On February 4, 1996, a full-page ad ran in the Sunday Star Times with the tagline: "Cricket is dead. Long live cricket". At the bottom was an invitation from Martin Crowe, asking people to come to Cornwall Park the next day and witness "the biggest thing to happen to cricket in decades".

This is the story of Cricket Max.



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Martin Crowe (batsman, NZ): I was at the end of my career in 1995 and I happened to meet the boss of Sky Television in New Zealand, he was an American, a New Yorker in fact, and he just casually said to me, Marty, can you make cricket three hours instead of 30?

Nate Smith (Sky CEO 1991-2000): I had a conversation at first with Jeff Crowe, and then he introduced me to Martin, and I said I'm looking for something television friendly that accentuates scoring, because that's more fun.



Rob Hellriegel (Sky marketing manager 1992-2000): We really wanted a summer sport, because in those days, we had really high churn, which means subscribers would leave in the summer and come back in the winter to watch rugby and league. We wanted a product that we could use in that summer period.



Smith: That was just a vague conversation - I had a lot more important and pressing things to do than worry about changing cricket.



John Fellet (Sky COO 1991-2000, CEO 2001-): There was a great deal of love for test cricket - and there still is - and there were a great many people in love with the one-day format - and there still are. They're almost like the Christian faith, where you have Christians, then you have the different denominations. We still felt there was a market that would skew younger if we could tie it up in about three hours.



Jeff Crowe (batsman, NZ): He said, do you think you can create a cricket game that's the distance and time of a baseball match? That's when Marty got his thinking cap on and he and I had some ideas. He drove it, I just understood what he was saying and questioned a few things.



Smith: He came with this fold-out board that had little cricket men on it. I didn't even know many of the rules or what the deal was, but he'd given all this thought to this new game, and said I think we can get this in in three and a half hours and we can get some more scoring and this is how it works.



M Crowe: I said, well, how about this, it's a three-hour game, it's called Cricket Max, it's four innings of 10 overs, there's a Max Zone behind the bowler, if you hit into it you get double score, and there's a free hit for a no ball, and he loved it.



Fellet: We got the idea and we started chatting. We were scrambling to get any content we could get our hands on at the time.



James Cameron (Sky 'cricket guy'): 90 per cent of the stuff that I was editing would be ESPN stuff and we didn't have a whole lot else.



J Crowe: The concept was to go quite radical with it, but an acceptable radical, and then sort of fine-tune it after that. Martin's idea was always to try and have the batsmen batting and the bowlers bowling, as opposed to the normal structure when the whole team would bat.



Smith: The most controversial change - there were more than a few - was the fourth wicket. Marty had come up with it as a gift to the bowlers, because he was making their lives miserable with some of his other rules. He put a fourth wicket in so at least they'd have that.



J Crowe: He always wanted the Max Zone to maximise the best shots in cricket, which were generally the straight hits.



Hellriegel: Martin made the name up. I think there was something else 'max' going around at the time. Max was kind of a word, there were other things using max, like Pepsi Max.



Smith: I remember the Max Zone more for the fact that we got Pepsi Max to sponsor it, so that was the last thing I wanted to see go.



Hellriegel: It was clever, but I don't think that was entirely why he called it that. His thing was maximum cricket.



Max's debut was squeezed into a busy schedule, the day before the New Zealand side flew out to India for the World Cup.



The first game was played between the World Cup squad and an All Star side featuring Martin, Lance Cairns, Sir Richard Hadlee, and Merv Hughes among others, at Cornwall Park on February 5, 1996.



Dion Nash (allrounder, Auckland & NZ): We were playing in shorts and it was a bit of a festival type atmosphere. We were playing against Richard Hadlee and other famous ex-Kiwi players, and that was a bit of a coup.



Shane Thomson (allrounder, Northern & NZ): It was exciting, because it was Martin's new concept and they were just looking at ways to try and amp up cricket, because it was falling away in popularity a little bit.





Lance Cairns bats during the first game of Cricket Max, using four stumps. PHOTO: PHOTOSPORT



Nash: It wasn't actually a bouncer, but by accident I remember digging one in quite short, and I got a good telling off by Sir Richard. He wasn't very happy about it.



Thomson: We were all pretty curious about it and I think we looked at it like a little bit of a novelty thing. We had four stumps, and I kind of thought it was a bit unfair, Richard Hadlee bowling to me with four stumps to aim at.



Thomson: There was quite a bit of interest about it.



Aaron Barnes (allrounder, Auckland): I remember a practice game at Cornwall Park which was to get some information on how Cricket Max would work and I remember sitting around with Martin and other people talking about what would make it a bit better. I remember four stumps was always a talking point.



