn't be so good for New Zealand because that means that instead of having 120 professional players, we've now got 30, 25, you know, 30.

And you know, when you narrow down the pathway like that, you, you create fewer opportunities for, for good young players to come through.

So I think there's, I think that would be a potentially a bad move for both teams unless it was done really well.

Perhaps if, if they were to expand that have three teams from New Zealand, seven teams from Australia or, or something like that.

Or.

Yeah.

11, Nine teams from Australia, three teams from New Zealand.

And have all teams allowed to pick New Zealanders or Australians?

Is, is what the, the soccer and rugby league teams have done that New Zealanders and Australians, both players, home players.

And that has worked there.

But it's interesting to see how it would go with cricket.

I think, I think the franchise model is probably the best one.

Or we just say, look, we just don't need to go down that path.

We just continued as a development run.

International cricket is where we make our money.

But the risk of ICC payouts dropping makes it very, very dangerous to just trust that model.

Right.

And I think that plays quite a lot into the fact that Bolt, for example, Trend Bolt did not accept a central contract a couple of years ago.

And so those things along with all the franchise around the world are, are creating a weird opportunity.

Where is it worth ignoring and just continuing on and just working on the national team or going the franchise model?

It's really not an easy answer, but I do want to go back to some of the bowlers that you mentioned.

Like you talked about Trent Bolt, you talked about Tim Saudi, Neil Wagner, I didn't mention a fourth one here, but Matt Henry has to be up there.

The reason I didn't mention him because he's still playing.

But where do you rate these fast bowlers?

Obviously New Zealand has always had really good pacers and seam bowlers as well.

So thoughts on where they, where they were, you know, where they land in terms of legacy of New Zealand cricket?

Yeah, look, I, I think it's a, it's, it's interesting because one of the things that, that they did do really well is they played roles, you know, that, yeah, the Bolt bowled downwind, Southey bowled into the wind.

Depending on.

Unless it was a crosswind.

And then they both Bolt some swung the right way.

The Wagner took the old ball, they got really good at their roles, whereas Richard Hadley took the new ball, took the old ball, took the one in the middle.

You know, he basically, if he had legs, he bowled and you know, so you look at that and I mean Jack Cowie likewise that, you know, he had no one with him.

So he just bowled until he couldn't bow anymore and then, then we had a rest and then came back and bowed until he couldn't bow anymore.

You know, so how do you compare those two?

The advantage that, that, you know, Bolton Southey had as well is they had Neil Wagner and Chris Martin playing with them.

Who gave them big rests, you know, and having guys that give you fast bowlers a decent rest makes a huge difference for your fast bowlers.

I got a. I had a really fascinating chat with former Auckland coach Tony Sale, and I said, you know, what was the big.

Because they won everything when he was coaching.

I said, what was the big reason for that?

He said, oh, Tom mechanic, Tom McCanning, you know, he wasn't really a massive star.

He said, no, he could bowl 30 overs a day of pressure.

And because he'd bowl 30 overs a day of creating pressure, it meant that, that Chris Drum and Andre Adams got a rest and they could come.

They were always bowling fresh.

That's why they averaged 18 and 20 for me, because they were bowling fresh the whole time.

You don't realize some of that stuff that, that, that the support players make a difference on the guys that are, that are bowling, you know, and, and so it's hard to rate where they, where they would go with others.

You know, do you really.

Could you.

You couldn't put either south or Bolt ahead of Shane Bond, and you couldn't put either of them ahead of Richard Hadley.

And so now you're going, well, would either of them be the third change, Boulder, or would you go with Neil Wagner for that role?

Because he's better with the oddball.

So it really comes down to combinations and that's something.

But what they had was a wonderful combination.

Bolton, Southey together were just magnificent because, you know, if you were good against the ball coming into you, then south, you would move it away.

If you were good with it going away, Bolt would move it in.

They were attacking different weaknesses and that was, that was wonderful.

Right?

The complementary nature of them, you know, made it a constant test.

Like it was just not, you know, play one phase out, played out the new ball.

There's always something new coming.

And I think the piece that I'll always remember about Neil Wagner, of course, he's always been remembered for eight over spells, you know, bowling right until his toe is broken and whatnot.

But, but I think that the piece that I always remember is cramping up Steve Smith.

He was just scoring tons and tons of runs.

And then he came to New Zealand and.

Or I don't remember if New Zealand went to Australia and Neil Wagner just found a way to, you know, attack his weakness and, you know, break him down and open up that middle order.

