Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

7 Chapter one So close How would you feel if you were selected to play in a first-class cricket match, made a score in the 90s in one of your innings - and were then never selected again? We know exactly how one man feels, for New Zealander Glenn Wilkinson went through precisely that experience in the 1990s, and has generously responded in detail to my queries about his background in cricket, about ‘his match’, and about his life outside cricket before and after his sole first-class appearance. In what follows, Glenn’s own words are indicated by the use of double quotation marks. ‘Glenn’s match’ was played as recently as March 1997, though his sporting story began long before that. A proud Wellingtonian, he was born in the city in April 1970 to a family where sport was evidently all-consuming (“Sunday evenings around the dinner table were all about the weekend’s sport”). An older brother shone at tennis as well as playing for the top cricket club of their area, while his two sisters were netball stars. His older sister played netball for Canterbury - “heavens forbid!” - and the New Zealand B team. Glenn was an outstanding sporting talent right from the start. Between the ages of eight and 15 he played in Wellington age-group sides at football, before he switched his attentions to rugby, “playing against all the good colleges in New Zealand as full-back and fly-half” - while still playing first eleven football if there was no clash of dates. From the age of 14 he made his college’s first eleven as a cricketer too, playing alongside 18-year-olds. This sporting life left insufficient time for studies, and so “my academic career took a bit of a back seat. I always envisioned I would make a living out of playing sport.” Fair enough, I reckon. After leaving school, cricket came to dominate. Having played for Wellington Under-20s in 1988/89, aged 18, Glenn moved up a further level in August 1989 when he toured England with the New Zealand Young Cricketers, playing in all three ‘Tests’ and all three ‘ODIs’ alongside the likes of Chris Harris, Chris Cairns, Adam Parore and Mark Richardson, and against the likes of Mark Ramprakash, Nick Knight and Dominic Cork. Although Glenn considered himself an all-rounder (“a right hand bat and bowler of right-arm medium pace. I felt I could get extra bounce and move the ball through the air”), on this tour he was played as “a bowler who could bat a bit”, taking his place at number 11 in the order, behind Richardson at ten. He didn’t mind, as he was “in heaven - my dream was coming true”.