0England vs New Zealand: Second Test, Day 3 — England Booming

There are vari­ous top­ics I could have chosen to write about after the third day of the second test in the Eng­land vs New Zea­l­and series.

The issues that imme­di­ately jump out are 1) anoth­er fant­ast­ic per­form­ance by England’s bowl­ers against a woe­ful Kiwi bat­ting line up 2) a lovely return to form of the home side’s skip­per and open­ing bat Alastair Cook 3) four wick­ets for Swann or 4) the highly debat­able decision by Eng­land not to enforce the fol­low on (almost guar­an­tee­ing a series vic­tory but greatly redu­cing the chances of a vic­tory in the match with rain fore­cast). But today I am going to swerve a little left of centre and focus on some­thing entirely different…

They say every day is a school day and today I learnt some­thing new today… The great mous­ta­chioed former middle order Aus­sie slug­ger Dav­id Boon is match ref­er­ee for this test. I like to think I have a good grasp of world crick­et events but the pro­mo­tion of the talis­man­ic Tas­mani­an as a world ref­er­ee in 2011 is some­thing that passed me by but is some­thing that also pleases me greatly.

Boon excelled in his career as an inter­na­tion­al super­star of beer drink­ing on flights between Aus­tralia and Eng­land. He was also pretty handy when bran­dish­ing the wil­low, aver­aging over 43 in the days that meant some­thing. He hit a half cen­tury on debut in Novem­ber 1984 against a West Indies attack boast­ing Court­ney Walsh, Joel ‘Big Bird’ Garner, Mal­colm Mar­shall and Michael Hold­ing. Quite a handy attack! Most cru­cially of all he got his 7,400+ career runs when it mattered. He was a born win­ner and even helped to mould Durham into the ser­i­ous county force they are today. I remem­ber grow­ing up watch­ing Ashes battles with Boon always there or there abouts in the thick of things. His bat­ting may not have been the most aes­thet­ic­ally pleas­ing but it was very cour­ageous. As an Eng­land fan it was hard to take – you get an open­er out cheaply then out strides Boon at num­ber 3 to shat­ter any hopes you had of dis­miss­ing the Aus­sies cheaply.

After life as a play­er he became an Aus­trali­an select­or and it is com­fort­ing to know that someone involved in inter­na­tion­al crick­et for many years is now keep­ing watch on inter­na­tion­al fix­tures. He’s a fig­ure you simply have to respect. His bat­ting record speaks for itself and he has kept him­self busy in the game since retire­ment. Most import­antly of all he has kept true to his roots and con­tin­ued to groom his bril­liant mous­tache. For me he rep­res­ents the archetyp­al ‘fair dinkum’ Aus­sie: A top play­er, a nev­er say die atti­tude, a good bloke and someone you wouldn’t want to go ten rounds with in the ring. The cur­rent crop could cer­tainly do with him in their middle order at the moment and I reck­on you could add anoth­er 10 to the aver­age he fin­ished with if he were play­ing today.

Fair dinkum mate