An honest engine: Kane Williamson’s many defining Black Caps moments

Just like that, New Zealand’s greatest batsman has called stumps on his international cricket career. He leaves behind a dazzling record – but the statistics only tell us so much, write James Borrowdale.

There is a photo of Kane Williamson in the aftermath of the final of the 2019 Cricket World Cup – won, as if any reader of this piece will need reminding, in the cruellest possible manner by England. The peak of his cap pulled low, his eyes hidden except for the crow’s feet in the corner of one of them, which have been prominently creased by the broad, if exceptionally wry, smile below.

I’d spent the night watching alone on a friend’s couch, chased out of my own small house by my pregnant partner who was rightly worried I would disturb her sleep. And, accordingly, having followed the slings and arrows of that game through the night to its mind-bending conclusion, my own expression shared much more with that of Matt Henry, who, behind Williamson in the photo, looks morose and heavy-eyed, contemplating something in the middle distance as he strokes his chin and, I assume, ponders the absurd twists of fate – freakish overthrows, the much-derided boundary countback rule – that kept his team from victory. Seemingly, however, not a glimmer of anger, nor even of sadness, in Williamson’s posture as Eoin Morgan and his English team accepted the winner’s plaudits in the late London sunlight.

It perhaps does Williamson a disservice to begin an appreciation of his career with what must’ve been one of his lowest professional moments, but the strange emotions of that sleep-deprived morning seven years ago came immediately to mind when, with a similar equanimity, and following another loss at Lord’s, Williamson last weekend announced his retirement from international cricket. No farewell home series for this great servant of New Zealand cricket, no hanging on for another tussle with the Australians in the approaching southern hemisphere summer, nor even the final two games of the current series – just a quiet acknowledgement that he no longer had the same voracious hunger to play, and then the logical conclusion of that realisation: “Continuing with anything less wouldn’t be right and I feel fortunate to step away on my own terms,” Williamson said.

That appetite for the game, and particularly for runs, was the basis for a set of statistics unlikely to ever be bettered by a New Zealander: 9,515 test runs at an average of 54, including 33 centuries, from 110 matches; almost 10,000 limited overs runs, with 15 centuries and 65 fifties.

That breadth of achievement makes it impossible to do anything but pick a few favourites: the early peak-Dale Steyn-defying century in Wellington that proved there was plenty of grit to go with the obvious talent, the match-turning double century against Sri Lanka to open his account in 2015, which proved to be Williamson’s annus miribalis: 1,172 test runs from 13 innings at an average of over 90, including hundreds in Australia and England. Or consider that late masterpiece: 121 not out against Sri Lanka in the fading Christchurch light, an innings that concluded with a scampered bye to ensure victory from the game’s final ball.

None of which is to discount his white-ball game; he was named player of the tournament in that 2019 World Cup for his 578 runs; in the 2018 Indian Premier League, he scored a tournament-high 735 runs. But it was test cricket that was closest to his heart, so it would be remiss not to mention the 101 runs he scored across two innings of the World Test Championship final to guide his team to victory, not out at the other end as the winning runs were clipped off the legs of his great compatriot, Ross Taylor.

But statistics, even such a stellar set of numbers as Williamson’s, only take one so far. As Sir Neville Cardus, the father of modern cricket writing, once observed of Australian batter Stan McCabe, assessing Williamson’s quality by adding up his runs makes almost as little sense as adding up all of Schubert’s notes to evaluate his value as a composer. The runs were immense, but I suspect Williamson the leader meant even more to his team, leading the side 40 times and winning 55 percent of the time – a far better ratio than anyone else to have captained New Zealand for a significant number of games. The calmness of his presence, standing in the gully or tossing the ball to his bowler from mid-off, always seemed to add credence to the ideals often cited by the team under his captaincy: that putting the team’s interests before one’s own was actually the key to unlocking individual performance, and that all players could do was to take command of their own processes. To focus on those controllables was a method, a kind of sporting koan, through which one tried to avoid becoming too buoyed by victory or too deflated by defeat, even of the most crushing kind – ie, Lord’s, 2019.

Senior members of that team have told me how earnestly those ideals were treated within the dressing room. These, apparently, were not mere press-conference platitudes. A sweat-glazed player expounding upon those principles in post-match interviews always brought to mind the sentiments expressed in a verse interlude from The Book of Fame, Lloyd Jones’ great novel about the 1905 “Originals” All Blacks tour: “When we considered the shape of our game / we saw the things at work / that we admired and cultivated / every man’s involvement and / a sharing of burden and responsibility. / When we considered the shape of our game / we saw an honest engine.” And in typing out those words now, it strikes me that the last three of those words might be a fitting descriptor of Williamson himself.

There is no extravagant elegance in his batting, a la Virat Kohli, nor Steve Smith’s strange kinetic profligacy, just simple, repeatable movements done with a minimum of fuss – taking an in-form Williamson, as Mark Richardson once observed, “as close to batting perfection, I think, as you [can] get”. It is honest batting, somehow: there is nothing mysterious and there are few shots that hadn’t already been perfected a generation ago, just a technique forged out of the long traditions of the game. It’s a run-scoring method so familiar after all these years that you can almost close your eyes and watch: as the bowler nears the top of his mark, Williamson unconsciously spins the bat in his hand, as if wanting to impress upon his opponents just how lightly it rests in his grip. He nods at the bowler, who charges in, only to watch all that effort wasted against the broad softness of Williamson’s bat, the ball played so late – so directly under his eyes and so squarely in the centre of the willow – that it hits the turf with all the menace of a half-deflated balloon.

Just another threat defused by that honest engine. How strange it will feel to watch the Black Caps take the field tonight and know we’ll never see it again.