1994 And 30 More: The Career of Greg Stretch

We’d said to Ben Wheeler, “Who’s going to be opening the bowling for Manawatu?”

He goes, “Well Bevan Small will have the first over, he’s pretty rapid. Bowls a lot of short stuff and he’s quick, so just play him as you see him”.

The openers, Geoff Barnett and Tim Abrahams, go “And who’s at the other end?”

“Oh don’t worry about him, he’s not much.”

Small bowls the first over and he’s pretty sharp, Barnett who’s the skipper faces it.

Tim Abrahams has asked for centre for the first ball of the second over. It’s just about taken his head off. It was Adam Milne.

Wheeler was on the ground laughing, he thought it was the funniest thing that he’d set the openers up.

But just to see Tim Abrahams’ face when he walked off and said, “You told me that other bowler wasn’t doing much!”

***

This was 2010, after Marlborough had earned a Hawke Cup challenge against Manawatu by a razor-thin margin – on net run rate alone – over Buller.

It was Marlborough’s first crack at a challenge since they’d won (and lost) the Cup in 1994. Stretch was the only survivor from those two 1994 XIs, by then a month away from his 40th birthday and able to not only claim veteran status but probably approaching something like a cricketing geriatric.

All roads pointed to that being the point that Stretch hung up the gloves, called it a day, and reflected on 24 years as a Marlborough representative – 12 of them as captain – while having a few beers in the pavilion and talking about how much better it all was back in my day.

Especially given, as ‘keeper, he was out in the field for nearly 168 overs as Manawatu racked up 517, and then backed it up with another 26-over stint in the second innings before the game was called off – “needless to say, the beers tasted okay that night.”

Stretch didn’t retire though, dragging the kit bag back out again the following summer. Surely there must have been moments when he thought maybe it was time to call it a day; or when his wife, Nicki, perhaps encouraged him to come to that conclusion?

 “Oh, well probably a bit of yes to both of those questions, mate.”

“I just loved playing for Marlborough,” Stretch reflects. “It meant the world to me.”

“I still felt, even after 200 overs in the field, that I could keep going. […] I always said to myself, if it got to the stage I was just there because I’d been there forever, and I wasn’t contributing either with the gloves or the bat, then it would be time to go.”

A YOUNG START

Greg Stretch began his Marlborough career back in November 1986, initially as a 16-year-old schoolboy fill-in for a match against New Zealand Universities, before claiming a slot in the side the following summer that he wouldn’t relinquish for close to three decades.

His first game as a frontline selection came in a Hawke Cup elimination game against Nelson, who rolled out a full gamut of former, current or future First Class cricketers. Marlborough’s coach was Barry Roberts, a Hawke Cup stalwart who had a career that took him from Marlborough to Taranaki, Franklin and Hamilton before returning home to Horton Park.

“I said to him, ‘What do you want me to do, Botts?’

“He said, ‘Just whatever you do, don’t walk.’

“So that’s the instruction I got. I went out there to face Dave Leonard, I pushed forward, got a nick. A big nick. Dave Guthardt has dived in front of second slip and taken a one-handed specky. I thought, oh, better listen to the coach, so I stood there waiting to be given out.

“And the umpire said not out. I had Peter Visser, Richard Harden, Gary Robertson, Steve Gill all around me. I was 17 at the time, they were just saying things I’d never heard before.”

While Stretch didn’t last too much longer, it was still a potentially pivotal moment as Marlborough snuck a first innings lead of only five. In the end they were left with two sessions to bat out the game.

Then, as he puts it, “we got ourselves into a bit of a situation.” In a show of grit belying his age, he batted with Mark Lane for “two-and-a-half hours” but still couldn’t quite kill the game off. Nelson found themselves with half a sniff, needing 90 off six overs.

Raj Maru, Marlborough’s overseas pro, looked to front up:

“He said to our coach ‘Oh, I can bowl three overs at my end for 30’. His first over went for 28 and two leg byes, Steve Gill got stuck into it.”

Marlborough held on, Greg Logan holding his nerve, and Stretch had “a great introduction to what Hawke Cup cricket was all about.”

“And it’s one I could talk to you about for an hour.”

