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in the foreground, shane bond hits the wickets in a bowl off as the west indies players watch on. in the background, the crowd goes wild
Shane Bond sends the Eden Park crowd into a bowl-out frenzy (Photo: DEAN TREML/AFP via Getty Images)

OPINIONSportsJanuary 31, 2025

Bring back the bowl-out, cricket’s version of going to penalties

in the foreground, shane bond hits the wickets in a bowl off as the west indies players watch on. in the background, the crowd goes wild
Shane Bond sends the Eden Park crowd into a bowl-out frenzy (Photo: DEAN TREML/AFP via Getty Images)

We’re one of the only nations to experience this rare and thrilling tiebreak method, and have suffered more than anyone from its demise. Who better to bring it back?

Twenty years ago next month, the first ever T20 international was played between New Zealand and Australia at Eden Park. This milestone event in the history of cricket saw the Black Caps wear retro beige uniforms, grow novelty facial hair and select Jeff Wilson, and the match ended with Glenn McGrath being shown a red card by umpire Billy Bowden for threatening to bowl underarm in homage to Trevor Chappell. 

Few who witnessed this spectacle would have predicted the extent to which the T20 format would dominate cricket in the years to come. Some of the new tactics and innovations it’s inspired would have made people’s heads fall off if they’d seen them that night at Eden Park. But for all cricket’s great leaps forward in the last 20 years, it’s also taken one major step back.

A year later, international T20 returned to Eden Park as New Zealand played the West Indies – still dressed in beige, but with fewer handlebar moustaches and a greater appreciation of the fact that T20 might be here to stay. Our first domestic T20 competition, a seven-match mini-tournament won by an insanely stacked Canterbury Wizards, had been contested earlier that summer. Jeff Wilson was out, Shane Bond was in. 

group photo of the black caps and australia teams before the first ever t20 international. nz in beige uniforms and white bucket hats, australia in yellow uniforms. several players who don't normally have a moustache have a moustache
Cricket heritage (Photo: Hamish Blair/Getty Images)

The West Indies batted first and scraped together 126/7 from their 20 overs. Bond finished with the immaculate figures of 2/15, including the prized scalp of Chris Gayle. In response, the Black Caps batters struggled to 111/8 at the end of the 19th over, leaving Bond and James Franklin requiring 16 off the final over. A six from Franklin off the second ball brought that target within reach, but the pair could only manage singles off the next three balls, leaving Bond needing five to win off the final delivery. He heaved it over cover for four, and the scores were tied.

With the Super Over still a mere twinkle in the ICC’s eye, the match instead went to a bowl-out.

Like a football penalty or a basketball free throw, the bowl-out asks players to execute a simple action under a suffocating amount of pressure. All the bowler has to do is deliver a ball that hits the unguarded set of stumps at the other end of the wicket – something they should in theory be able to do consistently. In the nets they’d probably do it nine times out of 10, but as the brief history of the bowl-out shows, it’s a different story under the spotlight. 

The rules of this particular bowl-out saw five bowlers from each team take turns bowling two deliveries each in a best-of-10 format. Nathan Astle stepped up first and reliably delivered two slow-medium deliveries on a good length. Both passed outside off stump. Dwayne Smith took the ball for the West Indies and sent two balls wide down leg. Jeetan Patel missed, then missed again. Chris Gayle did the same. Chris Cairns, in his final match for New Zealand, got nowhere near. Neither did Jerome Taylor. 

After a staggering 12 deliveries had failed to hit the stumps, up stepped Shane Bond. Bowling at half-pace, his first delivery cannoned into middle and off, sending the crowd into raptures. His second delivery, a full toss, achieved the same result. Ian Bradshaw missed two more for the West Indies, leaving Scott Styris to coolly clinch a 3-0 bowl-out victory for the hosts. 

It was a sublime and ridiculous bit of sporting theatre, only to be seen once again in international cricket, when India beat Pakistan by the same margin in a bowl-out at the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007. “I won’t want to see [another] cricket match decided on a bowl-out,” winning captain MS Dhoni dourly told reporters after the match. “It should always be decided on the field.” The Super Over was introduced the following year. 

