All hail Kane Williamson, cricket’s quiet achiever

New Zealand's captain Kane Williamson averages more than 70 in Tests over the past two years Picture: AFP

Shortly after Kane Williamson went through to his second double century of New Zealand’s international summer the cameras panned around the ground, where supporters stood in acclamation, and then to the home team’s dressing room. There you got a glimpse of two Black Caps players, Mitchell Santner and Tom Blundell, also standing and clapping, with Santner then turning to his teammate and shaking his head in wonderment.

Williamson’s form at present provokes such a response everywhere, as he is taking gluttony and consistency to head-scratching levels. In the past two years, predominantly playing at home, he has averaged more than 70, and in his past 50 Tests only five runs an innings fewer than that. He is now ranked the world’s No 1 Test batsman and is, by common consent, the best player produced by his country.

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What a week then for Williamson – not that he would enjoy the focus on him over his team – who has now also led New Zealand to the top of the Test rankings for the first time in the country’s history. With the 2-0 defeat of Pakistan, New Zealand toppled Australia at the summit, a testament to the intelligent way they marshal their slender resources and to their impregnability at home, where they are unbeaten in their past eight series.

While Williamson, 30, is hardly undervalued, it would be true to say that he has fewer column inches written about him and dominates airtime less frequently than, say, Virat Kohli or Steve Smith, two of his peers and rivals. Neither underappreciated nor undervalued in his home country, but unexposed in a wider sense, perhaps, in the way other stars of the game are not.

That says a lot about Williamson’s own understated nature, as well as the team he plays for. Williamson courts no publicity, has no social media exposure. Although now top of the team rankings, Test cricket costs New Zealand money and so they neither play as much of it nor travel as much as some other teams – when Williamson scores a hundred at home, much of the cricket world slumbers. The All Blacks, for the most part, help to keep cricket grounded, too.

These reasons apart, I also wonder if it says more about the way in which we value relative talents in all walks of life. Are we prone to underestimating low-key excellence at the expense of those with flashier credentials?

I’m guilty of this myself. I have written about Williamson before but certainly not to the same extent as Kohli or Smith. Kohli, for sure, is a magnetic presence on the cricket field and demands our attention: when a short video of him batting in the nets before India’s previous tour of Australia in 2018-19 was released, it provoked a whole column, so crisp was his ball-striking, so feline his movements. Smith’s technique, too, is fascinating, as it is so unusual and against the grain of orthodoxy.

Williamson’s game is not so eye-catching. You can’t really imagine emulating the way Kohli or Smith play, but you could imagine trying to copy Williamson (in your dreams). Yet he has the purest technique on show; plays the ball later than anyone else; makes better decisions more often and, at the moment, is scoring more runs, more consistently. These talents, such as decision-making in the blink of an eye, are not so striking or evident but they are the foundations of batting.

Here is the late Martin Crowe, Williamson’s predecessor as New Zealand’s best, on the captain’s unassuming greatness: “It’s his quiet defence that stands out, the ball met with a cushion in his hand, his framework right behind the line, his head staring the action down. Williamson is a difficult player to focus against: due to his humility and lack of ego, it is harder for bowlers … his passive body language gives very little to feed off.”

While Kohli is domineering on the field, and an embodiment of the new India off it, and Smith takes an infatuation with batting to new (and perhaps damaging) levels, Williamson trails an air of normality. As the New Zealand journalist Andrew Alderson wrote: “He appears as balanced in life as he is at the crease.”

Given these differences, I wonder whether the way in which the game is consumed now also accentuates the focus elsewhere. Increasingly, for younger viewers certainly, in-play clips and short-form highlights are followed as assiduously as the live action. In 2019 the live rights market accounted for 86 per cent of value for broadcast rights-holders, whereas the average fan consumed only just over half of their content live.

A studious defensive shot, a glide down to third man (Williamson’s trademark) or the humble celebration of a century are not so likely to make a widely shared highlights reel or find themselves made up into digestible short-form clips as a rasping drive, contorted shovel to leg or a dramatic celebration. Williamson’s greatness needs to be appreciated in the round, over time, rather than bit by ten-second bit.

Equally, his captaincy is more difficult to define in a snapshot than his predecessor’s. Brendon McCullum was a trendsetter, turning a historically pragmatic team into something more dynamic and a reflection of his own outsized personality. Williamson has felt no need to compete, stands unceremoniously at mid-off for the most part, and says of his understated style of leadership that it suits his personality, while the way in which his team play suits the national character. He and they are very comfortable in their own skin.

In Australia recently there was another example of understated but successful leadership and batsmanship in the figure of Ajinkya Rahane. Leading in Kohli’s absence, there could be no greater contrast between these two cricketers, yet India’s victory in the second Test in Melbourne spoke eloquently for the stand-in captain: he made a fine hundred in the first innings and calmly galvanised the team after a shocking defeat in the opening Test. His reaction to both was typically restrained and unassuming.

In the Harvard Business Review, authors Raffaella Sadun, Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen queried the common undervaluation of competent management. Operational effectiveness may not be seen as a path to sustainable competitive advantage – doing the same thing as others, only better, is perceived to be not as valuable as distinctive strategic positioning – yet it is neither as common nor as straightforward to replicate, as you may imagine.

In all walks of life, we can probably think of the quiet over-achievers who are shaded from time to time by those who, say, spend office time shouting more loudly, dressing more flashily or working more showily. Recent events on the cricket field are a reminder that sometimes understated excellence can be hard to beat.