New Zealand cricketing great Sutcliffe dies at 77

Bert Sutcliffe, the dashing left-hand batsman who played 42 Tests for New Zealand between 1947 and 1965, died in an Auckland hospice on Friday aged 77 after a long battle with emphysema.

Sutcliffe had been described as New Zealand's Don Bradman and made his name on the 1949 tour of England with Walter Hadlee's team when, after a slow start to the tour, he scored 2,627 runs at an average of about 60.

Sutcliffe scored five centuries and 15 half centuries and averaged 40.1 in his 42 Tests, with a highest score of 230 not out in Delhi on the 1965 tour of India, Pakistan and England.

He had retired in 1958 after a tour of England, but was persuaded to return for the gruelling five-month tour of the subcontinent and England in 1965 by captain John Reid. And it was in the first Test of that tour -- his first in seven years -- that Sutcliffe compiled his top score.

The left-hander dominated New Zealand cricket during the 1950s and scored his highest first-class score, 365 for Otago against Canterbury, in 1952.

He scored two triple centuries in domestic cricket during the 1950s.

But Sutcliffe never played in a New Zealand Test victory. He missed the country's first, in early 1956 against the West Indies, because he was still recovering from the 1955 tour of India and Pakistan, and victories in South Africa in 1962 were played before his return to the Test arena.

Reid, New Zealand's captain for much of Sutcliffe's career, said on Friday: "If anyone deserved to play in a New Zealand victory, it was Bert Sutcliffe. He put so much effort into the country's cricket on and off the field and deserved to be part of a Test winning side."

Sutcliffe won the hearts of cricket enthusiasts in South Africa in the Ellis Park Test of 1953. He had been felled by a Neil Adcock bouncer early in his innings and retired with blood gushing from a head wound. But he returned later in the innings with his head swathed in bandages and hit six sixes in an unbeaten knock of 80.

The last wicket to fall on that Christmas Day was that of young fast bowler Bob Blair, who had come to the crease to a standing ovation hours after learning of the death of his fiancée in a train disaster in New Zealand on Christmas Eve.

In February, Sutcliffe was remembered when the ground at Lincoln University, near Christchurch, was named the Bert Sutcliffe Oval in his honour.

Mail Cricket Editor