Forgotten Classics: A Taylor-Made Birthday Present
Birthdays are an occasion which is always meant to be celebrated. In the field of cricket, cricketers have often made use of their birthdays to deliver a performance for the ages. This piece is dedicated to a modern-day great who played one of the most underrated knocks in the history of the ICC Cricket World Cup, against an opponent which has hurt his team on quite a few occasions in the past in this tournament, while punishing them for giving him a birthday present twice in the space of three deliveries and giving them an explosive return gift later onward in the innings. Ross Taylor, while coming into the 2011 World Cup, had become one of New Zealand’s batting mainstays since his debut in 2006, but he hadn’t yet played that one innings that could bring him into the front-and-centre of the attention of the global cricket community, which had been hoping for big things from the man from Lower Hutt, Wellington. On his 27 th birthday on March 8, 2011, New Zealand took ...