Jesse Ryder, We Hardly Knew Ye
A cricketing 'what if?'
If New Zealand cricket fandom operated anything like the Barmy Army, the chants for Jesse Ryder would have written themselves. “Ryder’s on the storm, Ryder’s on the storm, with talent natural born, vicious cut shots will be thrown.” You can just imagine them growing louder and more boisterous after every boundary. Already, Ryder’s on the Storm has been a favourite headline of sub-editors the world over (I found at least three articles with that title, though I can hardly judge, I was only checking because I wanted to use it myself).
If we were feeling especially creative, that might have been interspersed with an excerpt from War’s Low Rider, too. “All my friends know Jesse Ryder (yeah). Jesse Ryder makes the score higher (yeah). Jesse Ryder never bats slower. Jesse Ryder is a real goer (hey).” Alas, we’ll have to make do with the Beige Brigade, sailors' hats, and vulgar, derogatory crowds, at least, if you trust David Warner (and I can’t imagine why his experience with New Zealand crowds would be an outlier…).
But this isn’t an outlet for me to write cricket-themed song parodies (There Is A Batter That Never Goes Out by The Steve Smiths will have to wait for another article, and it’s best that my Led Zeppelin Houses of the Kohli lyric sheet never sees the light of day), nor to complain about David Warner. This is an ode to Jesse Ryder; neither a eulogy nor a relitigation of his many off-field troubles, but a look into a persistent ‘what if’ that often nags at me.
In the wake of the 2019 Cricket World Cup, many New Zealand fans went through the stages of grief. Some still are. I might still be stuck in denial. I can’t quite remember why, in hindsight—it’s such a shame they cancelled the tournament abruptly and without explanation after the semi-finals, and the final never took place, but what a semi-final it was.
In all seriousness, there was a lot of Bargaining. A lot of ‘if onlys’ (Mitchell Santner, you know what you did). The one that has stuck with me the most was a comment I saw a few days later, which went something like: “If we’d had Jesse Ryder in this team, we’d have won at least one of these two tournaments.” A few years later, watching Martin Guptill meander to a match-losing 28 (35) in the T20 World Cup Final, it was difficult not to daydream. Oh, Jesse, where art thou?
Now, I know full well why Ryder wasn’t in the team. This isn’t the article to regurgitate that debate. There’s a compelling argument that if Ryder had remained in the team, the dressing room culture would never have turned around enough to make those finals in the first place. Trust me, I get all that. But in terms of pure on-field cricketing talent, it’s a difficult assertion to argue with. Before I attempt to investigate if this comforting coping mechanism actually holds up to scrutiny, allow yourselves to bask in the warm glow of a thrilling thought: Jesse Ryder x BazBall. Whoa. A fully unlocked, optimized, self-confident Ryder, batting with the utter freedom Baz has since imbued into so many. I mean, if Zak Crawley can do it, what would Ryder have done? Sorry, I may need a moment.
That’s all well and good, an utterly exhilarating concept, but how would it have worked in practice? First, a refresher. In 48 ODIs from 2008-2014, Ryder averaged 33.2 and struck at 95.3. Those numbers are remarkably similar to McCullum’s career marks (30 at 96), or, for another point of comparison, Sanath Jayasuriya averaged 32 and struck at 91 in ODIs. Pretty elite company as a dashing opener. To this day, Ryder’s ODI career strike rate puts him among the top 50 of all time (min. 1,000 runs), despite almost everyone above him on the list either debuting or playing the majority of their careers after he retired and the format was revolutionised (only Sehwag, Afridi, Gilchrist, Ricardo Powell, and, fittingly, Ian Smith are exceptions who played the majority of their careers pre-Ryder with higher strike rates). If Ryder came along today, there’s no doubt he’d be striking above 100, at the most conservative estimate. More likely, 120 would be in danger. Finn Allen, eat your heart out.
To illustrate this point, for the briefest moment, Ryder held the record for the fastest ODI hundred, scored from just 46 balls against the West Indies in a rain-reduced 21-over affair. I say brief, because Corey Anderson bested that mark by 10 balls in the same innings, New Year’s Day 2014. Long, long before Sunrisers Hyderabad were threatening the 300 barrier in T20s (scoring 200 was still scarcely believable), Ryder and Anderson powered NZ to 281 from 21 overs, facing Narine, Holder, and Bravo, no less. He was a decade ahead of his time, maybe two.
