Black Cap Daryl Mitchell tells Scotty Stevenson about why he dissects his performance in every game and why he sees himself as "a domestic battler".
This is the first thing that must be said, as strange as it may sound: Daryl Mitchell is the owner of a top row of teeth boasting such extraordinary luminosity they could outshine a Liberace stage jacket and all of Carmen Miranda's sequins.
Daryl Mitchell — the Dazzler as he has come to be known — is on a video call from London where he is sharing a hotel room with "his girls", wife Amy and daughters Addison and Lily. He is preparing for a four-hour bus trip to Manchester, 10 hours after being on the wrong side of the result against the Oval Invincibles at Lord's. It's another day in a life that feels very at odds with his own assessment of who he is as a cricketer. To wit: "A domestic battler".
The Daryl Mitchell we now know is not the Daryl Mitchell no one used to know. Quintessential Kiwi humility notwithstanding, domestic battler is a far cry from what he has become. Domestic battlers, as a rule if not a universal truth, don't walk past their name in glistening gold leaf on the Lord's Honours Board, as Mitchell did this week on his way to training. Domestic battlers don't score test match centuries at the home of cricket, which of course Mitchell did, before scoring another at Trent Bridge and another at Headingly in last year's three-test series against England. Five others have scored three successive centuries in a test series in England. The four most recognisable are Bradman, Boon, Lara, Dravid.
Not exactly battlers.
As is the nature of sport, it feels as though the Daryl Mitchell we now see, the one who has ascended the rickety cricketing staircase to become a fixture of Black Caps sides in all three formats, is the Daryl Mitchell who always was destined to be here. That, however, is the result of recency's firm grip on recollection; the evidential argument for Mitchell's modern success does not necessarily correlate with a self-evident truth. For much of his career the "talented but stubborn" all-rounder found his search for consistency entailed many a fruitless expedition into cricket's Badlands, where the banshees of failure dance around the towering bonfires of unrealised ambition.
"I was determined, that's how I would put it," he says of his quest to extract the most out of himself as a cricketer.
"At Northern Districts [for whom Mitchell played most of his domestic cricket] we had a lot of senior players who did their best to show me how to prepare and how to find my way. A combination of that advice and my own stubbornness allowed me to develop my own way to get where I wanted to be."
Where he wanted to be was on the best grounds in the world, wearing a fern on his chest, something his father John had done with the All Blacks, first as a player and then as the national coach. He had grown up in Hamilton watching his father play for and captain Waikato's Mooloo Men. He was just 10 (and his father just 37) when John Mitchell was named as All Blacks coach in 2001, replacing Wayne Smith. So what was it like to be the child of a man whose role was more scrutinised than any other in the ecosystem of New Zealand sport?
"If I think about it now, it was more a privilege than anything else for me. There were a lot of rugby crazy kids in New Zealand but not many of them were standing under the goal posts catching balls for Dan Carter and kicking them back."
It is a wonderful portrait of sentimentality, when viewed through a pre-pubescent's permanently wide eyes but, as much as Mitchell will forever cherish those boy's own memories, what happened in the aftermath of the 2003 Rugby World Cup, when New Zealand was defeated by Australia in the semi-final and the Rugby Union turned on their man, would ultimately and irrevocably change the course of his childhood.
On December 19, 2003, Graham Henry was appointed as All Blacks coach, replacing John Mitchell. Daryl and John were at Seddon Park, just a dad and his kid watching the opening day of the test match between New Zealand and Pakistan — a day on which Stephen Fleming would reach a century for the sixth time in his career.
Neither Mitchell got to see that milestone live.
"Dad and I were on the bank enjoying the test when there was an announcement over ground's PA system that Graham Henry had been appointed All Blacks coach.
"Dad just looked at me and said, 'Let's get out of here.' And we did."
Mitchell Senior hasn't lived in New Zealand since, and his son believes he probably never will again. Following his axing as All Blacks coach, John Mitchell moved to Perth to coach the Western Force in Super Rugby and Daryl followed, completing his schooling there and impressing local cricket aficionados enough to make the Western Australian under-19 side. He would return to Hamilton for the 2011-12 season and debut for Northern Districts, where the pitched battle between ability and intransigence would really begin.
To those close to cricket, Mitchell long presented something of a conundrum. He was an incredible striker of the ball and a more than handy medium pace bowler, but his 'determination' could be mistaken at times for other, less sought-after qualities — a claim, it should be noted, that requires as much cross-examination of the beholder as the behaviour. Mitchell, like all cricketers, had good days and bad, seasons of bumper harvest, and periods of debilitating drought. He was good enough for New Zealand A selection, but was he better than anyone else currently in the full New Zealand side?
