ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2015

New Zealand in 2014/15 New Zealand’s improving form in international cricket continued steadily through 2014 and the first half of 2015. After ending the 2014 season in seventh place in the ICC Test rankings, they rose to have two brief spells in third place during the summer of 2015, before other teams’ results relegated them back to sixth in the tightly-packed middle reaches of the rankings table. They began their 2014/15 season with a three-match series against Pakistan in the UAE in November 2014 – a potentially challenging contest for a side lacking an established high-quality spin attack. Pakistan won the first Test comfortably, but in the second they declined to accept Brendon McCullum’s finely-judged challenge to score 261 in around 72 overs. Then in a match played in a sombre atmosphere following the accident to Phillip Hughes in Australia – the scheduled second day was postponed as a mark of respect – the Third Test was virtually all New Zealand’s, despite a career-best 197 by Mohammad Hafeez in Pakistan’s first innings. In reply, New Zealand broke their national Test record score for the second time in the year by reaching 690 all out, scored at better than 4.8 runs per over. The innings featured McCullum’s third double-century of the year and the match’s second career-best score in the 190s, an innings of 192 by Kane Williamson. The less expected hero of the game was off-spinner Mark Craig, who took seven wickets in Pakistan’s first innings and who, when taking the last wicket of their second innings to secure the innings win, became only the third New Zealand spinner ever (after Daniel Vettori and John Bracewell) to take ten wickets in a single Test. He also made 65 in his only innings with the bat – one of six New Zealanders to reach 50 in the innings, another new national record. This match marked a final farewell to Vettori after a 17½-year, 112-match Test career (plus one Test for the ICC XI) in which he took 362 wickets for his country besides scoring over 4500 runs. At the end of his career he was New Zealand’s seventh-highest Test runscorer, as well as their second-highest wicket-taker. The drawn series with Pakistan left New Zealand still seventh in the rankings, but a 2-0 win in a home series against a declining Sri Lanka over the 2014/15 New Year period moved them up to fifth. In the first Test McCullum missed his fourth double-century of 2014 by only five runs, reaching his half-century off 45 balls, his century off 73, and his 150 off 103, before being dismissed for 195 off the 134th ball he faced when comfortably on course for the fastest-ever Test 200 (in terms of balls faced). In the second Test Williamson – by now firmly established as one of the world’s leading batsmen – finally recorded his maiden Test double-century, during a sixth-wicket partnership with B-J Watling which broke the world Test record for that wicket (in which Watling already had a share). Their partnership turned a first-innings deficit of 135 into a lead of 389, to set a target which proved well beyond their opponents. McCullum’s inspired batting and equally inspired captaincy had won him many friends, besides bringing New Zealand much success, and it was a popular outcome when he led his side to their first-ever ICC World Cup Final at Melbourne in March 2015. There was much disappointment when the win that they so craved eluded them. Third place in the Test rankings was nevertheless theirs after the annual recalculation of positions in May 2015. The manner of their play in the subsequent two-match series in England in May/June 2015, and in the series of ODIs that followed it, brought much joy to British cricket-lovers, even though New Zealand’s draw in the Test series briefly cost them their third place. At this point the five teams in third to seventh places in the rankings were so closely bunched that the positions could be altered by the result of a single match, and sure enough New Zealand regained third spot when India failed to defeat Bangladesh later in June. But it was lost once again in July as a result of Pakistan’s victory over Sri Lanka, and with two of their planned series in 2015/16 being against second-placed Australia, it may be a little while before New 211