Carrying The Bat: A Tribute to Martin Crowe

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Australia

On the cricket scorecard of life, no one gets back to the pavilion with an asterisk next to their name. There are no 'not outs.'

Some innings are long, and, outside the odd moment of excitement, aren't much fun to watch. Others are a lot shorter, but full of individuality, poise, and honest eagerness to understand why you were even sent out there in the first place.

Martin Crowe, the finest batsman in New Zealand cricket history, lived one of those lives. It ended in Auckland yesterday at 53, far too soon of course, but with that rare, undeniable quality that will ensure that as long as Kiwis pick up the willow and leather, they'll talk about the man they called 'Hogan.'

They won't talk about runs scored, or records beaten, though some might linger on certain innings. The 299 at the Basin. The 188 when we spanked Australia at the Gabba, and Paddles got his 9 for 52. That era-defining one-day ton in the first game of the 1992 World Cup against Australia.

They will talk about his best shots: the on-drives and late cuts. They will talk about the beyond-his-years genius of his captaincy; about how Dipak Patel opened the bowling in '92, and pinch-hitter Greatbatch opened the batting. They will talk about his style, grace, and belligerent poise. They will talk about a man of deep intensity, and welled-up, weighty concentration.

Peter Roebuck, who was Crowe's county captain at Somerset in the 1980s, described the New Zealander's batting as "the technique of sweet reason." The phrase couldn't sum up Crowe better.

It was all there, in a way that was rare to Kiwi batsmen. Crowe, an unrivalled student of the history of the game, knew this himself, and took pride in it. He was part of a lineage that extended back to "the Doctor" WG Grace, and to New Zealand's own Bert Suttcliffe and Martin Donnelly; the great left-hander who scored a double ton at Lord's and the man he was named after.

Crowe's mental preparation was legendary. He wouldn't talk to anyone for days leading up to tests, in his early years. Once, before a test in Pakistan in 1990, he went out onto the pitch the day before the game fully-padded up, and played invisible shots with his bat, at both ends, for the best part of an hour. Out there, by himself. The next day, he got a ton against Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram; the great swing bowlers of the last thirty years.

Don Neely, New Zealand's former convener of selectors, once said of Crowe: "it's not enough [for him] to score a century. He wants it to be a classic innings; a perfect innings. He's one of the few batsman you could imagine scoring a test century, and being unhappy with his innings."

In this, the mastery of Crowe unravels. No man can place so much value on one pursuit. The weight that it will demand you to carry will be far too much. Crowe struggled with it from the get-go, and found out early on the lie that is the one great myth of cricket: it is a team sport.

No way, more than anything else; it is a man against himself. And when you've got a mind like Crowe's, the battle is like being on the First Day at the Somme, over and over again.

Crowe carried the world on his back. Failures in his career would haunt him; weld him to a certain moment in time that he became convinced defined him. The lazy poke to the keeper on 299 at the Basin against Sri Lanka. The upset by Pakistan in the World Cup semi-final in 1992; his hamstring injury that day, and inability to stop the brutal onslaught of Inzamam ul-Haq.

That weight wasn't helped by the fact he was never one of the lads nor was he a diplomat. However articulate, Crowe was an out-spoken sporting character in a country that favours stoic, laconic types like Sir Colin Meads or Sir Ed Hillary. He was, in his own words "something Kiwis love to hate – a fast-growing, opinionated tally poppy from Auckland."

As is so often in New Zealand sport, we didn't know what we really had, at the time. We'd go to Lancaster Park the Basin, and Eden Park and cheer the runs, but secretly believe the myth of Crowe's aloofness. It is lucky, for both he and us, that we have since discovered the real Hogan.

His final years have been his hardest, as he suffered from a cancer that never seemed to give up. We saw that honesty from Crowe again, a sentimentality that verged on the truly lyrical and poetic. There were tears, and there was laughter.

There was his passing of the baton from his generation – the Last Great New Zealand Team – to Brendon McCullum's group. He mentored Ross Taylor and Martin Guptill, and has decreed that Kane Williamson the heir apparent to the Kiwi batting lineage that passed through him, and went back to Suttcliffe and Donnelly.

The journey to the World Cup final last year was one of the best two months in Kiwi sporting history. It was a statement for us, not only a cricketing nation, but an important step out of the shadows of Inzy at Eden Park in 1992.

You could see, for Crowe, it embodied more, too. He was in agony, suffering from his cancer and treatment, but the noble intent shown by McCullum's Boys was lighting up something, in him, that had been dark for so long.

We lost the final, but, as Crowe said at last year's New Zealand Cricket awards, "we won at the highest level, which was spirit, method and love."

Finally, he had, too. His family, and the cricketing world, will miss that very public search he underwent looking for it.

So goodbye to that sweat-caked headband; to the those lovely on-dives, and glorious late cuts, and that bat raised for centuries at the world's cathedrals of cricket.

Maybe you were one of this generation in New Zealand that loved him playing cricket too; sitting on the roof of your childhood home outside Taupo with your transistor (it was the only spot with reception) listening to Waddle and Coney commentate test matches, summer after summer, wanting - more than anything - to play cricket for your country.

Forever bowling into a concrete block in your backyard, forever playing practicing shots with an invisible bat, forever imagining what it would be like to be Crowe, to have his elegance and grace, to show that fight, and then running down and bowling again into that concrete block, and being happily trapped in the amber of that type of summer forever.

The spell can't be broken, not even now, when Crowe has been given out for the last time; that gritty, beautiful innings of his finally over.

So off come the gloves and helmet as he walks to the pavilion, and a ripple of applause spreads around the oval and then a cheer.

Goodbye Hogan, and thanks. How will our summers ever be the same again?