So I think it was, it was little Bits of that as well.

I think again, it goes to also, just strategy, team wise, the work that did in terms of identifying a weakness that a particular opposition had, even if it was somebody, a top player like Steve Smith.

So I think they did really well in that.

And then of course, the likes of Wagner, Bolt, Saudi, executed really, really well.

Yeah, the other one, the other person who I'd like to give some credit to, who doesn't get enough recognition for what he did in terms of changing the way New Zealand coached cricket was Craig McMillan.

Craig McMillan, who, when what he did is he decided that the players at international level, they have a technique already that's got them to a national level.

So I'm not going to tinker with their techniques.

So as a batting coach, he just focused on decision making.

So what he did is he, he worked on the players, on what shot are you going to play.

And they did lots of watching videos, figuring out where the field was, what's the best shot for you to play in this situation.

And they worked.

That was what his coaching was.

It was all about what's the best shot for the what.

What are the deliveries the bowlers are bowling to you?

What's the best shot you can already play to play into that situation.

Now let's practice doing that.

Quite an interesting approach to coaching, but it made a significant difference to the way that New Zealand scored runs.

We, we went from a team that was regularly getting bowled out for.

Yeah, 320 was a good score before Craig McMillan came in.

And then we were regularly getting 370, 380.

That 50 runs difference is often the difference between winning and losing a game in your first innings.

You know, 320, you don't win many games.

370, You don't lose many.

And so it was, it's, it's quite a big difference that, that he made bringing, coming in and just working on those little things.

And you saw some of the players put some shots away.

Ross Taylor, you know, he put away his cover drive and he played a beautiful cover drive.

Beautiful.

But.

And he got out to it all the time.

And he started playing the slog sweep a lot more, which everyone criticized.

But he hardly even got out playing a slog sweep.

He scored a lot of runs from it.

He looked great playing the COVID drive and got out all the time.

And so, you know, he stopped playing that cover drive, the beautiful cover drive he had.

He stopped playing it because he just wasn't many situations where that was the right shot to play with the Risk versus reward, no matter how beautifully he could play it.

And he went to the far more ugly slog sweep, but it was more effective, you know, and there was some things like that that they worked on.

Maybe not looking at the.

The traditionally you'd say, well, you should be playing a cover drive, not a slog sweep.

But actually it worked the other way for him.

And you've seen that a little bit in Gary's steady.

And with that tour of India, Daryl Mitchell played against the spin constantly.

So you had to off spin his bike.

He was bowling, he was playing reverse sweeps.

Now that's.

That.

That's a.

That's a terrible idea.

You should never do that.

You know, if you play reverse rate the linksman, you don't play reverse sweep to offspring.

But he did the opposite because that's what worked for him.

He'd found that for him, hitting against the spin was better than hitting with it, and so he did that.

But I criticized him on Twitter and then watched him just score truckloads of runs by hitting against the spin, thought, well, it might be traditionally a bad idea, but it works.

It's working really well for him.

And they've obviously decided this is what works for him.

And that sort of thing, working with the strengths of the players has been.

Has been a real.

A real thing that New Zealand's done.

Well.

Now.

One thing that always strikes me when I think about the New Zealand team, you know, be their batting, bowling, coaching, or just general setup, is clinical.

They're just very clinical in their approach to the game, very professional.

In fact, when I look at other teams right now, you know, even a team like Australia or England, there are players that you would consider, for lack of a better term, mercurial or colorful personality.

Right.

Whereas when I look at the New Zealand team, you know, they might as well be people working in a corporate setup.

They turn up, they do what they're expected to do.

They're very clinical about it.

And then there's no big fanfare.

There's no, you know, reams of media coverage.

They just go about their business and they do it.

And for me personally, having followed New Zealand, you know, over the last few decades, it might be a bit uncharitable.

But I always think them as a boring team because they just don't grab the attention.

There's only like a few players over the course of the last two decades for me that have really captured, you know, my attention from New Zealand.

But what is your take on that?

Is that like a cultural thing?

Like, is That a Kiwi thing or is that just how New Zealand cricket is?

Just being very intentional about how they want to play the game?

I think there's three parts to it.

Part of it is cultural that New Zealand has a really low power difference where they talk about the, the respect people give to people in positions of power.

New Zealand is the lowest of any country in the world.

So you will never address someone as sir or you know, like, like calling someone by Mr. And their surname.

