The Neil Wagner Appreciation Society
Neil Wagner’s Test carer ended last year with an impressive 260 wickets. Only four bowlers have taken more for New Zealand. His Plunket Shield career ended this week. It finished in glory as he took 5-53 in the final innings to win the match, and therefore the title, for Northern Districts against his former team, Otago, at Dunedin’s wonderful University Oval. Wagner’s haul of 373 Plunket Shield wickets (5 of them in one over, famously) is the second most in Plunket Shield history. Only left-arm spinner Stephen Boock has more: 492 at 19.82 between 1973 and 1990. It seems extraordinary that a player with so much Test cricket under his belt could also end up as the second highest wicket-taker in a domestic first-class competition. So, I had a look.
Because of the mix of first-class and Test matches in the cricket world, leading wicket-takers and run-scorers in domestic competitions tend to be ‘nearly-men’; good players who may have played some Test cricket but not a lot and plied their trade for their province/county/state for years. These days, once you get to playing regular international cricket, you rarely spotted on the domestic circuit. While this has exacerbated the divergence between leading players on international lists and those on domestic lists, it is not an entirely modern phenomena. Have a look at lists of the leaders in domestic tournaments, and you will see that even some of the great Test players of their day were not necessarily at the top of those piles even in their time.
I extracted the top five wicket-takers in the major competitions of each of the 12 Test playing nations. Even the most venerable of all these, the County Championship, has a top five with relatively limited Test match wicket-hauls: Tich Freeman (3 151 CC wickets, 66 in Tests), Wilfred Rhodes (3 112, 127), Charlie Parker (3 022, 2), Tom Goddard (2 678, 22) and Derek Shackleton (2 534, 18). Of all these local champions only six have taken 100-plus Test wickets, and Wagner is comfortably the leader with 260 at 27.57. Clarrie Grimmett, 216 at 24.21 in Test cricket, to go with his record 513 Sheffield Shield scalps is the only other one over 200. The rest of the list is Srinivas Venkataraghavan 156, Wilfred Rhodes 127, Ewen Chatfield 123, and Michael Kasprowicz 113. Good old Stephen Boock is seventh with 74 Test wickets.