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Kane and Able

margot butcher is a north & South contributing writer. photography by ken downie.

Cricket should be simple. And on those rare days when nobody gets you out, not even yourself, it is. See the ball, react to the line and length, hit the ball without get-ting out. Simple.

Batting is zen. Its a mindset, Kane Wil-liamson says. A tiny moment of indecision is crucial reaction time thats lost, the ball travelling so quickly at you theres no second chance to decide where to plant your feet or which stroke youre going to play. To suc-ceed, skills must become second nature, secondary to that zen of playing instinc-tively. Watch the ball, he tells himself. Then trust that mindset. Simple.

We were talking about batting in a clattery

cafe near Seddon Park, Hamiltons test crick-et ground and home ground for the Northern Knights, Williamsons first-class team. The espresso machine is graunching in our ears Im going a little spare but the young bats-man isnt the least bit distracted. He talks about growing up in Tauranga, talks a lot about his dad. Brett Williamson, from a big sporty family, played under-17s for Northern Districts and was a handy cricketer until his eyes packed up. Keratoconus, a one-in-a-thousand degenerative condition of the cor-nea thought to be genetic in its genesis. He needed a cornea transplant back in the days when techniques werent as sophisticated as now and thereafter channelled his love of cricket into coaching youngsters.

Kane and his twin brother, Logan, are the youngest of Brett and Sandra Williamsons

children. There are three elder sisters, Kylie, Anna and Sophie, now in their 20s, who all played for national age-group teams in vol-leyball. Bay of Plenty is a volleyball strong-hold, and they were taller for their age than Logan and Kane, a small man who looks like he could be Dominic Monaghans hobbit double in The Lord of the Rings.

But Kane always stood out at sport despite his diminutive size: point guard in basket-ball; first five-eighths in rugby; hockey, soc-cer, volleyball and cricket. His mother remembers him slotting mini-basketballs through a hoop when he was 18 months old, with the perfect action and everything.

Preternatural? New Zealand has produced thousands of first-class cricketers through the decades and hes only the second, after Martin Crowe, to have brought up 1000

at 20, he has the dexterity,

flexibility and footwork of a star batsman. But hes

now facing the worlds best bowlers, so its the mental game hes determined to conquer. Margot Butcher

analyses the mind-bending new world of

Kane Williamson.

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upbringing in which he bombs on debut. His big step-up to representing the Bay of Plenty, precociously at 14, was abysmal. It was against Hamilton. Dan Vettori was play-ing for them and I was just staring wide-eyed at him, eh. The first ball he bowled, he dropped it short and I whacked it, still look-ing at him, into the bat-pad. Out for a duck.

My first-class debut was the same. I was put into the side, made 2, 0, didnt do any-thing, dropped a catch. Then in the one-dayers, I was batting at six and kept getting one not out. A lot of guys spoke to me saying,

across as someone who had studied himself through the mirror of cricket. Dad had taught him the skill sets, how to play off the back foot (hallmark of a complete batsman), so many throw-downs over the years that Williamson snr stuffed his shoulder. Tech-nique was second nature; what engaged the batsman now was the ceaseless study of the human mind under pressure. And what is that pressure but your own perception?

If weve made Williamson sound like some golden whizz-kid, we need to point out that theres been a quirky pattern to his cricketing

in the local club competition. At 15, he was picked for the NZ youth team (under-19s).

Glenn Turner, our luminary batsman of the 1970s, remembers Williamson stood out from his bigger, shaving peers for being able to work the ball from offside to legside, which is tricky, and for being keen to learn, one of the few to ask lots of questions, even when the older boys mocked and teased him for it.

He was also a sixth-former when selected to make his first-class debut few do so that young and while he was head boy the fol-lowing year, Northern Districts made him a contracted player (i.e. gave him a salary). A professional sportsman while still a schoolboy, one of the 80 or so top players in the country. He took his cricket so seri-ously that hed already been taking yoga, Mayan martial arts and boxing classes for a couple of years to develop his dexterity, flexibility and footwork. His teammate Michael Parlane had been playing for Northern Districts since Williamson was still in Huggies.

