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 on the high-flying Pakistan team in a League-Stage match in the 2011 World Cup in Pallekele, Kandy, Sri Lanka. New Zealand has had a particularly painful history against the Men in Green, with the defeat in the 1992 World Cup semi-final in front of a packed home crowd at Auckland being the most painful of the lot. New Zealand came into this game after suffering an embarrassing hiding at the hands of their great Trans-Tasman rivals Australia, while getting the better of the minnows in the group Kenya & Zimbabwe without breaking into much of a sweat, while Pakistan was riding on the wave of inspirational performances of its captain Shahid Afridi & got the better of tournament co-hosts Sri Lanka in a tight game, while also getting past Canada in an unexpectedly tight game and beating Kenya with ease.

New Zealand were forced to keep out one of their in-form players Jesse Ryder due to injury and that allowed an out-of-form Jamie How to keep his spot while Pakistan recalled the Rawalpindi Express Shoaib Akhtar alongside left-arm spinner Abdur Rehman for Saeed Ajmal & Wahab Riaz. Shoaib made good on his recall and immediately sent Brendon McCullum back in the very first over of the game. That saw Jamie How enter at no.3 and he just stalled the innings & failed to even time the ball off the square and that increased the pressure on Martin Guptill to push the scoring rate up. How was put out of his miserable stay at the crease by an Umar Gul zinger, which trapped him plumb in front, and left New Zealand at 55/1 after 12.3 overs and having scored just 4 runs off an astoundingly high 29 balls. This brought Ross Taylor at the crease, with the hopes of his team riding on his shoulders.

Taylor soon got his birthday gift, not once but twice in the space of 3 deliveries, in the 14^th over bowled by Shoaib Akhtar. On the second ball, Shoaib bowled a peach of a delivery that found Taylor’s willow’s outside edge and the Pakistan ‘keeper Kamran Akmal just let it pass him, almost akin to a batsman shouldering arms, while looking at Younis Khan, who was at first slip & Taylor had a first birthday gift. Taylor then cashed on this first life, by slamming a booming square cut over the point fielder and earned another boundary. The immediate next delivery saw Ross receive his second birthday gift and this time, it was even more gilt-edged than the chance a couple of balls before. Shoaib bowled a repeat of that delivery, which was hostile in pace and just about held its line and took a nice healthy outside edge of Taylor’s bat and was on its way to finding it’s spot in Akmal’s gloves. But it seemed like Akmal’s gloves were made of reinforced concrete and instead of safely pouching the catch, he gargled all over it and spilt the catch like a cat on a hot tin roof.

After those two lives, Taylor settled down, but continued to live a relatively charmed life, with numerous play-and-misses and edges falling in no-man’s-land, but punctuating that with some superb strokes, while Martin Guptill would brought up a half-century, but was dismissed after scoring a relatively slow 57 off 86 deliveries and James Franklin too followed him like passing thoughts. All this while, Taylor was painstakingly compiling a half-century at a scoring rate that would be considered as being slow for the modern-day generation and was batting at 64 off 98 balls when Scott Styris was struck plumb in front of the stumps by an Umar Gul delivery, while looking for quick runs and was sent back after scoring 28 (37) and the New Zealand innings sputtering along at 175 for 5 in 42 overs. That brought off-spin bowling-all rounder Nathan McCullum to the crease and he started to set about pushing the scoring rate at a more acceptable position and at the 44 over mark, with only 6 overs remaining in the innings, New Zealand were positioned at 188/5 with their run rate hovering just over 4 RPO and Taylor was batting at 68 after facing a princely 105 deliveries. At that stage, nobody either in the ground, be it the players themselves, the match officials, spectators or those watching the game on their television sets, could’ve predicted the storm that was about to hit them.

Nathan McCullum prepared the initial launch pad for what would eventually become a full-fledged cyclone, by launching captain Shahid Afridi for a couple of sixes in the 45^th over and then clouting the highly impressive Umar Gul for another six in the next over, before being dismissed for a quick-fire and vital 19(10) and take the score to 210/6 after 46 overs, with Gul completing his outstanding spell of 10 overs while conceding only 32 runs and taking 3 wickets, all that while, Taylor was now batting on 76(111) .