While they fell short of earning a challenge that year, Marlborough were punching above their weight. Nelson still had many of the shining lights of their previous tenures, North Canterbury (now Canterbury Country) were strong, and the elimination games were “cut-throat cricket” as Stretch says.

Stretch played his first Hawke Cup challenge in 1990. It was a trip down to Invercargill, to play a Southland team on the road of their history-making tenure as Cup custodians. Marlborough batted first, showed very little with the bat, and found themselves 150 all-out.

Southland did little better, despite Marlborough largely losing seamer Peter Smith to a bee sting, and were at one stage 104-7, then 128-8.

“We did have them on the ropes, Kelvin Scoble, one of our seamers, bowled particularly well that day. I think we dropped Robbie [Hill] at one stage, and as you say, he went on and got 100. In the end, they won outright on the first ball of the third morning, they won by an innings.”

With so much time left in the game after Marlborough’s embarrassing second innings collapse, the two teams agreed to a friendly one-dayer. It likely wouldn’t have cheered any of the Marlborough players up that they managed to win that.

TRIUMPH AT FITZHERBERT

Four years later, Marlborough earned a challenge again. It came courtesy of a good win over Canterbury Country, followed by a surprisingly difficult outright against Buller, who looked set to play spoiler for a chunk of the match.

With the drama of the game, it downplays it something fierce to simply say Marlborough won. But in the end, that was the result – their first Hawke Cup triumph since 1968.

The story of that game has gone down in Hawke Cup folklore, though. A strong Manawatu team, featuring an enviable middle order (Mathew Sinclair, Jamie Lee, Dave Fulton, Warwick Bowden), made only 170. Craig Auckram stood large and was ably supported by a young Leon MacDonald.

Things quickly turned in response – when Stretch was dismissed for 12, his side was 94/6. That was quickly 99/7.

It was the unlikeliest of pairings – the 16-year-old MacDonald paired with 43-year-old Phil D’Auvergne – that revived Marlborough’s chances. After a 60-run stand, D’Auvergne fell while still 11 runs behind. Carl Bulfin was quickly dismissed for a duck, and legs-eleven Auckram now had to hold his nerve.

That he did, making a glorious five not-out in a 99-minute stand with MacDonald.

Manawatu quickly fought back, making 279 at a good pace and teeing up a near-perfect Day Three declaration, leaving just the right amount of time to put Marlborough in two minds between chasing the outright, and batting out a draw.

It would prove to be one of Stretch’s most important knocks.

“We were going along pretty well, then all of a sudden we had a collapse. I think I went in on a hat-trick, and then I was ninth out.”

In between, Stretch had made 36, but perhaps most critically batted out 72 minutes. But it was a double strike, with D’Auvergne dismissed only moments earlier, and left MacDonald and Auckram with another huge rearguard to mount.

Stretch was out stumped – and to a makeshift spinner at that, with seamer Paul Gibbs turning to offies while future one-Test leg-spinner Greg Loveridge sat on the sidelines as 12th man.

“I fell down over the leg side and Roger McEwan whipped the bails off. And as I walked off, I thought, well, bugger, that might be our one really good chance of winning it.”

Against all expectations, MacDonald and Auckram did it again. Their partnership lasted 74 minutes – “it felt like an eternity.”

“There were a lot of appeals. There were a lot of decisions that Manawatu would probably say went against them, one in particular.

“But in the end, we blocked out the last over and we'd won the Hawke Cup for the first time since 1968.

“Great jubilation. There were tears, there was hugging. It was one of those moments that you'll never forget.”

As Stretch says, it mattered not only to the playing group but to the supporters back home, and the brethren of past players – those like coach Barry Roberts and selector Stan Lane.

“It meant so much to them to see us finally, again, win the Hawke Cup.”

As for the players, there couldn’t have been a much more stressful way for the game to finish – watching a last wicket partnership try and doggedly survive for over an hour.

“Yeah at the end of it, I think we were all absolutely buggered. But we were able to have a beer and celebrate pretty well, I think.

“Then we got back to Blenheim and our sponsor put a keg on for the team. Then we had a mayoral reception that night.

“So there was a lot of celebrating for the week, before we rolled our sleeves up and prepared for Taranaki for our defence.”

