England must study Harris lesson

Chris Harris is the bald bloke who must have been in the New Zealand team since they started playing cricket. He hangs around at backward point taking spectacular catches, bats irritatingly in the lower middle order and needles batsmen with a brand of medium to slow bowling which could be a working model for the one-day art of taking the pace off and on its day takes something else altogether.

"Harry", as his wider public know him, is the embodiment of a bits-and-pieces player, and much more than the sum of his parts. With him two and two make five. He is New Zealand's most popular limited-overs cricketer, as well as their most capped and enduring, partly because he has been a fixture for so long, partly because of the wisps of hair which invariably wave lingeringly from his scalp when his cap falls off. It makes him look homespun.

The man with the middle name of Zinzan (the rugby player Zinzan Brooke is a relation, the Zinzani family having migrated from Italy to New Zealand a while back now) is no such thing. He is the sort of deadly composed all-rounder whom England are trying to find in their desperate attempt to have a side ready not only for the five-match limited-overs series which started against New Zealand today (due to end at 9.15am GMT) but more importantly for the World Cup 12 months hence. Young shavers like Paul Collingwood, Ben Hollioake and Jeremy Snape might seize the chance to look at Harris in the next three weeks and examine his approach.

Of course, he has not really been around from the dawn of Kiwi cricketing time, only since November 12 years ago when he played his first match against Australia. "Sydney, 1990, six overs, 1 for 36, and 17 not out," he said, to demonstrate, if nothing else, that the widely held belief that all one-dayers are instantly forgettable is not necessarily true.

"I remember being in the nets and bowling a couple of no-balls and Warren Lees [the former Kiwi player and coach] said to me that I shouldn't be overstepping the mark like that. I said: 'Look, I do that in the nets, I never do it in the game.' The first two balls I bowled were no- balls. The Australian crowd was about 38,000 strong and yelling abuse. Some things haven't changed." Harris is now 198 matches down a long road from his homely home town of Christchurch and in the second match of this series in Wellington on Saturday should become the first New Zealander to play 200. If he has not been around forever, it would seem he intends to go on for that long.

"People look at me and think I must be about 40 but I'm only 32 and keen to play for another five or six years and perhaps another two World Cups," he said. "The last journo I said that to started laughing." But is he still hungry for the one-day circus. "Yeah, definitely," he said with an old geezer's stern countenance.

Harris remains deceptively proficient. He won two man of the match awards in the recent triangular series in Australia, both against the hosts who elicit the best from him. It was against them that he scored one of the most stirring one-day centuries six years ago, 130 from 124 balls when New Zealand were 44 for 3. It was in the quarter- finals of the World Cup.

New Zealand lost, but it showed that Harris was a big-game player. He is also committed. During the recent Aussie tournament he twice flew back home to Christchurch because of his mother-in-law's illness, but he did not miss a match. He accepts that his Test career is probably over after 19 matches. He has never been as effective in the longer form of the international game (though he is prolific in domestic first-class cricket), which demonstrates that there are such entities as one-day specialists. He is tremendous news for bald blokes.