If the bowl-out was cricket’s answer to penalties, a Super Over is more like extra time: each team faces another over each, and the team that scores the most runs in that over wins. Perhaps the most famous Super Over took place in a One Day International between New Zealand and England at Lord’s in 2019, a match which also happened to be the World Cup final.

Without wanting to reopen the wounds of that fateful day, these are the facts: at the end of 50 overs, the scores were tied. This forced a Super Over, at the end of which scores were still tied. At this point, the previously unheard of “boundary count back” was invoked, by which England were declared champions.

Following widespread outcry that this rule was a total load of shit, it was changed so that a tied Super Over simply results in another Super Over, like playing multiple overtimes in basketball. Most would say that this is fair and just, and they are right to a point: the Super Over is a good way to decide a winner, and should remain cricket’s primary tiebreaker. But the bowl-out still has a role to play.

In a football World Cup final, a tie after extra time would have resulted in a penalty shoot-out, one of the cruellest but also most thrilling ways of deciding a winner ever invented. This is what should happen in cricket, in the unlikely event of a tied Super Over. 

Would New Zealand have won the World Cup if the final had gone to a bowl-out after the Super Over? Maybe not. Would it have been an even more agonising and fucked up way to lose than boundary count back? Probably! Would it have been a better way of deciding the final either way? Absolutely.

Super Overs are a relatively rare occurrence; bowl-outs would be rarer still, the cricketing equivalent of hitting the Powerball after winning Lotto’s first division. Even in this era of T20 abundance, we might only see one every few years – they’d be a genuine rarity, like a hat-trick, triple century or spectacular boundary catch used to be. The chance of a bowl-out would inject novelty back into a sport in which it’s become an increasingly scarce and valuable commodity. 

There is also a practical side to the argument – this weekend’s Super Smash finals, for example, are being played as a double-header, with a tight turnaround between the women’s and men’s matches. More than one Super Over at the end of the first match would blow the schedule to pieces. A bowl-out is both the fun and sensible solution.

Sure, the two international bowl-outs to date have been total shitters – one-sided, low quality, bordering on farcical. But imagine a bowl-out version of football’s epic Matildas vs France penalty shoot-out. Imagine a wicketkeeper being forced to step up and bowl the decisive delivery with their pads still on. Imagine, if you’re some kind of high-powered cricket executive, the content this would generate – the engagement

This year the Super Smash made a play for the attention of New Zealand’s cricket nostalgists by introducing 90s-inspired uniforms. Next season it should up the ante with another kind of retro throwback, and bring back the slim, thrilling possibility of a bowl-out.

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In petrolhead heaven filming Checkered Flag (Photo: Supplied)
In petrolhead heaven filming Checkered Flag (Photo: Supplied)

SportsJanuary 8, 2025

Confessions of an unlikely petrolhead

In petrolhead heaven filming Checkered Flag (Photo: Supplied)
In petrolhead heaven filming Checkered Flag (Photo: Supplied)

Summer reissue: Checkered Flag director Natalie Wilson on her lifelong love of motorsport, and the allure of Pukekohe Park Raceway.

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One childhood summer when my world revolved around winning stuff off the radio, I bagged tickets to Western Springs Speedway and then to Waikaraka Park in what was a dream season for my redial thumb.  The thrill for me was the win – I had absolutely no idea what a speedway was. But I remember my dad being suspiciously wiling to celebrate my achievement on his weekends and I remember enjoying it a lot more than my sisters. 