If their win against Manawatu had felt gruelling, Marlborough hadn’t even scratched the surface yet.

Phil D’Auvergne stood tall with the bat, dragging his side from 62/6 to a respectable 161, much of his time at the crease spent in a long, battling partnership with Stretch. Auckram again got the job done, bowling Taranaki out for 112.

The opportunity was teed up nicely to bat Taranaki out of the contest – but it never happened.

Instead, late on day three, Taranaki sealed a win by two wickets. Rain was forecast through the day but never came to Marlborough’s aid.

“About half an hour after we finished it rained. Started raining, rained for about 24 hours.”

“I think it's fair to say that we were all pretty buggered after six days of really, really hard cricket,” Stretch reflects on that loss. “You put your everything into it […] so you do sit in the sheds and you're pretty gutted because it meant so much to us to win it.”

INTO LEADERSHIP

For over a decade-and-a-half, Marlborough would fail to earn a challenge. They managed to develop quality players – for instance Jarrod Englefield, Brendon Diamanti, Brent Hefford, Greg Hegglund, Geoff Barnett – but rarely got full benefit with those players chasing First Class honours.

It wasn’t easy to earn a challenge either. With the changes and redistricting of zones through that time, Marlborough found themselves up against either the very strong Nelson and Canterbury Country sides of the ‘90s, or the excellent Hawke’s Bay and Manawatu sides of the early ‘00s.

“We had a few successes throughout that time,” considers Stretch when thinking back on the “tough cricket” in elimination contests. “But not enough to get us over the line to get a challenge, which was disappointing considering when we won it, we thought, ‘we want to do this again’.”

Stretch was captain for much of that intermediary period, from 1995/96 to 2007/08. He talks about how he “enjoyed” captaining his province and pays credit to the two coaches he worked with the most in that time – Barry Roberts and Denis Aberhart.

While he never earned a Central Districts call-up – making it as far as a few CD B and Emerging Players appearances – that was broadly unsurprising given the mortgage held on the CD wicket-keeper’s role by Martyn Sigley and then Bevan Griggs.

“I got my CD cap,” Stretch says, “albeit a CD B cap. But that was a proud moment because I always wanted to play for CD, but wasn’t quite good enough.”

TASTING VICTORY AGAIN

By the time they made their demoralising return to a challenge, with their 2010 drubbing at the hands of Manawatu, the captaincy reigns had been passed on. Stretch was now instead a selector, alongside 1994 teammate Colin Wood, and leading into the 2010/11 season they received a visit from Brendon Diamanti.

“He had just retired from CD Cricket at the start of that season. So when he told me and Colin that he’d decided to give up first-class cricket, but was it OK if he continues to play for Marlborough for the season? We said, ‘Oh, yes, yes, absolutely.’

“And as he left the changing room, we're high-fiving each other, knowing that we're going to obviously get a cricketer who's at the top of his powers, not only performing on the park, but also assisting with the development of our up-and-coming cricketers and playing alongside them.”

It would prove the spark the team needed, driving forward to earn another challenge. Stretch was part of that, making a hundred against Nelson in an early elimination contest. His first Marlborough hundred, if the records are right, since 1994/95.

It sounds disingenuous, but that drought helps shine a light on Stretch’s value to the team – alongside his contribution with the gloves, so often he was the minor partner in key partnerships. His ability to bat time and grind out supporting roles in tough conditions meant a benefit much larger than his sometimes skinny returns. As he says, “I batted in every position except 11,” further speaking to his willingness to plug gaps as required.

Marlborough’s challenge in 2011 brought together a unique XI. Diamanti’s CD retirement saw him available, but Leon MacDonald’s rugby retirement saw his return too. With Carl Bulfin – the great ‘90s cult hero, forever linked with CricketMax, his name conjuring those unforgettable images of blonde dreads and speed dealer sunnies – also back on the park, it meant Stretch was part of a trio of 1994 old boys.

At Molyneux Park in Alexandra, it would be captain fantastic Diamanti to the fore initially. His 16 over spell – 5 wickets, 8 runs – rolled Otago Country for 83 and put his side firmly in control of the contest from that point on.