But Ryder wasn’t just a dirty slogger, despite the accusations from many fans at the time. Far from it, he was in the Warner/Sehwag/Gilchrist mould of white ball blazers who are equally, if not more, adept in the red ball game. In 18 Tests, he averaged just over 40 with a relatively calm 55 strike rate. That climbs to an average of 45 in first-class cricket, with 8,748 runs and 25 hundreds. For comparison, Ross Taylor scored 27 first-class tons. What could have been…
Even that average belies Ryder’s talent—he was good enough to push 50, had other things not gotten in the way. Put simply, Ryder could really bat. You don’t score a hundred and then a double hundred in consecutive tests against Zaheer Khan, Ishant Sharma, and Harbhajan Singh after entering the crease at 40/3 and 23/3 if you can’t. Nor do you score a hundred in Ahmedabad against Khan, Singh, Sreesanth, and Ojha without oodles of talent, again walking to the crease with the team in trouble at 133/3 (soon 137/4) in pursuit of 487. Serendipitously, he scored that hundred (his third and final test ton) with Kane Williamson on debut at the other end on the way to notching his first test hundred. You’d struggle to find two more diametrically opposite personalities in NZ cricket than Williamson and Ryder, but that test represents the beginning and end of an era, all in one.
He could also offer handy part-time seam overs, another in NZ’s dibbly-dobbly medium pace lineage, picking up 12 wickets at 34 with an economy of 6.07 in ODIs. Not quite good enough to be a fifth bowler, but a very handy sixth. If that doesn’t sound mind-blowing, he also claimed 155 first-class wickets at 30, with an economy of 2.97. More than half of those came during a two-season purple patch, where he claimed 43 wickets at 17 for Essex in 2014, before going one better with 44 wickets the following season. Bear in mind how well seaming English conditions suited his bowling when we circle back to 2019. Outside of those two seasons, no one would claim Ryder was a world-beater with the ball, but he was certainly a handy contributor who loved a bouncer, despite his limited pace.
All of that brings me back to where and how Ryder would have fit in during New Zealand’s white-ball golden era. In 2019, the answer is pretty straightforward: a 35-year-old Ryder would have most likely occupied Henry Nicholls’ spot at the top of the order, or perhaps even Guptill’s, who had a torrid time throughout that tournament with five single-figure scores and only one innings over 50. Given our conservative selection habits, I think Ryder replacing Nicholls is more likely than NZ dropping Guptill. Remember, Nicholls was only vaulted in to open at the very last minute (he’d only done it four times in ODIs before the tournament, all coming that year). Colin Munro had occupied that spot until mid-tournament, when his poor form reached a critical apex, having averaged just 19 in ODIs in 2018 and only 25 in 2019, albeit striking above 100. The brains trust of Kane and Stead wanted an aggressive opener for that tournament, giving Munro every opportunity to come right, and Ryder would have fit the bill perfectly.
Guptill, Ryder, Williamson, Taylor. That’s an imposing top four, in anyone’s books. Could Ryder have scored that one extra run we needed? Would he have been the man for the Super Over, contorting that barest of margins into New Zealand’s favour? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t like to bowl to Jesse Ryder in a Super Over. Not that there was ever a good time to bowl to him.
In 2015, the fit is a little trickier, with the Guptill, McCullum, Williamson, Taylor top four being pretty untouchable. As blasphemous as this may be given their semi-final heroics, I think one of Grant Elliott or Corey Anderson would have made way (sorry, Grant Elliott, I love you and hope you’ve never had to buy your own drinks in New Zealand ever since that unbelievable chase). In all likelihood, Ryder would have taken Elliot’s spot at 5, given Elliott had only returned to the side earlier that year, having not previously played since averaging 24 in 14 ODIs in 2013 (and, before that, not featuring in the format since 2010).
However, let's just say Ryder replaced Anderson, because it’s my hypothetical, and I can’t bring myself to imagine a world where Elliott’s semi-final masterpiece and fighting 83 in the final never happened. Then again, Anderson’s 58 (57) to go with the wickets of Faf, Russow, and Miller in the semi-final were crucial too, and oft-overlooked. Oh well, that’s a butterfly effect to parse another day.
So, Ryder would have slotted into the all-rounder role at 5 or 6 during the 2015 World Cup, offering his part-time overs, and forming an utterly terrifying death-hitting combo with Luke Ronchi. Show me a bowler who would have liked to bowl to those two at the end of an innings, freed by Baz’s all-out attacking mentality, and I’ll show you a man who knows no fear. A quick divergence, but somehow, Ronchi is still underrated, even though his batting numbers (avg. 23.7, SR 114) are almost identical to Shahid Afridi’s (avg. 23.6, SR 117), while also offering top-class glovework.
Anyway, back to Ryder, I imagine him filling a similar role to A.B. de Villiers’ in that tournament, the man who fittingly took the fastest ODI hundred record off both Ryder and Anderson; an imposing, classy finisher who also fills the fifth/sixth bowler quota, along with Elliott and a sprinkling of Kane. If Baz and Gup don’t get you at the top, and Williamson, Taylor, and Elliott don’t class you to death in the middle overs, Ryder and Ronchi will remove your soul at the end.