Hellriegel: The four stumps went really quickly, because the feedback was so savage, and we thought, Christ, we'll never get this thing off the ground. It was just too radical a move.



Smith: We were going nowhere as long as the fourth wicket was there. We persevered with that for a while, but it disappeared pretty quickly.



Hellriegel: We brought it back and looked at it and said it's probably a bit too radical, let's take it back to the game of cricket and get it closer to it. So Martin reviewed the rules, and came up with Cricket Max in the form that we ended up playing it in.



Cameron: That initial game was a little bit out there, and by November that year we had cut out a whole lot of it. It just returned to normal cricket - three stumps, four innings, and a Max Zone, which I thought was a good, winning formula. As a fan of the game, that was good fun.



J Crowe: I think everybody was interested in giving it a go, to see what aspects would be worthwhile, and obviously New Zealand Cricket then took it on board.

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The first Max tournament was held in November 1996, over two weekends in Christchurch and Hamilton, with Central Districts taking home the spoils - the Lance Cairns Shield.



For the next six years, Max was a regular part of the domestic summer, in various shapes and forms, promoted with the line: It's short for action.

Hellriegel: We got players who absolutely loved it and embraced and saw the future, and others who just saw it as something that they had to do. I never really met anyone who said oh, I don't want to play that silly game.



Chris Nevin (batsman, Wellington): We trained for four-day cricket and one-day cricket, and all of a sudden we were training specifically for Cricket Max and tweaking batting orders and how you had to bowl. It added to the competition.



Mark Bailey (batsman, Northern): It was another trophy to try and win. It didn't feel like too much extra cricket. From what I remember it fitted in really well.



Hamish Barton (bowler, Auckland & Canterbury): We enjoyed it. That started to change the way we played cricket too. It started to make for a more aggressive brand of cricket, in four-day cricket and in one-day cricket. It was just something different.



Jacob Oram (allrounder, Central): I made my debut in Cricket Max so everything was so new to me at that level - big crowds, quality grounds, famous teammates and opposition. I just remember thinking how fast the game went and how quickly things changed.



Craig McMillan (batsman, Canterbury): It created its own identity and I remember really enjoying playing it. Any game you could play where you could hit a six straight and get 12, I thought was a hell of a game. For a guy who liked hitting boundaries it was a winner.



Peter Fulton (batsman, Canterbury): I remember a few years before I actually played, it used to be on on a Friday night, which I guess is similar to what they've tried with Twenty20 in the last few years. A lot of the time the Black Caps used to play quite frequently, so there were always some big names playing.



Warren McSkimming (bowler, Otago): When I first started playing it was pretty new, and it was completely different to anything else anyone had ever seen, so we were pretty excited about it.



Roger Twose (batsman, Wellington): I thought it was a fantastic game. I remember playing games at Ericsson Stadium, as it was called back then, with small boundaries. Because Crowie was a purist, he was trying to incentivise people to hit the ball straight back over the bowler's head.



Barnes: It was good fun. It gave you a chance to express yourself, and the overs were a lot more limited so you could go out there and play your game.



Hellriegel: I've got huge praise for (NZC CEO) Chris Doig and John Reid, the operations manager at the time. Doig took a lot of flack to do this, but he could really see the future in it.







Billy Bowden's umpiring style was born out of Cricket Max. PHOTO: PHOTOSPORT



Cameron: Billy Bowden started in Cricket Max. He was carrying on like he always has since. He's toned it down a bit. He was a former cricketer who knew Marty on the club scene and wanted a break as an umpire. He became a bit of a rock star.



Richard Petrie (batsman, Wellington): Every time they shorten the format the fielding and the batting and the bowling has to get better. They use to say, oh, I don't like 50-over cricket, and now they say, oh, I don't like T20, but the standard of play and intensity goes up every time, and it makes the longer format better, because the players have a wider range of skills.



Barton: Because it was more action-packed, players could express themselves more, and they had a lot more freedom to play a bit more aggressively. I think that opened up a few more doors for players.



Oram: From what I can remember everyone enjoyed playing it. It was a fast game which promoted big hits, quality death bowling and athletic fielding. We had great support from the public and it was televised so there wasn't much not to like.



Nevin: I think at the time there was a bit of prize money up for grabs - about $25,000 - so it put that competition into focus, because 20 years ago we didn't get paid.



Nash: It was pre players association and pre us getting paid, so we were all keen to play Max because it was one of the few forms of the game were we got paid.



