If it sounds like a familiar refrain, it still does not diminish the truth behind it. After shaking a rather large gorilla off his back when scoring a test century against India in Napier last year, McCullum’s form with the bat slipped on the tour to Sri Lanka.
Back home against the sub-continental threats of Bangladesh, and ahead of the marquee tour by Australia, McCullum’s runs and glovework will be a vital component of any success the BLACKCAPS can expect.
Daring, flamboyant and, yes, sometimes a little controversial, if Daniel Vettori is the brains behind this team, the tattooed McCullum is, at his best, the beating heart.
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While his work behind the stumps now ranks with the best New Zealand has ever produced, it is his presence at the batting crease which stirs anticipation among cricket fans from here to Kolkata and points in between.
A blistering accumulator of boundaries, McCullum, 28, is this season in search of the sort of consistency that has thus far eluded him. Now seemingly settled at the pivotal No 7 spot in the order in tests, McCullum would like to offer a similar threat to tiring attacks that Adam Gilchrist posed in the great Australian teams.
Problem being that all too often McCullum has found himself at the crease when the bowling attacks are not particularly tired.
But with high hopes in a batting line-up that includes such young talent as Martin Guptill, Daniel Flynn, Ross Taylor and Jesse Ryder, there should be more scope for McCullum to trust his instincts, just like there was in Napier when Taylor and Ryder had already pulverised the Indians, with McCullum applying the coup de grace for his third test century and first against one of the ‘big’ nations.
McCullum has marvellously entertaining instincts. Attack first, defend as a last resort. It will not always work but when it does it is edge-of-the-seat material. Forced into more defensive, counter-intuitive roles, McCullum looks as if he is wrestling himself as much as the opposition. He has no such conflicts in the short formats.
There was the time, obviously, when he took Twenty20 batting to a new level with his 158 not out in the first Indian Premier League match to be staged, going from nobody to cult hero in India in the space of 73 deliveries, most of which were dispatched to the outer points of M Chinnaswamy Stadium.
* Written by Dylan Cleaver.
* Article courtesy of the Official New Zealand Cricket Guide
