the mad scientists legacy

Sportsfreak take a stab at encapsulating their ex captain, whilst quoting the Suave one and yours truly.

Stephen Fleming, enigma. The most graceful batsman of his generation by a mile, yet the inescapable view is that he could have achieved more. A frustration that is heightened further by the fact he has been pushed out around 3 years too early.

The base stats are well-known. 43 half-centuries with only 9 centuries which is a lamentable conversion rate. Yet when he did reach 3 figures he was close on unstoppable. 3 of those innings were converted into double centuries; he had an average in those innings of 226.

He started his international career running with a tail-wind, and the feeling was that New Zealand had found the obvious replacement for the then semi-crippled Martin Crowe. But in retrospect the early signs were there. In both his test and ODI debuts he was dismissed for scores in the 90s.

It was 3 years before the elusive test century, but that did not prove to be the watershed people had expected; the batting contradictions just kept piling up.

UK cricket blog Republique Cricket pointed out some of many inconsistencies on his batting.

“The other strange thing about Fleming vs. Sri Lanka, was that he averaged over 100 in Sri Lanka, but 33 at home, which is quite bewildering.”

The Sri Lanka angle continues, which is not surprising given the avalanche of series between the 2 countries throughout the duration of his career. He rightly rates the 274* in Colombo as one of the great innings of all time, and contrasts that with the fact he was to go on to become Vaas’s bunny. The fallowing over to one side and being trapped plumb in front is another Fleming legend.

His batting was clearly hampered by so often having to cover for those around him. For a large part of the latter segment of his career he took over opening, due to a combination of a lack of quality openers and a log-jam in the middle order. Captains of past years would have played the seniority card and stuck to their favoured position, but Captain Fleming led from the front. Bradman would roll in his grave at such a style of captaincy.

This prevented his average rising through the 40s, and meant that he lost a lot of the natural freedom from earlier in his career. Less renowned as an ODI batsman, he still played NZ’s finest innings in that form of the game in gunning down Donald and co in a World Cup match at Fortress Wanderers.

But it is for his captaincy that he will be mainly remembered. He was our youngest ever captain; thrown the role as a stop-gap measure following some outstandingly bitchy years of conflict between Crowe, Howarth, Rutherford, Turner, Germon, Cairns and Parore, and even Danny Morrison with each of these people seeking absolute power in some modern low-rent Shakespearean plot. There were some pretty dominant personalities in this list, encompassing, in no particular order, perfectionists, spoilt brats, a player with delusions of grandeur, another with a massive chip on the shoulder, a puppet and a drunk. This was one massive mess to take over for a 23 year-old.

It was initially assumed he was just the front man for the spoilt brat brigade, but along with Rixon, soon stamped his style on things. And after Rixon departed, he took more control of things and carved out an impressive legacy, especially considering the lack of resources he usually had to battle with.

Nowhere was this better summed up than at Cricket with Balls where he is even compared to Noam Chomsky. Although we can not recall if Fleming ever told Kim Hill to f-off on live TV.

“I wish there were more captains like Fleming, he captained like a mad scientist, rather than the McDonald’s Managers most captains are.”

The apex of his captaincy career was during the Australia tour of 2001/02. This was a tour that saw Australia come within a few blind pieces of umpiring from a Zimbabwean umpire to winning a series on Australian soil. He had some luck; rain in the games where NZ struggled, but he maintained an attacking and innovative approach throughout, helped by the fact he suddenly had an attacking bowler at his disposal.

He used the full range of tricks here; declaring after just scraping past the follow-on mark to force S Waugh’s hand, packing half the team in Martyn’s favourite area (Martyn was never the same again) and getting Adam Parore to annoy everyone by blocking during a run “chase” thereby eliminating the home side and becoming a real hero in Perth.

Not only did he pick a tactic that was going to wind the locals up, but he got the most irritating person in the team to do it. That is true genius. But we always said he was more Australian than the Aussies themselves

As for his batting, he will probably go down as the best ever #5 New Zealand never had.

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