That’s the logistics and raw numbers covered: how good was Ryder, where would he have slotted in, and at whose expense? But Jesse Ryder couldn’t be explained on paper, nor by any logic I’ve ever encountered. What about the intangibles? What about (and I hate this sporting cliche, but no other fits) the X-factor?
One thing immediately springs to mind: New Zealand were scared in the 2015 final. Shit scared. Of Starc. Of the MCG. Of Australia. Of the big stage. I’m not sure the team would admit it, at least not in as many words, but it was written all over their faces: “We’re thrilled to have made it this far, but it seems inevitable Australia will do it again.” If they weren’t already beaten before the game started, they were after the first over.
Jesse Ryder would not have been scared. This is a man who was never afraid to speak his mind, for better and often for worse. A man who battled with alcoholism for most of his career (I mean this in no way as an indictment or judgement of his addiction, and sincerely hope that Ryder is doing better these days). More to the point, we’re talking about a man who suffered a collapsed lung and a fractured skull in a bar attack, had to be put in a medically induced coma for three days after vomit entered his lungs, and then broke the record for the fastest ODI hundred barely nine months later. If Rishab Pant’s story of recovery from a car crash is remarkable (and it is), that is practically miraculous. After that, what did he have left to fear? A game in a really big stadium against some guys in canary yellow who could bowl pretty fast? Pfft. I don’t know if Ryder would have scored runs that day. In fact, his limited record against Australia suggests not (an average of 16 from four tests, and just 25 runs in his sole ODI innings). But I know he wouldn’t have been intimidated. I know he would have watched McCullum dance down the wicket to Mitchell Starc and thought, hey, I can do that too, but better. Maybe it would have ended the same way. Maybe he’d have launched 150 (71). Maybe it would have rubbed off on his teammates. That’s the beauty and terror of Jesse Ryder, you never quite knew.
By 2019, Ryder would have been a veteran at 35. It’s hard to imagine what veteran-era Jesse Ryder would have looked like with the bat, so unique and undeniable are the impressions he left between 24-30. Would he have slowed down and matured like David Warner, becoming a reliable run machine? Or would he have gone the Rohit Sharma route and hit the turbocharge button in his later years? I have a pretty strong guess, and it isn’t the former. Coming out to open in Nicholls’ place, a blazing 42 (18) could have set an entirely different tone that day, maybe even reinvigorating Guptill, and giving a greater buffer for Kane and Latham’s slow but vital contributions throughout the middle.
As with 2015, we’ll never know what Ryder would have done in the Game That Must Not Be Named, the Final That Never Happened. He’s just as likely to have scored a golden duck, charging Archer in the first over to try to bury the ghosts of Brendon McCullum, but, whatever he contributed with the bat, I don’t think he would have panicked. You don’t need me to remind you that New Zealand panicked that day (I wish I could forget). Trent Boult agonisingly stepping on the rope, Mitchell Santner ducking the last ball of the innings, and all the rest. Not Ryder. Ryder would have wanted the ball (remember his record for Essex?). He wouldn’t have been intimidated by Stokes, Buttler, or anyone else. He was often accused of being arrogant off the field, probably fairly, but these are the moments when that arrogance would have come in handy. What, you think you’re better than me? I’ll show you. And given the overwhelming success of de Grandhomme’s stump-to-stump medium pace on that pitch and Neesham picking up 3 crucial wickets, Ryder, a bowler from a similar mould, certainly would have gotten his chance. Likely not at the death, when the panic utterly set in, but he definitely would have gotten a bowl. He would have bounced Eoin Morgan and probably given him a gobful. A slow, maybe even ineffective bouncer, but I know I’d be petrified trying to face one, simply because of the man delivering it. I have a clear picture in my mind of Ryder repeatedly rolling his arm over in the field, trying to get Kane’s attention at any opportunity right until the final over, and then the Super Over, too.
Sadly, this will forever remain one of cricket's innumerable ‘what ifs’, a fun thought exercise, and no more. Maybe, in some parallel universe, New Zealand is 2x World Cup Champions on the back of a pair of Ryder masterpieces. Maybe his form fell off horrendously, and we never even made those finals. But back in our universe, Ryder was a masterful batter well ahead of his time, and cricket is a little poorer for never having seen these scenarios play out, even if we understand why.
“If you give this man a life, your cricket team will die. He’s a killer on a road…Ryder on the storm.”
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Good stuff and I'd encourage you to read Jarrod Kimber's pieces on Jesse Ryder, which are two of my favourite cricket profiles:
https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/jarrod-kimber-do-it-for-yourself-jesse-558036
https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/jarrod-kimber-jesse-ryder-s-suburban-fairy-tale-865093