It is the weirdest thing re-reading e-mails from someone who has just died. You can hear the voice, see the man: urgent, demanding, provocative, tetchy, prickly, inquisitive, insatiably curious and, above all, intelligent. That was Martin Crowe for you, the finest batsman New Zealand has produced and one of the game’s keenest minds, who died yesterday of lymphoma aged just 53.
As is often the case, I got to know Martin better post-career. We had played against each other a little. He scored a pair of magnificent back-to-back hundreds in 1994 at Lord’s and Old Trafford, his international swansong, carrying a poor New Zealand team and standing apart as a champion among journeymen.
They were the last Test hundreds he scored and if, physically, he was past his best by then, his game still had all the hallmarks of the fine player he had been, New Zealand’s best throughout the 1980s. He was a perfectionist: classical, correct, sideways on but two-eyed and slightly open-hipped, poised, nimble-footed, a player of touch and class and feel, almost the last of a breed as the game moved inexorably to a more physical and dynamic style.
We had argued. He had been struggling with a knee injury and flu and had sent word via Robin Smith that he’d like a substitute for a session. My head was filled with a thousand thoughts and the request had slipped my mind and I didn’t send a reply. He took it as a snub and resented it for a while until, in passing years later, I recalled my embarrassment at having forgotten the request. Once he realised that there had been nothing sinister, he relaxed.
Well, relaxed is never a word you would associate with Martin. He was tortured to some extent, the hangover from expectations of greatness that had been thrust upon him as a 19-year-old making his Test debut. His late-in-life autobiography, Raw, detailed the difficulties of a view from the mountain peak with unsparing honesty: “that innocent boy became a resentful man, a man who harboured grudges…[who] became a world record-holder of grievances.” At times cricket “tortured me and destroyed my spirit”, he wrote.
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But it also provided him with glorious moments and memories and, after retirement from playing, with a platform from which to express his formidable cricketing intelligence. He had the sharpest cricket mind I have come across in a former player and there was no aspect of the game latterly upon which he did not have an opinion. Post cancer diagnosis four years ago, his writing took on an honesty, urgency and insight that elevated it from standard offerings.
The e-mails again: chucking, ball tampering, spirit of cricket, Kevin Pietersen, Alastair Cook, Brendon McCullum, DRS, the ICC takeover by India, England and Australia, a Test Championship, batting technique, commentary - he had a trenchant view on them all. Especially after the diagnosis, the e-mails came flooding in, as if he knew there was much to get off his chest and too little time remaining.
Among former players, I have not come across someone who had a better grasp of the game’s direction and if I didn’t always agree with his conclusions (we had a furious exchange, for example, on tolerance of arm flexion for bowlers - he resolutely against, me more relaxed), they were never to be dismissed. His intuition was evident as captain in the 1992 World Cup, when he opened the bowling with a spinner and the batting with a pinch-hitter and, again, shortly after his retirement when, as executive producer of Sky New Zealand, he invented a short form of the game called Cricket Max - essentially a precursor to Twenty20, which came seven years later in England. He could see which way the wind was blowing before anyone else and, more than that, had the wherewithal to act up his intuition.
It is ironic, then, that he came to detest T20. He loved the purity of batting and saw it as an aesthetic exercise. Watching batsmen muscle bowlers to the boundary turned him off. He also came to detest the meanness that he too often saw on the cricket field and he called for a more enlightened approach to the game, something that rubbed off on McCullum and his current New Zealand team. Nothing gave him more pleasure than, late in life, watching the success of Ross Taylor and Martin Guptill, two players whom he mentored.
Martin viewed his illness, initially, as an opportunity, given that it allowed him to confront the demons and the man that, he felt, cricket had made him into. So, latterly, his instincts for the game and people in it were invariably sound: he was against rampant ego, selfishness, boorishness, bullying (the takeover at the ICC had him incandescent with rage) and the lop-sidedness of one-day cricket which will, inevitably, swamp the longer form of the game.
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Those e-mails again. On batting: “there is this biomechanics theory doing the rounds, standing there like a baseball hitter, with minimal footwork, bat set high. The stance and the crouch should be the same for pace and spin. The bat taps on the ground, which lowers your centre of gravity and connects you to the ground and your feet. Using both feet and footwork are king. Strange times.”
When I first found out that he had lymphoma I had sent him an e-mail allowing him a substitute this time, but only for a session before he got better. “Thanks mate, I just wanted to sleep and not field a session that’s all. You were too tough back then, hard as nails. Now you are too kind. See you soon.” Sadly not, but he was a rare talent and had a unique voice that will not be forgotten.
