Martin Crowe, who has died of lymphoma at the premature age of 53, was New Zealand’s finest batsman. Indeed, he could be considered to have been the most handsome right-handed batsman since the Second World War. He was also one of the sport’s most astute captains, leading New Zealand to the semifinals of the 1992 World Cup, and thinkers about the game. He invented an abbreviated format called Cricket Max, popular in his native country for a short while, which anticipated the 20-over game.
Crowe entered the New Zealand Test team at the tender age of 19, so promising was he, and such has been the shortage of class batsmen in a country where elite sportsmen are drawn towards rugby. He was following in the footsteps of his elder brother Jeff, who had an average career as a Test cricketer before becoming one of the longest-serving ICC match referees.
But whereas Jeff Crowe pragmatically shovelled straight balls through mid-wicket, Martin became a supreme technician. He can be compared with India’s Rahul Dravid and England’s Ian Bell as an embodiment of orthodoxy, but Crowe was more athletic than either.
His strategy was pace off the ball. New Zealand were short of fast bowlers, but stuffed with slow-medium dobbers who were devilishly difficult to get away on grudging end-of-season pitches on what were for most of the year rugby grounds. Crowe masterminded the tactic of opening the bowling with a spinner, in this case the off-spinner Dipak Patel, who whisked through six overs for 10 runs before anyone knew what was happening.
The strategy did not quite work out. Crowe’s team lost their semifinal against Pakistan, who played a more virile brand and went on to defeat England in the final. But he had stirred New Zealand to heights which their cricketers had never achieved before — and which they were not to achieve again until Brendon McCullum’s team reached the 2015 World Cup final.
By then Crowe was gravely ill. He said the final would probably be the last game of cricket that he watched, and he was not far out. It would have been appropriate if New Zealand had won, for his sake, as Crowe was the batting mentor of two New Zealand players, Martin Guptill and Ross Taylor: “the sons I’ve never had,” he called them. Or if, instead of some dubious administrator, Crowe, the master batsman, had presented Australia’s winning captain with the World Cup.