Jackson Pearce and Jerrym Lamb would back up their skipper, both making hundreds. MacDonald added 85, and Marlborough pushed through to an unassailable 472.

“So, again, a great, great occasion and great too for Leon and Bully and myself to be involved again. Albeit they'd been away and done bigger and brighter things. There was only one silly fool that still kept on going all those years!”

Marlborough rectified one of their mistakes from 1994, managing to hold the Cup through a defence. It was no mean feat, coming up against a strong Hawke’s Bay team.

Stretch talks about the “great crowds” at Horton Park through the game, and they were treated to a spectacle. Batting first, Hawke’s Bay made 304 – and Stretch suggests it would’ve been more if it weren’t for Diamanti getting lucky when Carl Cachopa was on 84.

“Brendon bowled a short ball […] and the batter’s expected it to obviously come through chest high. It’s hit a bald spot and gone virtually straight along the ground and hit him right in front for an LBW.”

“That was the only ball that hit that spot the whole game,” Stretch recalls.

Perhaps fate was on Marlborough’s side that day – though they still needed to score over 300 to claim the first innings lead. It would be captain Diamanti who took control of the game, adding to his first innings five-for with a not-out 141.

“That would be in my top two or three innings I've ever seen from a Marlborough player. He was captain, he was in complete control of the innings, of the chase, and made sure that people who came out to bat with him understood what was required. And for us to end up with a first innings win in front of a huge local crowd was, again, another one of my top cricketing memories.”

It corrected the error of 1994, when Marlborough had failed to defend the Cup. For Stretch, it was perhaps just as well the top order ensured his runs weren’t needed – as he’d made ducks against both Otago Country and Hawke’s Bay.

“I think in the challenge I faced two balls, and in the defence, I faced one.

“And I remember going out to bat against Hawke's Bay, and Brendon was still obviously not out, and he’s come to me and said, ‘Rightio, they're bowling for LBWs. They're bowling wicket to wicket. Just get forward.’

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, obviously, that didn't happen, so big appeal, first ball, LBW. As I walked off, I was thinking, ‘Shit’.”

Beating a big association like Hawke’s Bay was an impressive effort, but their next defence against Hamilton would prove a bridge too far. “Completely outplayed,” is how Stretch terms it. Spin was the difference, with 17 Marlborough wickets falling to the triple-pronged attack of Joe Walker, Anton Devcich and Mitchell Santner.

For Stretch, the main memory of that game comes while ‘keeping up to one of the seamers. Devcich was the batsman, and Marlborough’s gloveman was “chipping away as wicketkeepers do.”

“I'll never forget this, he was facing up and he put his hand up and he yelled out to the bowlers, ‘Stop there’. And he turned around to me and said, ‘Would you fuck off back to the rest home?’”

Whatever response might’ve been lined up was well undermined by Stretch’s own teammates cracking up. The two shared a laugh over a beer after the game, and the victim calls it “one of the best sledges I had towards the end of my career, that’s for real.”

RETIREMENT – BUT PLENTY OF CRICKET

While, again, the end of that Hawke Cup tenure seemed an opportune moment for Stretch to pull the pin, he still wasn’t quite ready to give up the game he loved, and carried on for another three summers. He even came back for one more game against Buller in 2017 – if you count that one, his Marlborough career lasted 31 years.

That game was the first to be played for the Scanlon/Stretch Cup, donated by the two families. And family become a great note at the end of Stretch’s career, when he was able to play for his province alongside son Matthew.

Stretch’s love of cricket ensured it was never going to end there. Alongside carrying on as selector (a role he still has now), he became team manager after retiring. He was on the Marlborough management committee in an almost unbroken stint from 1989 to 2018 (including six years as chair), has been a board member ever since (including a stint from 2018-2023 as chairman), while also spending a period as a board member for Central Districts from 2014 to 2017.

If that doesn’t seem like enough, Stretch has also held the full variety of roles for his Wairau Valley club since 1989, including an extended current stint as President. He has also recently become a match referee for New Zealand Cricket. Back on field, he plays still plays club cricket alongside Over 50s for New Zealand, and is the Convenor of Selectors and Manager for the Over 50s side touring Sri Lanka in 2025.

As Stretch puts it:

“Cricket has been such a big part of my life. I love it.”