The world’s third-best Test batsman has made a quiet arrival in London for the beginning of a four-month stint in county cricket. Middlesex made headlines recently by saying they werekeen to sign Virat Kohli. Maybe next year. This one, they’ve got his friend and contemporary Kane Williamson who, with his gear stuffed into a Karachi Kings kit bag, was picked up from the airport by his new captain, Steve Eskinazi, on Wednesday morning then went straight to training on the Nursery Ground before the game against Sussex in the Blast on Thursday night.
Williamson should do plenty for Middlesex’s middle order, but maybe not quite so much for the viewing figures their live stream brings in on the subcontinent. Still, it feels like a coup for county cricket. It has been made possible by the support of MCC, who are paying a part of the 34-year-old’s fee so that he can double up playing for London Spirit in the Hundred.
To commit to spending the summer in England, Williamson has had to turn down another central contract with New Zealand, who are going on tour in Zimbabwe in July and August. Instead, he says, he will continue the arrangement he has had for the past 12 months, where he is available to play for the national team without being obliged to when their fixtures clash with other commitments. “It worked well last year, and obviously I’m in close conversations with New Zealand cricket, and the relationship is strong, but the landscape’s changing really fast.”
Williamson is in the odd position of being a part of their team, and apart from their team. “Yeah, we’re still learning how to do it,” he says. “The landscape keeps changing with the different challenges that we’re presented with as cricketers. It’s a work in progress. But New ZealandCrickethave been great to work with on it, I’ve been fortunate with that.” To be blunt, the economics of the game mean they don’t have much choice.
Williamson, so adept at pacing an innings, is trying to work out how best to thread his way through the years he has left in the game he plays so well. Eleven years ago, his compatriot Martin Crowe named Williamson, Kohli, Joe Root and Steve Smith the “Fab Four” in a famous article for ESPN Cricinfo. All these years later Kohli – who is 36 – has just become the first of them to announce his retirement from Test cricket, a decision which, Williamson says, caused him to do a little reflective thinking himself.
“My first thought was ‘oh gosh, there’s an end point’,” he says. “Because before that, you’re on the journey, there’s a pursuit there. And it’s not connected to those other three, but we’ve all been playing at the same time, and we’ve all competed against each other for a long time and we all know each other pretty well. So then you do start to reflect a little bit. I know Virat pretty well, we’ve chatted a lot over the years, but you do realise that we’re not just cricketers as well, we’re human beings and your life situation changes.”
Unlike Kohli, Williamson still wants to play red-ball cricket. But he also has a young family to look after. They have come over with him. “Summer’s always got a nice buzz here in the UK and especially in London, so it’s great to call it home for a few months.” You guess it makes a welcome change from making an itinerant living on tour, or the T20 circuit.
He is looking forward to playing four or five championship matches. He says the competition helped make him into the player he is. “I know I really valued my time in England actually playing county cricket as a young player, getting exposed and having to learn. You’re just constantly having to try and work things out but getting so many opportunities to do it. Whereas in most other parts of the world you’re playing half as many games a year.
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“The opportunities now are vast and that’s an amazing thing. But my passion was for the red-ball game, that was the pinnacle, and that’s where my aspirations were, growing up,” he says.
“I guess on the other side, you have the white-ball formats and they come and they go pretty quickly and there’s so much of it going on, which presents a lot of fantastic opportunities, but yeah, when I talk about the soul of the game I still see that as the red-ball cricket.”
Go catch him at it if you can. It’s not clear how many more who think, or play, the same way will come along after he’s gone.