Cricket N.Z. Team “Tuned Up” For First County Matches

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28573, 30 April 1958, Page 6

Cricket N.Z. Team “Tuned Up” For First County Matches

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.)

LONDON, April 29. The New Zealanders will shortly leave Eastbourne for Worcester for the first county match of their tour. The period, likened by Mr lain MacLeod, the Minister of Labour, at the London New Zealand Cricket Club dinner, to an orchestra warming up before the theatre curtain rises, will have ended It has been a valuable phase and the team seems pretty well in tune for its 10 matches before the first test, which begin at Edgbaston. Leeds, on June 5. The four one-day social matches have been light-hearted affairs but they have provided useful practice. All the main batsmen, with the exception of Sutcliffe, have made 40 and over, ranging from Reid’s 47 to Hartford’s 105, and Sutcliffe is in such high spirits and good form that there is a reasonable prospect of more than one county bowler aching in arm and heart before long. All the New Zealand bowlers have taken between three and five wickets apiece and have shown quite' good form. Hayes has demonstrated his ability with a new ball and so has Mac Gibbon. Moir, Alabaster and Sparling seem well geared for hard work ahead. Both Petrie and Ward have been neat and quick behind the stumps.

Fielding and, one suspects, fieldplacing need to be tightened up but there is no reason to doubt that Reid will put the screws on. If the New Zealanders can sharpen themselves on Worcestershire and Leicestershire—both at the foot of the championship table last season—and then in their third match make Surrey, the champion county, sit up they will have made a flying start.