There used to be a National Bank ad on telly in which a kid was agonising under a swirling high ball, going through a string of flash-backs of all the times hed

dropped a catch. Williamson, all of 12 at the time, was drawn to it. As you would expect in saccharine ad-land, the boy in the com-mercial ended up taking the catch, but it didnt compute with the young Williamson. Around that age, he was playing Roller Mills rugby, where hed struck up a rapport with Jeff Robb, forwards coach for the Bay of Plenty Roller Mills side. A big influence on Williamson, hed also begun teaching at his intermediate school.

We started having lots of chats about the mental side of sport, about believing and being positive, Williamson recalls, rather than focusing on dont let this happen and exaggerating what could go wrong.

That was something that stuck with me, and I remember so clearly this moment playing against Westlake, one of my first games when Id just got to college, nervous as hell, the ball swirling and me under it. I was thinking, Right, Im going to catch it, going to catch it... and I caught it. I popped back to the intermediate school to see Jeff and said, I gotta tell you what happened!

Mindset. For a couple of hours, its almost exclusively what we talked about in that noisy cafe, and the young cricketer came

first-class runs by the age of 20. His back story is a litany of precocious vignettes, al-ways making cricket sides as the baby of the team by a daunting two or three years. Eight-year-olds grow up on Kiwi Cricket, a modified version played with a soft ball, and have to retire and let someone else have a bat when they reach 20 or 30 runs. Eight-year-old Williamson had all the shots, al-most always retired, and the senior primary-school team wanted him even though he was only a junior.

Dad wasnt sure if I should; all the boys were a few years older and it was the hard ball. But I got the OK. Then we had a team meeting and had to vote for the captain, and all the senior boys voted for me to be cap-tain, even though I was a couple of years younger than them.

He says that without being a wanker he has nice manners and deflects all praise that he is naturally talented or gifted.

Cricket is his addiction. For as long as he can remember he has practised as much as he can, and found motivation in goals. He is still finding plenty to learn. I always practised with Dad, just nagging at him, eh inside, outside, wherever I could have a bat. I wasnt even six. Our house backed onto the Pillans Point School field. After a few years, Dad ended up building nets there and putting in a pitch through Pub Charity, so that suited me quite nicely.

He writes left-handed, bowls and bats right-handed, kicks left-footed (Our whole familys a bit like that) and grew up listen-ing to the Blackcaps on radio because the family didnt have Sky. Hes always had the jump start on his peers. At 12, Williamson led Bay of Plenty Coastlands to the North-ern Districts under-14 title in Gisborne, scoring a head-turning 420 runs from just four innings. At 14, he was up against adults as the Tauranga Boys College 1st XI played

He took his cricket so seriously that hed already been taking yoga, Mayan martial arts and boxing classes for a couple of years to develop his flexibility and footwork.

Top: Williamson snares the chance to have his photo taken with Blackcaps hero Dan Vettori his future

captain at Seddon Park in Hamilton in 2000.Above: With his twin, Logan (left),

at the age of two years and five months.

Williamsons progress through the school, club and provincial ranks to the national team has been helped by his study of the human mind under pressure. Rather than becoming fixated on what can go wrong, he focuses on staying positive and maintaining his confidence.

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and forming part of a record fifth-wicket stand integral to saving the test against the worlds number-one test team.

As Williamson reached three figures, Vet-tori, his captain, was at the non-strikers end. Having been a precocious teenage Blackcap himself, perhaps no one better understood the achievement. Williamson had recently shown him a photo Vettori with an eight-year-old fan whod asked him to pose for a picture during a break in a cricket match at Seddon Park in Hamilton. That was Williamson. Now the Kodak mo-ment is of Williamson leaning into the skip-pers shoulder in almost a father-son fashion he barely reaches Vettoris collarbone quietly absorbing his first test century, the expert Indian commentators, meanwhile, raving about his nimble footwork and com-posure, timing and flair.

In this age of cricket, Indias boundary-slapping rock star Virender Sehwag can in-solently bat through the line of the ball without moving his feet; players like Sri Lankas Tillakaratne Dilshan and Blackcap Brendon McCullum invent impressively confident backward slogs under the high-adrenaline influence of Twenty20. Might there still be room for a modern classic like Williamson, who prefers test cricket and plays like the textbooks say?