Andre Adams (allrounder, Auckland): The more it was played and with the inclusion of prize money, it was actually the first thing that was really worth playing for from a financial point of view, so that made it more serious.



Barton: I remember my first game I ever played for Auckland, the manager walked around with wads of $400 cash - I didn't even know we got paid.



Fulton: I remember when I first got the chance to play it, it was something a bit different and a bit exciting and you got to have two bats, so that was always a bonus.



Neal Parlane (batsman, Northern): As a batter, I thought it was great because you got to have two bats, and you had 10 overs, so you got to whack it from ball one.



McMillan: Another thing we liked about it was you had two bats, you could miss out in the first innings and still bat in the second.



Thomson: I think the general feeling with the batters was, cool, this is a free licence and this will improve my one-day game. It was almost like a bit of practice for the proper matches.

Twose: It was a bit of a gamechanger for me. You were always taught to hit the ball along the ground - lifting the ball was to be scorned upon, especially if you got out. You were a complete turkey if you were trying to hit the ball in the air.

Hayden Shaw (bowler, Canterbury): I was a bowler mainly that could bat a bit and could smack the ball, and it turned out in Cricket Max I ended up batting three, four, five, just because of my ability to hit the ball. That was pretty cool and a bit of an ego boost.

Thomson: The younger players were better at dealing with the going in and hitting from ball one idea, whereas we'd grown up playing the straight bat and getting yourself in, and one a ball was good.



Twose: It forced me as a batsmen to think about how I could get more consistency hitting the ball in the air and straight, and I developed the technique to be able to do that, and I applied it in practice and in games, and then that held me in great stead for my one-day cricket career.



Barnes: I loved batting. I hated bowling.



Thomson: I remember the bowlers just looking at each other and going, this is a s*** game for the bowlers, because how can you go for eight an over, and that's a good day? It was a complete, turn you on your head kind of thing. Particularly the slow bowlers, we thought they were going to absolutely slaughter us.



Fulton: The Max Zone added a bit of strategy to the game. There was bit of risk-reward there for the bowlers. If they bowled it full and straight and tried to attack the stumps, that was the delivery that was most at risk of getting hit back through the Max Zone and likewise it created chances to take wickets, because batsmen were eyeing it up.



Nevin: It took people a wee while to work out that you could still play cricket shots. I think initially they just tried to whack it wherever they could as hard as they could.



Fulton: I didn't mind it, I know probably some people thought it was a gimmick, but when you look back it was probably 10 to 15 years before it's time - a lot of those ideas about how to change the game and how to make it more exciting and more viewer-friendly.



Cameron: Graeme Hughes was famous for being a league caller, so they brought him in to do the call on Cricket Max, and of course he was theatrical and coming up with all these new sayings. Some people hated it, some people loved it. but it was supposed to be trying to attract a whole new audience.



Nevin: Obviously those first few years there was the novelty factor of it. Some guys became household names through Cricket Max - look at the likes of Carl Bulfin who was a sensation and ended up playing for NZ on the back of it.



Hellriegel: We created a few stars who never really made it on the international scene. There was a guy called Bulfin, and he was a real character, he was a surfie with big long hair, and he became a cult figure. You just couldn't do that in normal cricket.



In October 1997, Max took on an international flair, with an England Lions side visiting for a three-game series against the Max Blacks, led by Roger Twose.



The Lions were led by Matthew Maynard, who had played a bit of Max for Otago the previous season.



Matthew Maynard (captain, England Lions): I thought it was a great concept, to try and gee up the one-day game as it was. What Martin came up with was quite innovative.



Bailey: You realised there was a lot of expense put into it when they started bringing an international team out.



Maynard: We actually had some idea of what we were trying to achieve. We had some plans in place and tried to execute them. We had a great little tour. The lads enjoyed it, they all had a good laugh and enjoyed New Zealand, and why wouldn't you?



Bailey: I remember getting together up in a hotel in Auckland with Martin Crowe and he was dishing out all the gear, and we had a good chat about it, how we wanted to not take it as a gimmick and really play it as hard and as properly as we could and put on a really good show. We certainly wanted to win it.







England Lions captain Matthew Maynard in shorts for a Max international. PHOTO: ALLSPORT UK



Barnes: It was always a dream for me to represent my country. I was lucky enough to play in the shorter forms of the game - not just in the Max Blacks, but in the Hong Kong Sixes as well - and it was an introduction really to seeing how things were and the competitiveness of it.



Chandler: A lot of the English guys had been proven international players, whereas a lot of us hadn't played any international cricket at all, so to be playing guys like Robin Smith and Phil DeFreitas and Chris Lewis, it was quite an exciting opportunity.



