Kiwis have short memories when it comes to dodgy run outs

Jul 1 2008 by Pat Murphy

England one-day captain Paul Collingwood will have to live with his decision not to recall New Zealand’s Grant Elliott in the one-day international at the Oval last Wednesday.

It will always be on his CV as England captain and some good judges, including The Post’s Jack Bannister believe he should never lead his country again.

I disagree. Having liked and admired Collingwood for a decade while on England duty, I believe he was acting in character in trying for an advantage, but that he was let down by the rest of his team-mates.

Collingwood is a remarkable competitor, someone who has got the very best out of himself as a player by an unrelenting drive. The red mists are bound to swirl around him now and then and he needed sound guidance on Wednesday.

Yet too many of the England players are clones, unable to think independently of the captain, willing to tell him he was in the wrong. Current England players mistake synthetic aggression like throwing the ball hard back at the wicketkeeper, forcing the batsmen to get out of the way, as sending out the right competitive message.

That’s superficial piffle. As puerile as the mindless touching of gloves every time the England batsmen meet in the middle or the cosy handslapping that goes on as they pass each other while in the field.

Depressingly, many young and impressionable cricketers are now apeing these mindless customs in village and club cricket at the weekends.

Those players under Collingwood’s leadership are too willing to remain in the bubble, that shell of mutual self-regard and companionship, telling themselves they are great players when the facts suggest otherwise.

He should not be sacrificed, because he lacked guidance during the crucial two-and-a-half minutes that elapsed between the collision and Elliott’s departure in high dudgeon. Even though Collingwood wrongly chose to aver afterwards that he only had a split second to make the judgment. He didn’t and he had umpire Mark Benson in his ear, making sure he knew what he was doing.

An Andrew Strauss, a Michael Vaughan or an Andrew Flintoff would have offered sensible independent advice to a novice leader who was out of his depth. That doesn’t mean that Collingwood should walk the plank. He won some credibility back by having the bottle to go straight into a hostile New Zealand dressing-room and admit he got it wrong.

Yet we still had to endure Team England’s hyperbolic attitude afterwards, with coach Peter Moores and stand-in captain Kevin Pietersen saying that Collingwood was ‘a great man’ for holding up his hand. Not really, guys – just a mature adult who loves the game, realising he’d made a serious error.

Sympathy was all for the Kiwis until this columnist trawled through Wisden a couple of days later. I came across the First Test between New Zealand and Sri Lanka at Christchurch in December 2006. I’d forgotten the significance of the scorecard entry ‘M.Muralitharan run out 8’ until Wisden enlightened me.

Murali had completed a single to give Kumar Sangakkara a worthy century and he went out of his crease to congratulate his team-mate. The Kiwi wicket-keeper, Brendon McCullum, broke the wicket and Murali was run out. Which was technically correct but he wasn’t attempting a run, as Elliott was at the Oval. The ball was surely dead.

New Zealand captain Stephen Fleming refused to withdraw the appeal, arguing that his team was trying to win a Test. He was supported fully by NZ Cricket’s chief executive at the time, Martin Snedden..

Fleming has since retired from international cricket, garlanded with golden opinions as a credit to the game, a deep thinker and all-round good egg. And McCullum has form in this area, having done the same in a Test in Zimbabwe in 2005.

In August 2005, during the second Test at Bulawayo, he ran out the last man, Chris Mpofu, after the batsman turned around after a single had been taken and walked down the pitch to congratulate Blessing Mahwire, who had just crossed fifty for the first time at the international level.

Mahwire drove Daniel Vettori to long-on, but Mpofu, after completing the run, ran towards his partner. McCullum took the throw from the deep and whipped off the bails.

McCullum was one of four survivors from that New Zealand victory over Sri Lanka who reacted so vociferously on the balcony at The Oval after Collingwood’s gimlet-eyed decision. One of the others is the new captain, Vettori, who rightly felt his England counterpart was in the wrong. But he didn’t refer to the Murali run out in subsequent interviews.

When it comes to assessing the impact and significance of a regrettable moment which will always be a black mark on a respected player’s career, it’s handy to get a perspective on similar incidents elsewhere.

The past informs the present. Collingwood should therefore not be pilloried in a moral crusade. And we should ban all use of the archaic phrase ‘it’s not cricket’.