That just doesn't happen in New Zealand.

You know, the, if, if you're getting on, if the Prime Minister was going to take a bus, you'd have to queue up like everyone else.

That's.

We're a very egalitarian society.

And so a downside of that is we're not very good at honoring success.

The upside of that is that we, that we treat people evenly no matter where they're at.

But it means that we don't celebrate success the same way that other countries do.

And that can.

There's certainly a downside of that, but it does mean that the players don't tend to blow their own trumpets as much because you get pulled down for doing that.

New Zealand, that is very much a very unacceptable thing to do.

So you don't see people celebrating themselves like the way the Australians do.

You know that that's.

And in fact most of the players that do that tend to be South African born players who've got a little bit more of that, that that sort of thing is in their culture.

So that's one thing.

Secondly, there's a real strong team ethos and a part of that I think because New Zealanders all grow up playing team sports.

You know, I think myself and I was terrible at sports.

I played in six different team sports, I think growing up, maybe seven, you know, like.

And that's just what you do.

You learn how to play as playing teams.

And that's, that's a huge part of our culture is doing that.

And even individual sports tend to have a bit of a team focus.

You talk about running teams, you don't sprint in a team.

But they talk about it as, that they work together, they train together, all of that sort of thing.

So team is a big part of New Zealand.

So there's very much doing your role for the team is valued highly here.

And that's true across the all sports.

You know, the, the, the, the captain in the rugby team is often the player who does the stuff that no one notices.

It's not the guy that it's not always the guy that scores all the tries.

You know, that's.

And, and then likewise, the third thing is that New Zealand cricket have had very good media management and security personnel who managed to keep any of the bad stuff out of the press.

There have been, there have been stuff that's happened.

There have certainly been incidents that have not been reported or have, you know, the, the stuff that's, that's gone on I've managed to keep quiet.

So there's, that's, that's also part of the, you know, when, when New Zealand cricketers make mistakes.

It's not on the, it's not on the tabloids like it is when an English player or an Australian player makes a mistake.

That is pretty.

So I think England and India could use some help on that front.

I mean, in fact, I remember when that whole captaincy saga involving Ross Taylor and Brendan McCollum was happening, that was the closest I could think of when New Zealand cricket just seemed to be, not necessarily in disarray, but there just seemed to be kind of conflicting camps.

And you know, he said, you know, all that stuff.

So, yeah, I'm just impressed by the overall control over the narrative that New Zealand seems to have.

That's.

There's been that pain happening behind the scenes.

It's not, it hasn't completely gone away.

But the, what did happen is the Hism camp very much won, you know, the Hessen Bacal and Camp One.

And so the other camp has, you know, disappeared off a little bit, you know, and, but you saw it in the match fixing accusations.

You know, Cairns was very much in the McGoldrick camp.

McCullum was very much in the Hessen camp.

And so those allegations, the point they're pointing at different players.

There was more mention of some players than there was of others.

And that was in part due to which camp they were in.

So, you know, you, I know one of the players who came home from the ICL where he hadn't been paid by the, the teams came home and bought a house in a flash suburb with cash.

So if he hadn't been paid, somehow that money got to him.

There is, you know, at a house in a flash suburb in Auckland is not cheap.

You're looking millions of dollars.

So, so there was certainly some skullduggery going on.

But, but again, it managed to, you know, while there was the, the Obvious Cairns, Modi McCullum sort of thing that happened, a lot of New Zealand cricket managed to keep itself very quiet and very out of the road and let that Happen over to the side and they kept out of it.

Which was, again, very good media management to not make it a New Zealand cricket issue.

Getting back to the cricket, I mean, that's, that's really good insight, but I do want to, like, talk about two, Two more things actually related to the cricket.

One is, of course, we've not touched on Ken Williamson too much, so we've talked about him a little bit, but he was obviously the leader that led them to the World Test Championship.

Incredible batter, of course, as he was as he announced his retirement after that first Test, my first thought was, man, if there was a deserving guy to be in the 10,000 Test club, that was him.

And he fell short by 500 runs.

So, yeah, take us, take us away with your thoughts, Michael, on Kane Williamson, the batter and the leader.

Yeah, as a stats guy, I'm really sad that Kane Williamson didn't make it to 10,000 because it sort of, you know, it felt like he could have got there fairly quickly, you know, like he could have been almost there by now.

But, you know, he decided that he wasn't operating, playing at the level he wanted to play it and wasn't that interested in, in getting back there.