Barnes: The competitors in those teams were very highly-skilled people who had been around a while. You had the Lewises and the Smiths for England. Just picking their brains and talking to them after the games; they were pretty good to sit down and have a beer with, and understand how they got to where they were.



England won the first game of the series, played at Ericsson Stadium in Auckland, setting up the possibility of an embarrassing defeat for the hosts and inventors of the game.



Maynard: It was one of those things. It was about how we executed, more as a bowling group than a batting group, a lot of the batters could hit a ball if it was in their areas, so the onus had to be on the bowlers not to bowl there.



Maynard: It was one-all going down to Wellington, and then we got beaten at the Basin.



Hellriegel: I had never ever seen anyone so down. I said to them at the time, it's an exhibition game, you've never played it before, and they said it doesn't matter, we should have beaten them.

The series also saw the England team play in shorts, one of the few Max innovations that didn't catch on.

Maynard: That was coming in domestically and I remember seeing Aravinda de Silva in shorts, and he wasn't a very happy camper. The grass burns from diving and stuff, they could actually sting quite a bit, so they weren't a great concept as far as I was concerned. Keep shorts for the beach or if you're going for a run, but not on the cricket pitch.

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The beginning of the end for Cricket Max came the following year in 1999, when Sky won the rights to show New Zealand's international cricket. Though it would still be played up until November 2002, the writing was on the wall.

Smith: We had cut a deal for BSkyB to carry the Cricket Max coverage that we did and I remember being in Edinburgh talking to a guy that ran an investment company.

Smith: He asked me about Cricket Max because he had been watching it in Scotland, and it stunned me, I think I responded well, no one's even watching it in New Zealand!

Hellriegel: Once we'd done the Max project, and NZC had seen how it'd worked, Sky then went on to win cricket off TVNZ and has held it ever since. Unfortunately for Martin and I, that really ended the Max flirtation. Sky had cricket and felt it didn't really need to underwrite Max anymore.

Cameron: We'd created this game with Marty to get cricket on Sky when we didn't have the rights, so there was less of a drive behind it for sure.

Cameron: Marty was our executive producer of cricket at the time, and because he was was involved in its creation he was very keen to see it carry on. It ended up just getting compacted into the earlier part of the season.

Perhaps as a sign of Max's waning relevance, the 2000-01 season featured a format that saw associations paired off and sent into the country to play five-game series against each other.

McSkimming: When you first start playing, your dream is to play in all these places, like Jade Stadium and Eden Park, but then the cool thing about Max was we went to all these quirky places around New Zealand and had a great time.

Barton: We did play in some funny little grounds, but it was good to get the game out to the regions and the smaller towns and get the locals along.

Parlane: We played in Warkworth on concrete there, and on concrete in Timaru, a grass pitch in Whakatane, and two games at Cornwall Park on concrete as well.

Shaw: We went to Ashburton, Gore, Invercargill and Westport - we were all over the place.

Parlane: Bowlers at that level didn't really want to run in too hard on artificial wickets, and the approaches were never really as flat as they are these days - there was always a little step down or a step up. They were a bit unsure of things and we could just stand there and whack it, basically.

Brent Arnel (bowler, Northern): We played a game at Te Awamutu, where I was born; that was a funny game playing what was almost like a homecoming. It was an artificial out the back of a school, with pretty tiny boundaries so the crowd was close to the action. Obviously the school got out and came around. It was a pretty interesting game of cricket.

Stephen Cunis (bowler, Northern & Canterbury): I quite enjoyed that, a five-match series and travelling around the South Island, we played on artificials quite a bit on smaller grounds, and that was really tough, but in saying that it was bloody good.

Barton: I remember down in Gore we got a really good crowd.

Cunis: That was interesting playing in Gore - I'll tell you that for nothing. I wouldn't say as a Canterbury team we were overly liked much there. Chris Gaffaney got a hundred, they smashed it, and they beat us.

Shaw: We were playing in Westport and were playing on an artificial pitch that was wooden underneath, so when you bowled it didn't bounce, and I remember Andrew Hore absolutely smacking us.

McSkimming: That was an absolutely awesome game. We took a bus there from Dunedin, which was just horrendous.

Andrew Hore (batsman, Otago): Apparently the bus driver didn't actually have a bus licence, we found out when we got back.

Hore: We had to win. It was 2-2 in the series with Canterbury and we had to get quite a few in the fourth innings.

McSkimming: We shouldn't have played, because it was wet and an artificial, but we ended up playing, and this real good crowd turned out.

