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 mindbending new world of
Kane Williamson.

+ Profile

Kane
and Able

ricket 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 getting out. Simple.
Batting is zen. Its a mindset, Kane Williamson 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 succeed, skills must become second nature,
secondary to that zen of playing instinctively. 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 cricket 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 batsman 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-athousand degenerative condition of the cornea 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 volleyball. Bay of Plenty is a volleyball stronghold, 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 basketball; first five-eighths in rugby; hockey, soccer, 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

margot butcher is a north & South contributing writer. photography by ken downie.
70 | NORTH & SOUTH | august 2010

N O R T H & S O U T H | F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 1 | 7 1

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.

7 2 | N O R T H & S O U T H | febr u a ry 2 0 1 1

first-class runs by the age of 20. His back

story is a litany of precocious vignettes, always 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. Eightyear-old Williamson had all the shots, almost always retired, and the senior primaryschool 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 captain, 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 listening 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 Northern 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

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 following 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 seriously 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.

here 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 flashbacks 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 commercial 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

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.

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. Technique 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

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 playing for them and I was just staring wideeyed at him, eh. The first ball he bowled, he
dropped it short and I whacked it, still looking 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 anything, dropped a catch. Then in the onedayers, I was batting at six and kept getting
one not out. A lot of guys spoke to me saying,
N O R T H & S O U T H | febr u a ry 2 0 1 1 | 7 3

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 Bangladesh, 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 firstclass 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 teammates 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 Blackcaps, 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
7 4 | N O R T H & S O U T H | febr u a ry 2 0 1 1

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.

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 trying to complicate and push my game forcefully 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.

artin Crowe, the beautiful 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

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, Vettori, 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 moment is of Williamson leaning into the skippers 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 composure, timing and flair.
In this age of cricket, Indias boundaryslapping rock star Virender Sehwag can insolently 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 highadrenaline 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 Tendulkar and saw, for the first time, a batsman
slight in stature who reminded him of himself. At Ahmedabad, it was the turn of Tendulkar, Indias greatest batsman and Williamsons 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 managed a test century on debut. These quickfooted, short men with good eyes, deft timing 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 mental 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 normal rock star, who still lives at home in Tauranga, 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.  +
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