TURNER'S OBSERVATIONS STILL CARRY WEIGHT
A review of Cricket’s Global Warming. By Martin Davidson
Glenn Turner needs no introduction to the reader/s of these words.
In the last 50 years, he has arguably contributed as much to the wider cause of New Zealand cricket than any flanneled fool who preceded, or followed him.
As a young man, he was equally adept off the front foot and back, offering a defensive bat to threatening and non-threatening deliveries alike as he laid the foundations for a long and run-laden career. As he grew, in body and mind, he allowed himself the odd flourish but there was always a cussedness about him.
With growing maturity, as a person and batsman, Turner evolved his game, adding crisply struck cover drives that always remained on the carpet; the odd slash behind point would reveal itself on occasion, surgically applied to evade long-armed gully fieldsmen. The advent of the pyjama game saw the scholarly non-follower or fashion expand his repertoire, the lofted clip off his legs for two helping to keep the runs ticking over at an acceptable rate.
In retirement, Turner remained attached to a game he has given his life to. Coach, selector, broadcaster, critic ... he has done them all, in each and every role offering an honest, frank, considered, researched - at time visceral - appraisal of events unfolding out there in the middle.
And when New Zealand Cricket got into a crisis in the mid-1990s, Turner accepted an offer to take control of a national side still on its knees, peering upwards through a thick haze of vapour, as the aftermath of the pot-smoking tour of South Africa left human wreckage strewn across not only the street but an entire neighbourhood.
Once Turner's reign was terminated abruptly by an NZC preoccupied with bowing to player pressure and the search for the filthy lucre, Turner drifted from sight and re-emerged in retirement close enough to a golf course in Wanaka to whet his deep need for competition. He remains a highly knowledgeable student of the game and can still conduct a master class on batsmanship.
He is one of the most astute observers of the game to call the Land of the Long White Cloud home but as the years have rolled by and his 70th birthday came and went, Turner found himself very much on the outside looking in. However, his binoculars are still in strong focus, and his latest creation hit internet bookshops in April of last year. Cricket's Global Warming, a 237-page soft-cover publication found on amazon.com and bookdepository.com, has been scripted in collaboration with Lynn McConnell, another good southern bloke now living in Warkworth.
The contents of the book don't require a forensic examination for a reviewer to conclude it is a fine read for the many of us out there unhappy with the direction cricket is heading in. Money, and the naked pursuit of more money, is a cancer that threatens the very fabric of the sport and Turner, in his inimitably lecturing tone, sets about exposing the many incidents and accident, hints and allegations, that have pock-marked both the national and international game in the last couple of decades.
Of course, he offers his remedies to any manner of ills, and wants his thoughts to start a wider conversation among those who care about the great game, in the hope a broad discussion will accelerate the discovery of a cure acceptable to the game's supposed guardians.
Cricket's Global Warming available as ebook through Amazon.com and as a paperback from thebookdepository.com (free postage worldwide).