by Arunabha Sengupta
The previous evening had been spent in mental preparation alongside his opening partner Robert ‘Jumbo’ Anderson, aided by a process of lobbing a few pears at a passer-by from the window of their room in St George Hotel, Wellington.
On that morning, he got stuck in traffic while driving to Basin Reserve. That did not help his nerves. He dearly wanted to get a hundred on Test debut. His father had flown in from Canterbury for the match, although he hated flying.
The day was cold, overcast with a howling northerly. Geoffrey Boycott, in his second Test as captain, won the toss and put them in. Jumbo and he went out and the debutant faced the first ball.
It was Bob Willis who ran in, with the great howling wind behind him. The bat battled the gust to stay straight, feeling like a crowbar at one end and a feather at the other.
The first ball was short of good length, on middle and leg, going across. There was a faint touch through to Bob Taylor. The fielders went up. “What a bloody disaster,” thought the newcomer.
But then, he was quite sure umpire Bob Monteith had not heard the snick over the wind. He was sure that no one walked in Test cricket. He stayed put.
Willis, though had heard it distinctly. He let fly a mouthful of the choicest epithets. Some of the slip fielders joined in. However, Taylor was a teammate at Derbyshire, remained quiet. Everyone knew it was his debut. And there were Mike Hendrick and Geoff Miller, two more mates from the county team in the England side.
Young John Wright stuck around. Quite literally so. Willis bowled a hostile spell. He could not manage to get off strike for nearly an hour. 52 minutes passed before he got his first run, he inched to 23 not out at lunch. He lost a few partners, but stonewalled his way to 55 before the day’s play ended half an hour early due to bad light. 152 for 3 at stumps. That night Walter Hadlee called to congratulate him, advising him to get more on the front foot. Against Willis that was easier said than done.
The next day the wind was less of a problem, having changed direction into a southerly. Wright was given out, leg before to Botham, in the very first over. The umpire was Monteith and it was probably going down leg. But, he was not really in a position to complain. 348 minutes, 244 balls for 55 with three boundaries. The debut century did not transpire, but he had given his dad a full day to watch his batting … provided he was able stay awake.
In the second innings he got 19 in 169 minutes off 105 balls. Willis did get him this time. New Zealand, dismissed for 123, left England 137 to win. Richard Hadlee got into the act with 6 for 26, ending with 10 for 100 in the match, and Boycott’s men were bowled out for 64. Success in his first Test, John Wright was declared batsman of the match.
Before the second Test at Christchurch, Wright went for a haircut. As he waited, the barber said to the guy in the chair: “What about the cricket then—wasn’t that great stuff?”
“Yeah,” was the answer. “but it was probably just a fluke.”
Wright was not amused by the negativity. But when he got 4 and 0 and New Zealand lost by 174 runs, he knew it was true, as with most of the things in cricket and life.
When Wright returned to Derbyshire later that year, Taylor, Hendrick and Miller presented him a memento for the occasion. A packet of Walker’s potato chips.
Wright played Test cricket for 15 years, finishing with 5334 runs. There are 96 batsmen who have scored over 5000 runs in Tests, and Wright’s strike rate (estimated at 35.26) is the lowest. He was even slower than Boycott.
But he was tenacious. 104 balls between dismissals places him among the more difficult men to dismiss.
While Indian Summers, co-written by Sharda Ugra, is about his experiences as the coach of the Indian team and is one of the better accounts of the game penned in recent times, his earlier autobiography Christmas at Rarotonga, co-written with Paul Thomas, is another of those brilliantly entertaining cricket books produced in New Zealand that no one will tell you about.
John Wright was born on 5 July 1954.