It's never 'just a game' - Dion Nash
By Margot Butcher
From New Zealand v West Indies 1999/2000 Series Program Guide

At the beginning of this season, after weeks of intensive treatment for the back injury that had shortened his Indian tour, Dion Nash took a holiday.

Now, when international cricketers take a holiday, two things are almost always involved: since they live out of a suitcase for the better part of the year, they tend to avoid anything that involves airports and passports. Secondly, a cricketer's holiday should not often involve a great deal of sport. No competition please, I just want to lie on a beach and RELAX.

Nash's holiday took the form of a fishing holiday in the Malborough sounds. It was typical Dion Nash style more than traditional cricketer style: his holiday just had to have some form of compettion included - even if it was against a fish.

Team-mates characterise Nash as a laidback, sunny soul away from cricket, but put him in creams or teal-blues on a cricket field and he morphs into a fiery streetfighter. Someone to whom a game is never just a game.

As Gavin Larsen wrote in his book 'Grand Larseny', "There's nothing wrong with a bit of mongrel dog and 'D' has it by the truckload. He stands eyeball-to-eyeball with the opposition and he has one quality which I think is priceless: he hates losing."

Nash's relentless, high-energy attitude to any form of competition is infectious. He's a handy cricketer to have around not only with a bat or ball in his hand, or in the field, where his comittment is total, but in the dressing room on a long afternoon when things are not going as planned for the home team. That's when Nashy's mongrel is tearing at the chain.

If ever there was an example, it was the deciding fourth Test against England last year. The series (level at 1-1) was there for the taking by either side. England, batting for the second time, needed only a comfortable innings to assert the upper hand and the New Zealanders were desparate not to allow it. Out comes Nash. He rips through England's middle order, dismissing Atherton, Ramprakash and Stewart in the space of 12 deliveries for the cost of just four runs. At 157/7 at lunch, England is staring down the barrel.

Chris Cairns was named 'man of the series' after that stirring win, but he quickly singled out his fellow all-rounder as key to victory. "Dion was a stand-out performer", said Cairns. "He gives me confidence."

It's been a long journey for Nash, from his days as a sleek and nippy New Zealand Youth star, the athletic kid from Dargaville whose career began to take off at the start of this decade. He made his Test debut in 1992 with only four first-class matches to his name, but this rocket-fuelled start tapered off when career-threatening stress fractures in his lower back played havoc with his form and fitness.

Only last summer - when, as the 1999 New Zealand Cricket Almanack alerts us, he was one of only four New Zealand players to be selected for all nine home Tests - did it seem he had put it all behind him. At the same time he galvanised public appreciation for his merciless competitive instincts as he filled in for injured captain Stephen Fleming.

Nash has a habit of doing things in style. He put himself on the international cricket map during New Zealand's previous tour of England when he became the first player to take a double of 10 (actually 11) wickets and a half-century from a match at Lord's.

That performance, perhaps, underlined that he has developed into an allrounder better known for his bowling than his batting. Opportunities in the lower order are, of course, limited; his bowling figures have made the better reading, spiked with five-wicket bags. His Lord's figures were six for 76 and five for 93; his best in Tests is a spectacular six for 27.

But Nash is a dilligent batsman in the nets and it's unlikely his competitive instinct would allow him to lose sight of the fact he has yet to record a Test century in some 30 Tests now, though he drew oh-so-close with 89 not out in New Zealand's Basin Reserve victory over India last summer. In fact, don't be surprised if there's a bet on between himself and Dan Vettori as to whom can get to the three figure mark first.

Entering the second stanza of this summer's National Bank Series is in itself something to relish for a player whose plane trip home from India at the start of this season was a nervous one.

When Nash fell at the bowling crease in India and felt his back spasm - the old trouble spot - it was initially feared the painful stress fractures that had silenced his career for a full two years had returned. Imagine his relief when it was discovered he had a herniated disc - not a pleasant injury in itself, but one which would require only a few weeks' careful attention.

Now, just a birthday or two away from 30, Nash has survived the rigours of cricket on his slender frame through a careful management plan and oceans of commitment to the prescribed doses of physiotherapy, stretching, strengthening, and Pilates (a specialised workout system long embraced by the ballet world as the ticket to a high-functioning, well-balanced body). Perhaps it's the same dilligence that in the first place, years ago, fashioned a young athlete who could bat, bowl and field to international standard.

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