It took five years for Don Neely to write his book Men in White,a compilation of New Zealands cricket history. As the 73-year-old pulls out the hard-bound volume from the display in his living room,he has to peep over the book to talk about the effort gone into the making of the monster. The golden-edged pages havent missed a single run scored or wicket taken by a Kiwi cricketer in Tests. And there are full reports of each game,with boxes highlighting milestones,as they were passed. Ask Neely about the word count,and he gets lost in thought. Lets look at it this way,there are 1,600 pictures in the book,and each caption is about 50 words so that makes it 80,000 words for captions. The rest is history a pretty a long one since the book has over 1,200 pages and weighs about 22 kgs. When the colossal chronicle was presented to Lords,commentator John Arlot had quipped how they needed an entire table just to keep the book. A first-class cricketer who led Wellington in his playing days,Neely was a national selector for 14 years it was during his tenure New Zealand cricket touched new heights with the emergence of all-rounder Richard Hadlee and is now the president of NZC. He is also on the board of the citys national museum. Talking about Basin Reserve,he suddenly remembers Ravi Shastri had made his debut there. He was here in 1981. I think he bowled three overs in the second innings,gave away some nine runs and had three wickets, he says. Go on the Internet and check the India vs New Zealand Wellington Test of 1981: Shastris figures read 3-0-9-3.