I think, you know, that the amount of work required to get there, he was just, he was over it, but he was a phenomenal batsman.

One thing that people miss when they look at Kane Williamson is that the role of number three is with the, with the introduction of wobble.

See, you know, since that's, that's come in, batting in the top order has got very, very difficult.

Batting get some new balls, got very hard.

And Kane Williamson was coming in often on green pitches against a new ball regularly.

And yet his numbers in New Zealand are extraordinary, you know, and part of that was that he cashed in the fourth innings when he got a fourth innings chase.

I think it's four times that he had unbeaten century to win a Test.

And there's only been like 12 in the history of tears cricket.

Four of them are by Kane Williamson.

You know, he's.

His, his ability at batting under pressure like that was, Was extraordinary.

And that World cup against Australia, the World cup match against Australia where he was batting with the tail, hit the ball into the stands to win the match, you know, just that and, and just acting nonchalantly as if it was nothing, because he had the ability to just act as if there was no pressure, you know, and I'm sure he was, there was some pressure there, but he just was able to handle it all of the little details that he went to in his preparation, like one story that you, you may or may not have heard, was that before his first tour of India, where he scored the 100 on debut, he realized that he needed to be really good at watching the ball in the air, watching the spit, and predicting what it was going to do before it hit the pitch.

So he joined a table tennis club and didn't play table tennis.

He joined the club and sat there and watched the table tennis players hitting the ball to him and trying to figure out which way he was going to spin because they spin the ball so much in the air.

And he has practiced watching the ball, the table tennis ball, spinning in the air.

Now, that's a level of detail that, that not many players go to.

He.

The other thing that he learned is to dry a pitch out.

He used kitty litter.

And so he got a.

He had a pitch that they rolled kitty litter into.

So the ball jagged off the pitch because it was rough and dry.

And he got the spinners.

Over the winter, they put up a marquee.

He got spinners to bolt him on this kitty letter so the ball would turn sharply.

And so he could practice dealing with the ball doing things that he wasn't prepared for so that he could play really late.

He developed a technique for playing the wobble scene.

And you'll notice it if you watch some of it.

He played inside the ball with soft heads until he saw a ball and he knew what it was doing.

So if he, if there was a wobble seam delivery, he played inside the line with soft heads.

He got a lot of outside edges because of that.

Because instead of playing the line of ball, he played inside it.

But it meant if the ball jagged in, it hit, it hit his bat.

If it jagged out, it missed his bat and missed the stumps.

So he'd cover up the off stump.

Playing slightly inside the line.

That bowl of four stump, it just went past him.

Or if he hit the edge because he had such soft hands, would go down the ground.

And often he would go through the slips before the amount of times that he would play a ball through second slip for four.

That was a perfectly good delivery.

And he just managed to.

It was that sort of little subtle shifts in his technique.

Instead of playing the lines, we'll play inside the line so that if there was a hard edge, he was using soft hands.

He, he had little things like that that he did.

The other thing you'd watch at the start of his career, he would just score regularly.

You know, he Would score, you know, every third or fourth ball, he'd score runs.

Later on his career, he would decide this is a time to survive or this is the time to.

To, to attack.

And he would really.

He would go sometimes 20, 30 balls without scoring a run and then score four boundaries in a row, like, figure out what this bowler is going to do.

Bang, bang, bang, score a bunch of boundaries, hit a bunch of.

A bunch of deliveries into the, you know, score off, say, 15 deliveries in a row and then go another 30 balls without scoring anything.

And he was just, all right, this bowler's got, is in rhythm.

We'll let it.

We'll just face him, we'll just see him off, wait until he's getting tired, and then I will score a lot of runs off him really quickly and then I'll go back to the fence squad.

So he developed that sort of thing to his game that particularly you notice for.

There was a period where he didn't get dismissed.

It was something like 17 tests where he didn't get dismissed over once he got.

Once he scored 20 until he scored 150.

There wasn't a single dismissal between 20 and 150 because once he was in, he wasn't going to miss out.

And so there was a period where that was.

He was just extraordinary.

And then the bowlers caught up.

His eye started to go.

You know, his.

One of the skills he had was how closely he could watch the ball.

So he'd talk about.

He knew if the ball was an in swing or an outswing because he'd be able to see which way the seat was pointing as it was coming down the pitch like.

And when he was watching the, the spinners, he would watch which direction the ball was spinning.

