A hundred and a fifty, and then nothing

Rodney Redmond hit twenty fours in his first Test innings.

Twenty. In a hundred and forty-five minutes, against Intikhab Alam and Pervez Sajjad and Sarfraz Nawaz, on debut, opening the batting for a New Zealand side that had not won a Test series in four years.

The match

Pakistan made 402. Majid Khan scored 110 and Bruce Taylor took four.

Redmond and Glenn Turner opened and put on 159. Turner, who would finish with a hundred and three first-class hundreds behind him and a reputation as the most technically complete batsman his country had produced, made 58 of them.

Redmond made 107 and was out first, caught by Mushtaq Mohammad off Pervez Sajjad.

New Zealand were then 251 for nine and looked like conceding a lead of 150. Brian Hastings and Richard Collinge added 151 for the last wicket, which was a world Test record, and the innings finished level with Pakistan on exactly 402.

Full scorecard: New Zealand v Pakistan, 3rd Test, Auckland, 16–19 February 1973 →

The second innings

Pakistan made 271. New Zealand needed 272 on the last day and were never going to get them.

Redmond made 56 from eighty-four minutes with nine fours before Wasim Raja had him caught. New Zealand finished on 92 for three and the match was drawn.

His Test career was over. He was twenty-eight.

What the numbers are

One match, two innings, 163 runs, average 81.50, twenty-nine fours.

Only a handful of players in the history of Test cricket have made a century and a fifty in their only appearance. Doing it while opening, in a drawn match your side never controlled, at a scoring rate nobody else in either team sustained for as long, is a category of its own.

The scorecard’s own match notes record it without elaboration: Rodney Redmond scored 107 and 56 in this, his only test.

The explanation everybody offers

Contact lenses.

Redmond had switched to them shortly before the match and the standard account is that he developed problems with his eyes afterwards which affected his batting and were never properly resolved.

That account is repeated in every article written about him and it may well be true. What does not exist is a medical record, a selector’s statement, or a contemporary report from 1973 explaining that a man who had just made 163 on debut was unavailable or unfit.

He played first-class cricket for another three seasons.

What makes it strange rather than sad

New Zealand were not a strong side in 1973 and had no surplus of openers. Turner was established. The other end had been a problem for years and would remain one.

A team in that position does not usually discard a twenty-eight-year-old who has just scored 163 in a Test, whatever his eyesight, without at least trying him again once.

The tour to England later that year came and went without him. So did the next home summer, and every one after it.

What the ground has seen

Eden Park has a habit of producing scorecards that do not read like cricket. Eighteen years before Redmond’s hundred, New Zealand were bowled out there for 26, which is still the lowest total in the history of Test cricket.

Both matches are fully documented. Both are missing the same thing, which is anybody in authority explaining what happened and why.

The card records 107 and 56 and a drawn Test match. The next line in Redmond’s career is blank, and it stays blank for fifty-three years.

••••••

No. 3 in One Cap, a series of 6.

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