by Arunabha Sengupta
His appearance was almost melancholy. Frank Tyson likened him to Hamlet at the wicket.
Hadlee was introspective, calculating and intense. The word calculating is not used lightly here. His cricket was based on the most solid base of scientific technique, laced with meticulous logic.
It was almost perfect mathematical analysis that led him to his double of 100 wickets and 1000 runs in the 1984 season for Nottinghamshire.
Hadlee prepared a dossier of the target number of runs and wickets he needed at every stage, weighed with the strengths and weaknesses of the opponents. He worked on increasing his strength and stamina, and as a corollary decreased and optimised his run up.
As a result he scored 1,179 runs at 51.26 and took 117 wickets at 14.05.
His build was not that of a fast bowler, and hence he had to exaggerate the side on position of his delivery stride and extract the maximum amount of whip from the lean frame and long arms. He still managed a pace only marginally inferior to Malcolm Marshall and Michael Holding at their peaks.
One may consider this an exaggeration, but according to the analysis of the inimitable Charles Davis, Hadlee forced more batsmen to retire hurt during his Test career than any other bowler, apart from Courtney Walsh. If we consider in terms of number of hors de combat per Test match, Hadlee is next only to Wes Hall and Colin Croft.
Hence, along with all the splendid ability to swing and cut prodigiously and at will, Hadlee could be hostile as well. And he could swing and cut the ball at will. Even did so, on Indian pitches when he was 37, stealing a march on Kapil Dev who was eight years younger and bowling in his home conditions.
He delivered almost after brushing the stumps with his right hand. Indeed, often the bail at the non-striker’s end was knocked off. His reason was simple. When the ball shot through along a line drawn from middle stump to middle stump, even minimal movements through the air and off the pitch could produce devastating effect.
Initially, he moved more away than in. But, soon Hadlee added the in-swing and the off-cutter. With time the leg-cutter was sharpened as well, a slower delivery added into the arsenal and a bouncer rose viciously from time to time. In the early eighties, his county captain Clive Rice proclaimed that he was one of the ‘top five fast bowlers of the world’. By the late eighties, the splendours of experience had perhaps moved him to the best among the best.
While his bowling was a sophisticated science, his batting was the picture of simplicity. His idea was to hit it as hard as possible, and to choose the ball to whack after careful consideration. In the early days of his career, he seldom scored heavily. But a rather limited batting side soon offered opportunities, and he matured into a solid lower order batsman in the latter half of his career.
Scores improved once he started donning a helmet, and then burgeoned further when he wrote his coaching manual Hadlee on Cricket. By the late seventies he was an all-rounder in the making. Within a few years a part of the supreme quartet along with Kapil Dev, Ian Botham and Imran Khan.
Richard Hadlee ended his career with 431 wickets from 86 Tests at an average of 22.29, with 36 five-wicket hauls and 9 ten-fors. With bat, he scored 3,124 runs at 27.16 with 2 hundreds and 15 fifties
Hadlee confessed that he was not that serious about ODIs. However, his collection of 158 wickets at 21.56 from 115 matches puts him at fourth position in terms of average among bowlers with more than 100 wickets.
In the Kiwi wins, Hadlee’s contribution was spellbinding. In 22 won Tests, he captured 173 wickets at 13.06, better than any bowler with 100 or more wickets in victories. He did not perform as well in defeats, but even then captured 94 wickets at 21.71 from those 28 losses. He accounted for 36% of the opposition wickets to fall in all Tests, and almost 41% in the victories.
The 22 wins and 28 losses from Hadlee’s 86 Tests need to be put into perspective. Before he had emerged into the Test arena, New Zealand had played 102 Tests, winning just 7 and losing 46. It can be said without semblance of doubt that he took a group of faceless amateur cricketers and transformed them into a world class outfit.
Hadlee was a phenomenon — one of a kind, and will perhaps never be repeated.
He was born on 2 July 1951.