That's how he knew what it was going to do.

Like, he's not, he's not needing to see what they're doing in the hand.

He just watches it in the air and reacts accordingly.

Not many players have got an eye good enough to do that, you know, so there was an incredible natural ability, but there was also this drive to be better and to keep improving.

And yeah, he was sort of, that the, the top point one percent of natural ability, but he was also the top zero point one percent in, in application and, you know, and work ethic.

And that's why we ended up being such an extraordinary player is not because he was the most talented, he was very talented, but because he also then combined that with an incredible work ethic.

And it's a real pity that he didn't get to play more three and four test series because the few times he got to play in the third or fourth Test he averaged something like 75 in Tests.

After the second Test because he had a chance to work out the bowlers, come up with a decent strategy.

It's a lack of the drawer a little bit the first one because he doesn't know what their plans is.

But by the third test he'd figured out what they were going to do and he was and, and he was now reactive.

He never got a chance to do that much because New Zealand played too many two test series.

But even with that he went through a period of, I think it was 11 series in a row where he hit at least one century and those were two Test series.

The only guy that's done more than that was Don Bradman that's had more series in a row with the, with at least one century.

And there's a lot of guys that have played four and five test series that would have one where they missed one.

Kate Williamson just was consistently if, you know, if he got a start, he cashed it and he'd get at least one start.

It's, it's fascinating.

I mean the things that you mentioned are not things that we haven't heard before.

Like the fact that, you know, using kitty litter to make the pitches spin like Sachin10 Ulgar did that in India of course in a different manner.

But yes, practiced with spinning pitches for preparation for Shane Warren.

But the fact that fascinates me is the whole table tennis incident because not only is it a very unconventional way to prepare, but also he was really young at the time.

If I remember right, he debuted right around 18, so 2 or 19 maybe.

So to have that level of awareness at that age, that is just incredible maturity.

And you know, it kind of shows why he's had this long career that he's had.

Yeah, well, it was interesting.

There was the, there's a schoolboy competition every year with the top team from the six regions get together and play in a, in a week long competition and he was with Tauranga Boys, I believe he's Tauronga Boys where, where they had, you know, quite a good group of players.

They had.

I think Daniel Flynn was playing for them as well and a couple of.

And he scored a century five games they played.

But he wasn't the top run scorer in that competition because for playing for Christchurch Boys High was Corey Anderson who also scored a century in every game.

But the difference was Kate Williamson scored a century by Pushing ones and twos and hitting the ball along the ground and, and Cory Anderson has hit his, his century by hitting the ball into the pavilion regularly or onto the thing and getting stuck in the trees outside the boundary.

You know, he wasn't necessarily the most naturally gifted, but he had that X factor that he thought that he was prepared to keep pushing his game.

And you know, Martin Crow talked about that that was what made Kane Williamson great, was not just that he had the natural ability, but that he was so hungry for runs that he would keep pushing himself to become better.

Usually when a player of his caliber, you know, leaves the, the team, you know, you imagine like someone like Joe Root leaving England or retiring and Virat Kohli being done with the game.

They leave a big hole in the team as far as, be it their presence, their impact on their teammates, performances, all of that.

Do you see something like that with New Zealand?

Like how badly do you think, you know, Kane Williamson's departure essentially affects New Zealand cricket?

Well, well, in some ways it's been a gradual departure because he had so many injury issues and so we'd played a number of series without him, you know, and so that means it's not going to leave as big a hole as say, Richard Hadley's departure did or Martin Crow's departure.

Crow was similar in terms of.

He, you know, he only played about a third of the games in the last couple of years and average in the 20s.

And then because his knees just had given up, you know, and he was no longer able to play at the level he'd be playing.

And Ken Williamson was a little bit similar in terms of.

Because he'd be.

He'd gone from being super consistent to being getting out low scores and then getting big scores.

It meant that there was already.

He'd already been gone missing from a number of games in series and he'd been.

And he'd got, he'd been injured out of a few series, so we'd actually already learned how to play without him.

We were already.

The cable, the, the post Williamson era, the transition's been pretty pretty smooth.

And part of that's because of the rise of Daryl Mitchell and you know, the fact Tom Latham is still there, David Conway is still there, Henry Nichols has stepped up, you know, and, and Russian Ravindra, who's certainly a very exciting talent.

You know, in some ways our batting Lineup without him is not that much weaker than it was when he was there because, you know, he'd become very much a.

A zero, a hero player.

