Special Match As Greg Hay Joins An Exclusive Club

Central Stags captain Greg Hay is poised to become just the second player to play 100 first-class matches for his side.

Tomorrow at Napier’s McLean Park, Hay is set to follow in the footsteps of the only other Central Stags representative to have achieved the milestone, his record-holding predecessor Mathew Sinclair.

The stats are stacking up for Hay, the rock of the first-class side who played his overall career 100th first-class match three weeks ago (having also twice represented New Zealand A during his lengthy career) at his home ground in Nelson.

In Auckland in the opening round this season, he broke Jamie How's record for the most first-class wins as Stags captain. After another exciting outright victory last week in Dunedin, Hay now has 15 Plunket Shield wins - and has twice lifted the revered Plunket Shield as the team's skipper.

The Stags are no doubt fired up to make it another four days to remember for their captain, and it's against the team they edged last season for the silverware: Canterbury, with the toss set for 10am tomorrow at Napier's sunny McLean Park.

It's the Stags' first match in Hawke’s Bay this summer, free admission all four days.

Tempering the mood a tad is the absence of Hay's fellow senior batsman, Tom Bruce whose torn abductor in training this week forces the first change to the squad this season.

Bruce scored a century in the latest win: a 50-run away thriller against the Otago Volts that propelled the defending champion Stags to within a sniff of the lead on the points table after three of the eight rounds.

It was the second Stags ton of a campaign which has so far seen the bowling pack produce consistently outstanding performances while the batting has been patchy - with reverse swing always a danger early in the summer.

The only other centurion so far has been Hay who opened the season in brilliant form, carrying his bat through the first day of the season, for a century that set up his team's innings victory in Auckland. The gritty opener played another significant hand with the bat in the latest match, too.

Hay played his very first game in November 2006, against the Wellington Firebirds at the Cello Basin Reserve. That was almost another century as he was left stranded on 98 not out on debut.

Since then, Hay has accrued 6,723 runs for the Stags at an average of 42.01, including 17 centuries and 32 half centuries, with some memorable double centuries among them - including his all-time high of 226 in an emphatic victory in his only appearance at Molyneux Park, and his unbeaten 202* against Canterbury at Rangiora.

In a career of two halves, the now 39-year-old debuted for the team as a flame-haired young gun 22-year-old from Nelson who had been a Young Player to Lord's (representing the MCC Young Cricketers side, which offered playing opportunities to rising talents from around the world) in 2003.

Initially he struggled to find a consistent place in the Stags team, and drifted away entirely between 2009 and 2013 when you might have spotted him playing club cricket in Auckland or on a surfboard, trying to catch a break.

His return to the Stags first-class squad in December 2013 has led to the most emphatic period of his career.

That comeback match saw him produce an unbeaten 83* first up, and he hasn't looked back. Moving up from the middle order to open the batting in latter seasons, and taking over the first-class captaincy from Will Young after the team's 2019 championship win, he has found the niche from which he can be most influential.

In 2020, he lifted the trophy himself, in his first summer as captain, and repeated the scenes earlier this year when the Stags clinched the trophy again with a thrilling result in Nelson.

Hay heads into the big game tomorrow as the Stags' second overall all-time run scorer, with his 6,723 shaded only by Sinclair's phenomenal 9,148.

Hay is also second-equal on the list of most centuries for the side (17, shared with Peter Ingram). Who's ahead of him? Yep. Just ‘Skippy' Sinclair, with 27.

And while Hay is the second highest capped Stag and just the second to join the 100 club, Sinclair is the goat there too with 119 caps.

Hay will be conscious of not distracting himself from the primary mission at hand over the coming four days: to seize the opportunity to beat Canterbury and move, hopefully, into the Plunket Shield championship lead, in the last red-ball match of the year before the mid-summer switch to white-ball cricket. The Plunket Shield campaign will then resume on 29 February 2024.

Admission is free all four days to see Hay and his team in action, in the toughest format of all to win.

The four-dayer is scheduled to begin at 10.30am tomorrow (15 November 2023) with livescoring and free livestreams at www.cdcricket.co.nz.

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