"As recently as four years ago Amy and I were thinking that maybe this just wasn't going to happen, but even in those periods of doubt — and there have been plenty of those — I still believed, even if the light of that belief had dimmed, that if I put my mind to it, I would get there."
In February 2019, Mitchell was called into New Zealand's T20 International side for the first time to face India but that belief, now back on high beam, would be called upon again as cricket handed him another salutary lesson in the difference between getting there and truly arriving. In Mitchell's first 11 innings he reached double figures just three times, a return on investment that provided little validation for elevation, and one that would have derailed a less determined player. It would not dissuade him.
"I have a very simple formula for dealing with the complex emotions that come with this sport: I don't spend a lot of time looking back, and I never try to project too far into the future. I just try to live in the present."
Which is naturally the only place any of us can live, for the past has now gone and the future has not arrived. What did arrive though, was Daryl Mitchell.
After that less than auspicious international introduction, Mitchell has had 38 bats in T20 Internationals. He has failed to reach double figures on just seven occasions. He's also registered five half centuries, a top score of 72 not out (which sent New Zealand to the T20 World Cup final), and he has been dismissed for a duck just once. It is said there are two ways to go bankrupt: gradually then suddenly. It feels as if the same axiom can apply to Mitchell's life as bona fide Black Cap.
"I love this game, but it can be horrible, especially for batters. It constantly reminds you that you are going to have good days and bad but if you want to make peace with that, you must play the game the way you want to.
"All I want to do is contribute to the team I am playing for, to find ways to get involved in the game, and to find ways to win."
It is undeniable that Mitchell finds ways to get involved. He is just that kind of athlete. You see them in all sports, the players who appear built for the big moments, who actively seek them out, crave them, want desperately to play their part. As much as cricket's shorter formats serve up fast food highlights like franchise burger joints, cricket's most lingering flavours can still only be found in the test match kitchen.
And it is here where Mitchell has truly established himself, a fact that seems most analogous with the way he has learned to deal with cricket's idiosyncratic pressures. His first innings, after he was called into the test team in place of the injured and infinitely mysterious Colin de Grandhomme to face England in November, 2019, produced 73 runs and omission for the next 13 months.
Mitchell returned to the test team in December 2020, and has not left. There have been some forgettable innings since, but the overall body of work has confounded those who doubt him and placed him in record categories where domestic battlers simply have no place. Mitchell took 22 innings to move past 1000 test runs. Only Devon Conway (19), John Reid and Mark Richardson (20) and Jesse Ryder (21) got there in quicker time. That string of consecutive centuries against England (which also featured two half-centuries) stands as his apotheosis, but will it remain that way?
The nature of cricket dictates that any analysis of a player's career is first and foremost concerned with his or her statistics. In this way, every player can be compared with all players past, and benchmarked against every player in the future. It is also widely accepted that at the end of a player's career, the averages thus presented will directly correspond to that player's true ability, given that the longer the career, the greater the chance of failure. This wisdom, though entrenched in the sport, leaves a player like Daryl Mitchell in an analytical wilderness wherein the average is at odds with the sample size. This in turn creates a punditry paradox: Mitchell's contribution is obvious, while his historical value is yet to be revealed.
This is the trickiest of territories to navigate. Now 32, fresh from a county season with Lancashire, and in the midst of The Hundred with London Spirit, Mitchell's place in the current pecking order of New Zealand cricket simultaneously feels safe while for some his averages appear strangely inflated, as if everything he has achieved to this point is anomalous to standard perceptions of players and the anachronistic notion of pre-ordainment.
Regardless of what side of the boundary rope you stand on this matter, there is an energy about Mitchell that goes some way to explaining how he gradually, then suddenly, found himself in the centre of all things. As he talks, he breaks down his match from the night before; he has catalogued his contribution (didn't with the bat) and filed a moment missed (an attempted catch on the boundary) under 'what if?'
"I do that every time I finish a game. Did I watch the ball? Was I absolutely ready for a moment that came my way? Did I prepare the best way possible? If I can work through that process, and if I can say I did everything I needed to do, then I can accept that it wasn't my day, and move on."
He will have days that aren't his, and days that are. He's had plenty already. He was a kid who dreamed of playing for his country, and now he does. Plenty of dreams die before the dawn, but cricket is a summer sport and Mitchell's dreams have found a place in the sun.
For now, and for who knows how long, Daryl Mitchell is on the road with his family in tow, just as he had been on the road with his father as he chased his career as a coach. Back home in Christchurch, on the wall in the garage, are two ferns. One stitched in white on the famous black jersey, and one stitched in black on a white test shirt.
Monochromatic mementos — the realised aspirations of two generations.
The Scotty Stevenson Interview is a regular feature you can find on 1news.co.nz each Saturday.
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