And when he was, when he was good, he was really, really good.

But, you know, his, his skills had started waning near the end of his, near the end of his career.

So in some ways I think the transition's been easier because it had already happened before he, before he'd retired.

That was of course one of the three, or rather four if I include the World Test championship finals they reached in the last decade to ODI finals, that T20 World cup and then of course the win at the wtc.

And a lot of teams were surprised, a lot of fans were surprised about seeing New Zealand in Dubai in a World Cup T20 World cup final.

You know, they expected other teams to be there.

England in particular was expected to be.

But what was super interesting about that is they, they talked about how the New Zealand team got there a week or so in advance and they prepared in 45 degrees Celsius heat, you know, in the afternoon, and they were doing a bunch of hydration tests.

So every player was tested and they went through all those, you know, clinical things, things which probably give you that 0.1% piece that Michael was mentioning.

The, the fact that Benny was calling, you know, New Zealand very clinical, that I.

Examples which really made New Zealand take that step extra, which, you know, other teams may not have done, and really became a big reason why, I don't want to say they overachieved, but they achieved so much in the last decade.

I think that that really always stands out with me.

And I think all the examples you just gave about Ken Williamson sort of aligned well with that.

Yeah, that, that, that 1 percenters, those little things.

One of the things that New Zealand did that that's really helped was they got in Chris Donaldson, who's a Olympic sprinter, you know, he.

I think he, he ran something like 10.1 for 100 meters.

Really, really quick runner, 200 as well, was, you know, 22nd to 200 runner.

And he got him with very little background to cricket.

They brought him in to work on the running, running between wickets and fielding and fitness.

And he's still with the team like 12 years, 13 years later.

And he they work.

They've got nutritionists.

They actually got an Olympic throwing coach as well for like shot put, discus.

They got him in to work with some of the players.

Locky Ferguson probably added 10km an hour to his bowling by getting the, the, the way that they get the shoulder through for the discus and the shot and the javelin.

They got him, they got him doing that.

And a whole lot of the weights that they do specifically designed for, for building up that bowling strength.

And you look, we've got fast bowlers coming out of ears now.

New Zealand never used to have fast bowls.

We used to have a lot of really good medium paces, but now we've got five or six guys that can bowl 150Ks on a, on a good day.

You know, you've got Ben Sears, you got Willow Rourke, you've got Adam Milne, Lockie Ferguson, Matt Fisher.

So you have five guys that can bolt that sort of, that sort of speed, which just unheard of in the past.

And it's all those little things.

And one of the things that they do is they test the pl.

They weigh them before and after a training, before and after a match, and they, they adapt their diets to where they're at and how they're doing.

I got to go a night out in town with some of the team and it was interesting.

They all had different drinks that they were allowed to drink on the, on this thing.

It's like you're not allowed a beer, but you're.

You've got to have a Diet Coke because your body's not reacting well.

Whereas he's allowed a beer because his body's handles it okay.

And they all had their, they, they knew what they were, they knew what they were allowed to have, you know, and, and they were all doing the things that would work for them, you know, and even when they were out at the bar in the West Indies, they were, they were drinking what they were allowed to drink given their.

Give.

Given their nutrition tests and things.

And the really interesting one with that was that they discovered that a bunch of the fast bowlers did better if they'd been eating kfc.

So KFC became a staple for.

I think Trent Bolt was one who.

They found that KFC actually really improved his performance.

So he regularly would sit down, eat a big chunk of kfc, which, that's what I tell myself too, would definitely not be considered performance food in both sports.

But because he lost condition so much during a day that they needed to get it in as quickly as possible with the right combination of fat and protein, and that tended to be the thing that that was the easiest way to get it.

And they're just thinking outside the square, some of that stuff.

Just trying to find those little we advantages.

That's really fascinating.

Michael, thank you so much for all your time.

It's been an amazing deep dive into New Zealand cricket.

Whenever we talk to you, I feel like I learned so much about all these nitty gritties which make this sport and this team so fascinating.

I think with.

With all of the or many of the names we talked about having left the international team, it's going to be a really fun era for New Zealand.

Interesting era.

There'll be obviously be some downs, I'm sure, but there's a lot of good talent in the pipeline, so will be interesting to see and we hope we'll bring you back in maybe a year or two, and then we'll see how New Zealand has done with all the new ones.

Sounds good.

All right, we'll catch you guys later.

Thanks, Michael.

Thanks, Michael.