“It’s a bit of a shame that it comes up again. The guys that were disciplined around that have absolutely done their time, more than their time I reckon when some of the punishments were handed out. I guess it creates a bit of drama and there will be plenty of noise around it for a little bit longer, unfortunately. Maybe there are some question marks around how they dealt with it originally but I think the best thing to do is move on,” Williamson said.
Williamson’s autobiography The Bare Margins was released this week, something he said went full circle after being against the idea of a book during his playing career.
“To be honest I didn’t really think to do it and I didn’t think I would throughout my career. I sort of got convinced. Met with a friend of mine who was the former CEO of the players association and he said I had to, bullied me into it,” Williamson joked.
“No he gave me a purpose to do it, to try and capture the growth of the environment the time I was in it, my lens on my career and how I went about it. It came full circle from not really thinking about doing a book to enjoying the process of it.”
Williamson announced his retirement from cricket in June, before the second test against England. He finished with 110 test caps, the most New Zealand test runs (9515), most centuries (33) and an astonishing average (54.06).
Highlights included one World Test Championship, two 50-over World Cup finals, and a T20 World Cup decider. His captaincy record in the longest format, with 22 victories, 10 losses and eight draws from 40 matches in charge, surpasses the best of any other permanent national skipper.
Williamson told Ryan Bridge TODAY it was tough to pick the most enjoyable moment of his career.
“It’s quite hard to pin down one. When you first get called up to [the] international team is really really special. It’s a childhood dream. But once you’re in the side and you’re part of trying to help grow a team, I think that is the most satisfying part – it’s taking a lot of steps forward. I really enjoyed that. You go through different moments – some go your way some don’t. And 2019 was a bit like that. To get through that and then experience the World Test Championship final and have some success as a team and ultimately winning that was quite special.”
Williamson said the impact of the 2019 ODI World Cup final hit him when he was travelling in Geneva after the tournament and fans wanted to talk to him about the Super Over defeat.
“When you’re involved in those experiences directly you sort of see them a different way. How large the impact and how it captured so many people even, perhaps necessarily not just cricketing fans. Heading to Geneva just after that, I’d been there many times and no one had even spoken cricket to me. It was quite incredible.
“That was more the challenging part of dealing with that, the months afterwards was you felt like you were consoling people who were emotional and struggling to deal with the result more so than your own connection to that match. An amazing time as a team, we look back on it fondly despite the heartbreak that it was.”