The game would change irreversibly in the 47^th over, which saw the then Turtle Taylor turn into Rampaging Ross-co, and hand out a birthday return gift to the Pakistan team and especially Kamran Akmal & Shoaib Akhtar in the form of an explosion never seen before by this side. Taylor tore into Shoaib Akhtar bowling his 9^th over of the game like a piranha, by smashing Akhtar for 28 runs consisting of 3 sixes and 2 fours, as the Rawalpindi Express was derailed in spectacular fashion, with Shoaib constantly bowling in the back-of-length area, which allowed Taylor to free his arms out and target the square-leg and midwicket fence & peppered that area with a flurry of sixes and fours to raise a stunning century by the end of this over, with Taylor going up to 102 from 117 balls. The 48^th over saw the beanpole all-rounder Jacob Oram take toll of the left-arm spinner Abdur Rehman by depositing him just short of the midwicket boundary for a four and then tossing him over the long-off boundary for six and scoring 15 runs off the over, with Taylor getting just the 1 ball to face, off which he got a single, and this over took the score to 253/6 in 48 overs, with the run-rate now pushing just over the 5 RPO mark. Following the mauling that Shoaib received in the 47^th over, the responsibility for the penultimate over (49^th over) was given to the veteran all-rounder Abdul Razzaq and Ross Taylor had clearly started seeing that white cricket ball like a football and his mood was like that of the bull in a Spanish bullfight who’s lost his rag at the sight of anything red.

This 49^th over saw Pakistan pay the full price of Kamran Akmal giving the twin birthday gifts to the birthday boy, as Ross Taylor unleashed his absolute worst and cracked each delivery of Razzaq to every nook-and-cranny of the ground, from deep extra cover to deep mid-wicket and collect 30 runs from this over, with Razzaq losing his bearings with each delivery and bowling in Taylor’s wheelhouse by feeding him the kind of deliveries that Taylor had been making hay through the last few overs, with the back-of-length deliveries being deposited everywhere with 3 sixes and 2 fours coming in with sundries too making a presence. This mega over took the score to 283 with just 1 more over remaining in this innings and Pakistan’s entire planning lying in smithereens with Tortoise Taylor morphing into Rampaging Ross to now become a full-fledged Cyclone Rosco, with Taylor now having accelerated to batting at 131* off just 124 deliveries, which seemed like a distant dream just 6 overs ago, when Taylor was batting at 68 off 105 deliveries. The last over ended with Jacob Oram hitting another brace of sixes off Abdur Rehman before being dismissed for 25 runs off just 9 balls with pacer Kyle Mills also wetting his beak in hitting 7 runs off the last 3 balls of the innings and taking the score past the 300 run mark, with the final total now reading 302/7 after the completion of the 50 overs, a far cry from 188/5 at the 44 over mark, with the last 6 overs seeing New Zealand score a frightening 114 runs at an astounding average run rate of 19 RPO.

Pakistan lost the fight during their chase and saw most of their major batsmen fall like flies caught in a fire, with all the New Zealand bowlers partaking their share in the miseries of the Pakistani batting, where only Abdul Razzaq showed some semblance of a fight with a superb 62 off 74 balls and Umar Gul hitting an attractive & quick-fire 34 off just 25 balls, but that wasn’t enough as their team folded over for a meek 192 in the 42^nd over & handing the Black Caps a massive 110 run victory. Pacer Tim Southee made light of the injury-enforced absence of their captain & lead spinner Daniel Vettori in the second half of this game, by taking 3/25 off 8 overs, which had reduced Pakistan to a sorry 45/5 in the 15^th over.

This game and this innings marked the turning point of Taylor’s career and after this, there wasn’t any looking back for him, as he would go on to become one of the most impactful middle-order batsmen in global ODI cricket in the coming years.