In his eighties, the legendary Australian Don Bradman watched a young Sachin Ten-dulkar and saw, for the first time, a batsman slight in stature who reminded him of him-self. At Ahmedabad, it was the turn of Ten-dulkar, Indias greatest batsman and Wil-liamsons batting hero, to watch a player many years his junior and remember how he had felt as a 16-year-old playing his first game for his country. Even he hadnt man-aged a test century on debut. These quick-footed, short men with good eyes, deft tim-ing and low hands how they can play.

Williamson had already made his first one-day hundred for New Zealand, on the earlier tour against Bangladesh. Barely in the team a minute and already busting men-tal barriers. He says he just keeps it simple by watching the ball. International cricket isnt a whole new beast. It is a step up, but its still cricket, eh?

He finishes his coffee and slips out into the Hamilton haze, where he might pass, even now, as a schoolboy in the street. A very nor-mal rock star, who still lives at home in Tau-ranga, who turned down scholarships to play for fancy schools in Auckland because he believed in himself, who has the cricket world at his feet, who just loves to bat. Simple. +

bad decisions for the first half of last season and then made good decisions for the second half. Yet it wasnt as if I changed my game or became a different player.

Thats what I learnt. That instead of try-ing to complicate and push my game force-fully to try to improve, I succeeded by just relaxing. I started learning the guitar in the middle of it, to relax. When the pressure is on, rather than handling the pressure, you almost dont register the pressure, and then youre in the place to score runs.

Martin Crowe, the beau-tiful batsman whom Williamson is too young to have ever seen play except on video, has become a

mentor. They met last year. What I responded to well was the way he

tries to get players to find what they did a few years ago when they just played, says the young pretender, which for someone like me was at college, when you just play and dont get caught up in the small stuff. Often coaches feel they have to change things, impose, change your grips and so on, and what I found really good was he said, What you do is right.

You just have to trust your natural style is good enough, trust the instinctive way you play, because when the pressure is on you need to use that instinct. Thats when you make your best decisions. My game is my game, rather than, I need my game to be like someone elses game.

He didnt make a duck on his test debut after all, of course. Instead, his seemingly nerveless 131 made him the youngest New Zealander ever to open his test career with a century, breaking a 45-year-old record

Make sure you have that presence at the crease, Stick your tits out, that sort of thing. I thought, Yeah, thats right. Youve been selected to be there, after all.

Belief is the strongest thing in your game and I just needed to reset my confidence at that level. I tell myself no matter how good the level is, everyone is human and theres no set way. Even the best players in the world are different from each other, so if I work as hard as I can, theres no reason I cant be there.

When it happened again, this time on his Blackcaps debut on a one-day international tour of Sri Lanka a few months back duck, duck he swears he felt unfazed. We were talking upon his return, before he set off again with the Blackcaps to play in Bangla-desh, and then to India, where he would make his test debut. We joked that hed have no reason to feel nervous on test debut, since he was bound to make a duck anyway. And then, as history had shown, he would be away soon enough.

When he was barely 18, Williamson won Northern Districts cricketer of the year award, noteworthy in a team of such strength they supply more Blackcaps than any other first-class association and have won more trophies than any other team in the past couple of years. Then, last season, he was judged the most outstanding first-class batsman in the land, garnering special praise for an eight-hour innings in which he looked like he could keep batting all week.

Hed just got out in one of the last games against Otago when his mobile rang. Mark Greatbatch, coach of the Blackcaps, was calling to say he wanted him in Hamilton the next day, in the squad to play Australia. The dream had come true. Williamson rang his parents, then quietly watched his team-mates without letting on the game came first. In the event, he was omitted from the test-playing XI and released, but within months would be contracted to the Black-caps, aged just 19, despite not yet having played for them.

Yet, last summer, his first-class scores for Northern Districts were 2, 18, 2, 6 not out, 16, 93, 170, 192, 33, 26 a good season in the end, but the first half had been a failure.

Without bragging, until then Id always done well, says Williamson. It was a new experience for me and I learned so much from it. A lot of people were interviewing me when I wasnt scoring runs and decided that it meant I wasnt in form. Well, whats form? Is it hitting the ball in the middle, or is it when youre making good decisions? I just made

At Ahmedabad, it was the turn of Sachin Tendulkar, Williamsons hero, to watch a player many years his junior and remember how hed felt at 16 playing for his country. Even he hadnt managed a test century on debut.