Hore: I actually dislocated my finger in the field then came out and got 77 not out to win it and that got us up to Auckland for the finals, which was a good trip.

Hore: I went into the training room with this dislocated finger and showed it to Denis Aberhart who was our coach and he just ducked out the door straight away and it went over the loudspeaker, is there a doctor at the ground? And while that was happening, I'd just gently pulled it back into place and I was padded up when everyone came back in.

McSkimming: All the locals looked after us - we had whitebait patties for afternoon tea and that was really cool.

In the 2001-02 season, Max consisted of six games, played over a single weekend at North Harbour Stadium's outer oval.

The same was planned for the following season, at Lloyd Elsmore park on the other side of Auckland, but became one of the casualties of the New Zealand Cricket Players Association strike.

Apart from one final international in December 2002 against India, Max was never seen again.

Cameron: I never fully understood why it stopped. There was a players strike that occurred, and that took out that year's Cricket Max, and I never understood why it disappeared other than the fact that a couple of years later, T20 started up.

Cameron: I do remember Marty predicting that Cricket Max wouldn't come back once that year ended up not happening.



Mark Bailey playing in a Max game for Northern Districts. PHOTO: PHOTOSPORT

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Smith: What was fun about that period, was there were no barriers, there was no one saying we can't do that, or this will never work. Everyone who was associated with the project was just thinking how do we get this done?

A similar attitude was present in England in June 2003, when Twenty20 was played for the first time.

Having been unveiled just days after New Zealand's Max tournament had been cancelled in November 2002, it proved to be a roaring success, and since then Twenty20 has gone from strength to strength.

M Crowe: I was privately pleased that what Nate Smith started, I inspired, and Rob Hellriegel marketed was being treated deadly seriously all around the world. We may not have owned the patent to the new phenomenon, but we sure knew where it all started - back at Panorama Rd, Penrose, in little old Auckland.

M Crowe: The 'baby' that Nate Smith wanted to get rolling eight years earlier was about to take cricket into orbit. Three-hour cricket was set to revolutionise the game globally. The effect would be massive, a quite astonishing transformation in the history of the great game.

Hellriegel: The real shame of Cricket Max is that it was a really good product, and we had it first, and we just couldn't break the conservatism.

Cameron: At one point we'd combined with the Aussies and come up with this Super Eights, which was Cricket Max but eight-a-side, and so there was a bit of jostling happening around the world to take a hold of the third generation game, but in the end, T20 was just the simplest thing for the public to understand.

Twose: I reckon Crowe was very unlucky, because he was very close to cracking it, and obviously what became T20, in my mind, that could have easily been Cricket Max. Maybe T20's slightly simpler, but he was definitely on the right path.

Fulton: I think Martin Crowe was probably just a little bit before his time, and if he'd waited a few more years, and brought it out then, he might have made himself a lot of money, because it sort of died a bit of a slow death and two or three years later T20 came along and for the rest of the world it was this new idea, whereas we'd already been going along those lines for a few years anyway.

Chandler: From Martin Crowe's perspective, he obviously had the foresight, he just didn't get the right version. He was probably a few years ahead of himself. Whether he looks back on that and feels a bit aggrieved I dunno, but he was the guy pushing the game, that's for sure.

McSkimming: We probably didn't take it seriously enough. It was sort of like a hit and giggle. We didn't really think it was going to have a future.

Parlane: I don't think Cricket Max was ever taken as seriously as it could have been or should have been. I think when Twenty20 first started, that was the case as well, but now we're seeing that it's becoming the most popular form for non-cricket fans, if you like.

Barton: It doesn't surprise me that T20's become such a big thing. Just the way people are in terms of being time poor and they're wanting to go along to events that don't last the whole day.

Cunis: T20's a fantastic format. There's an older generation who struggle with T20 - my father's friends and colleagues, I have some good discussions with them around T20 - but it's such a fantastic format. Look at the Big Bash - how phenomenal was that.

Parlane: I think that Cricket Max probably gave the guys who invented T20 an idea, and they tweaked the idea, and it's turned into the biggest saviour of cricket that we've seen in a long, long time.

McMillan: It was just maybe too revolutionary at the time. Maybe the cricket world wasn't quite ready for Max. T20 cricket came around a couple of years later and the changes they made in terms of one innings made T20 a better game. You can look back on it and say in many ways it started with Cricket Max.

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Martin Crowe's comments are taken from his 2013 book Raw, with permission, and from an interview with the Can't Bowl, Can't Throw podcast in 2014.

The original Cricket Max rules - click to enlarge.

