Famous Cricketers No 79 - Richard Hadlee

conditions were favourable, he could make his faster ball swing away. His favourite delivery was the “dangly”, his slower ball, which swung when pitched right up. There was also the flier and the yorker which was fired straight into the block hole. There was also his batting which improved so much over the years that he ended his first-class career with 12,052 runs at 31.71, including 14 centuries, one of which was a double century, and 59 fifties. Furthermore, he top scored in a completed innings 35 times and shared 32 century partnerships. Although he became a more disciplined batsman – the introduction of the helmet gave him the confidence to deal with the short-pitched delivery – Hadlee still had technical deficiencies and could not be considered in the same class as a batsman as those other three great all-rounders, Ian Botham, Imran Khan and Kapil Dev. Hadlee tended to be loose outside the off-stump, sometimes sparring at deliveries without using his feet and there were occasions when he lacked the necessary self-restraint and would succumb to a careless or rash shot. However, when the ball was pitched up he enjoyed lofting it to the boundary. Another favourite shot was the back foot drive, especially when he was given plenty of width outside his off-stump. A safe and reliable fielder, Hadlee held 198 catches in his 342 first-class games. However, in later years, having slowed down and with a poor throwing arm, he often fielded in the gully or when the spinners were operating he would be at first slip. The one-day game was not something that Hadlee ever really enjoyed with its artificial restrictions and with the emphasis so far as bowlers were concerned on containment rather than attack. However, it says much for his professionalism that he achieved so much in this form of cricket. Playing in 115 one-day internationals, he captured 158 wickets, then a record for New Zealand, and also scored 1,751 runs. There were some notable performances by him, not least a remarkable innings of 79 at Adelaide in 1982/83 when New Zealand beat England against all the odds. And when playing for Nottinghamshire, he was determined not to leave Trent Bridge without a one-day trophy. Not surprisingly, he achieved this too when in his last season with the club he scored an exciting 70* in the NatWest Trophy final to give Nottinghamshire the trophy when all had seemed lost. Although cricket was the real passion in Hadlee’s life, he also enjoyed other sports. During his school days he played first rugby union but then changed over to football, gaining a place in the soccer first XI in his last three years there and was captain in his final year. He also appeared for Canterbury in both sports at schoolboy representative level. In football he played as goalkeeper not only at school but afterwards with first Rangers and then Woolston WMC in the Southern League. However, soon there was time for little else other than cricket when he made his first tour of England in 1973 and then on his return home he married his fiancée, Karen Marsh, who was also a New Zealand cricketer. With the arrival of their two sons, first Nicholas and then Matthew, Hadlee had plenty to occupy him on the domestic front. During his cricket career much of Hadlee’s time off the field was spent on promotional work, coaching, guest appearances and giving his views on the game both in newspaper articles and on the radio – the demands were endless. Furthermore, as his career developed it became a life of constant travel, regularly commuting between England and New Zealand as well as touring with the New Zealanders to other parts of the world. There was also the demanding county circuit and some exhausting schedules in Australia with its seemingly endless number of one-day games. In spite of all this, Hadlee remained fixated on statistics, records to break, milestones to reach and goals to achieve. Targets to aim for became an obsession as he would clinically plot out his campaign of action. 9