Once the radio ticket well ran dry, I convinced someone to pay actual money to take me again. Giddy with dutch-angle-photojournalistic delusions I got trigger happy with my camera’s “foggy-corner” filter and captured possibly the worst photos ever taken of Western Springs. Objectively bad – I’ve taken better by accident from inside my bag – but also personally devastating because I genuinely believed I was siphoning some of the magic that was overloading all of my little senses onto film. The demented swarm of roaring engines, dirt bullets pelting my face, nostrils full of fumes, lips dry from salty chips and thin sauce. Maybe capturing something of the guilty tension between willing the metal to crunch and fear of witnessing something horrible, or the glory of seeing my car – the one I’d picked moments ago – taking a victory lap, checkered flag out the window. But no.

Three decades later, in a quiet corner at the loud end of a friend’s party it came out that the new colleague I was talking to was a speedway regular too. Buoyed by our surprising commonality, the lovely little chat we embarked on soon slammed full speed into the wall as I, without filter, uttered one of the Top 5 of most shamefully-bogan things I’ve ever said. Verbatim: “Every car, I feel like I’m right there in it. Sometimes, I am the car.” Pump the goddamn brakes. Chuck it into reverse. Too late. 

Facing the fact that I uttered these words comes with the admission that they’re true. And my visceral response is not reserved for big, dumb (jeez I love it) speedway or whatever racing I’m watching. It’s drip-fed when my car and I execute a flawless manoeuvre like the Torvill and Dean of parallel parking, when my friends get me on a racetrack for my birthday, or when I see my dream car in the flesh and pull alongside, window down… 

Of course I’m going to profess my love to the strangers in the black De Tomaso Pantera and of course they accommodate me with amused grins. Not until later do I think about how from their perspective, here’s an unlikely 40-year-old woman, in a filthy station wagon, leaning across her son yelling, “Is that a ‘71? How come I’ve never seen it before!? A recent import?” and whatever else I could squeeze in before the light turned green.

On the grid at Pukekohe Park (Photo: Supplied)

And while gender, age and parental status aren’t exclusionary factors, I don’t really know how I ended up here. I’ve never had a big-time-car-person friend (I’ve also ended friendships over reckless overtaking), I know firsthand what a horror crash feels like (and have been lucky to survive with just epilepsy), and since the Datsun I got when I was too young to sit my learner’s license I’ve never had a cool or modern car – I get older, they stay the same age (about 18). All that and of course, I’m now aware that petrol cars are killing us, which is a pretty valid reason for ignoring these urges. 

On occasion I get called a petrolhead but I feel deeply unqualified for this title. Maybe it’s semantics, but it seems that knowing how petrol works should be a requirement for starters. My mechanical knowledge is rudimentary at a stretch and it takes me 2.5 days at Pick-A-Part to do what F1 pit crews nail in 1.8 seconds. Car Enthusiast? That seems like it’s for people who are enthusiastic about modern auto technology and my 22-year-old Toyota Corolla covered in lichen cackles at the suggestion. 

Pukekohe Park Raceway (Photo: Checkered Flag)

So I’m settling on motorsport being a spectrum and if you’re on it, where you sit is irrelevant to your right to enjoy it. As far as inclusion goes, Pukekohe Park Raceway felt like coming home – for me over the final months of its life and for untold others over the previous 60 years. For every Shane Van Gisbergen are thousands more who know exactly how petrol works but would never attempt the speeds. There are those who pull onto the track with a hand raised bike that sounds like popcorn and doesn’t make it off the start line. Young teens who hit breakneck speeds but legally require Mum and Dad to drive them home down State Highway 1, and six-foot-four units who maintain their Mazda Demio is the perfect racecar for them – headroom for days! There are armies who are deep in motorsport but exclusively from the pits or the stands and those who come alone, year after year, and sit under their favourite tree on the hill, eating salty chips with thin sauce, quietly having their senses overwhelmed.

As a seriously under-qualified petrolhead and an overqualified opportunist, I completed far more laps of Pukekohe than were needed to make the documentary. My favourites were at sunset, making extra engine noises with my mouth as required, my son changing gears from the passenger seat, lichen edges ruffling as I nudged it just above road speed. Absolute glory.

First published April 18, 2024.

Checkered Flag is available to watch on The Spinoff now. Made with support from NZ On Air.

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