Bob Blair obituary: Fast bowler whose courage defined New Zealand cricket

Bert Sutcliffe played on with his head wrapped in a bandage.

Sutcliffe, sustained by whisky and with his head in bandages, returned to the crease at the fall of the sixth wicket, with his score on nine, and the total at 81 for six. With the courage of desperation he launched a violent attack on the South Africa bowlers.

Blair, meanwhile, having decided that he could not malinger while his teammates were under the cosh, made his way to the ground. At the fall of the ninth wicket, with Sutcliffe on 53 not out and the score at 154, Blair walked out to bat as the entire crowd stood in awed silence.

“What are you doing out here?” Sutcliffe demanded, as Blair reached the crease. “This is no place for you. Let’s swing the bat and get out of here.”

Sutcliffe was as good as his word, scoring 27 runs in no time, including three sixes from the first four deliveries in an eight-ball over bowled by the off-spinner Hugh Tayfield.

Sutcliffe then took a single, and watched as Blair, inspired by “pure anger”, struck the seventh ball of the over for another six. Shortly afterwards he was stumped. The last wicket had put on 33, with Sutcliffe being left on 80 not out.

Blair subsequently bowled five overs in South Africa’s second innings. New Zealand lost the match by 132 runs, but the South African press was clear that the tourists had taken the battle honours.

The legend grew, inspiring a play in 2008, and in 2011 both a book, What Are You Doing Out Here? by Norman Harris, and a television film. The book, at least, gave an accurate account.

The son of a railwayman, Robert William Blair was born at Petone, a suburb of Wellington renowned for sporting prowess, on June 23, 1932. The family house was next to the Petone recreation ground, so that Bob and his elder brother, Jim, grew up playing every kind of game.

At Petone Technical School, Bob was soon terrorising batsmen, to his own undisguised glee. Lean and aggressive, he had a lovely whipcord action, sometimes compared to that of Fred Trueman, though his model (and later his friend) was the great Australian bowler, Ray Lindwall.

Oddly, Blair was declared unfit for military service, apparently due to a dodgy knee and hammer toes. “They said I couldn’t walk,” he recalled, “so I decided to run.”

Blair took a simple view of the art of fast bowling. “There are three stumps down there, and a bat and a batsman,” he said, “and you’ve got to hit one of them.” It was, he mocked, only theorists and coaches who complicated the game.

In December 1951, aged 19, Blair made his debut for Wellington in the Plunket Shield. An analysis of eight for 36 against Otago in January 1953 won him a place a few weeks later in the New Zealand side against South Africa at the Basin Reserve.

His first few overs in this match were the most dynamic he ever bowled in tests, as he grabbed the wickets of John Waite, Russell Endean and Roy McLean while conceding only eight runs. At the end of the innings, he had taken four for 98.

Understandably, Blair made no particular mark on the tour of South Africa in 1953-54, and for some years afterwards was selected only sporadically for the New Zealand team. It did not help that he never disguised the animus he felt for the test selectors.

There was some justice on Blair’s side, for in Plunket Shield matches for Wellington (and for Central Districts in 1955-56), he consistently returned impressive figures. He always seemed to gain an extra yard of pace when the ball was flying. The 47 wickets he took for Wellington in the Plunket Shield of 1956-57 were a record for the competition, and his total of 53 for that season (including four victims in the first test against the West Indies at Dunedin) set another mark.

Blair’s bowling, however, lacked variation, and was treated with disdain by great batsmen such as Everton Weekes, Peter May and Tom Graveney. In England in 1958, he took only three wickets in three tests at a cost of 70.00 each. On the credit side he dismissed Len Hutton at Dunedin in 1955 and Peter May at the Oval in 1958.

In the Plunket Shield, Blair remained an alarming proposition into his 30s. Between 1951 and 1965, he claimed 330 wickets for Wellington, at 15.16 apiece. In 1964, he became the first New Zealand bowler to take 500 first-class wickets, before retiring the next year with a total of 537 victims (at 18.54), a record which stood for 15 years. In his 19 tests, by contrast, he managed only 43 wickets at an average of 35.23.

Curiously, his last test, against South Africa at Auckland in 1964, proved his most successful, with analyses of four for 85 and three for 57.

Blair’s batting earned him the nickname “Rabbit”; indeed, on three occasions in test cricket he was dismissed for a “pair”. Most surprisingly, however, he scored 64 not out (out of an innings total of 194) against England at Wellington in 1963. His final batting averages were 6.75 in tests and 12.29 in all first-class cricket.

Originally a printing compositor, Blair owned a sports shop with his fellow Wellington pace bowler Bruce Morrison. After retiring from the game, he suddenly left New Zealand, and subsequently coached in Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, England and Ireland. He captained the Lancashire over-50s in a county competition, taking 7-12 in the semi-finals, and played his last game, for Widnes, when he was 67. He settled in Cheshire.

In 2013, Blair returned briefly to Wellington to receive an award from a local newspaper, proving in an interview that his youthful asperity had matured into a delightfully ironic humour. In recalling the disaster at Tangiwai, he was careful to remind the audience that 150 others had died besides his fiancée.

Bob Blair married Barbara in 1986. He had two sons.

Bob Blair, born June 23, 1932, died June 23 2026

– UK Daily Telegraph