Mitchell McClenaghan: The Wicket-Taker Who Chose the Leagues

In August 2017 Mitchell McClenaghan gave up his New Zealand central contract. He was thirty-one, he had taken 82 wickets in 48 one-day internationals, he held the record for the fewest matches taken by a New Zealander to reach fifty ODI wickets, and he had just finished a season in which he was the fourth-highest wicket-taker in the IPL. He was not dropped and he was not finished. He decided that the franchise circuit was the better use of the years he had left, and he went.

That decision has since become routine enough that it barely registers. In 2017 it was still slightly shocking, and McClenaghan's career is a useful place to examine why players started making it — because his particular set of skills was valued very differently by the two employers.

The bowler, and the number that describes him

Mitchell McClenaghan bowled left-arm fast-medium at genuine pace, angling the ball across the right-hander from wide of the crease, with a bouncer he used far more often than most white-ball seamers dared and a habit of getting in the batter's face afterwards. He was expensive. He was also, ball for ball, one of the most productive wicket-takers of his generation in either white-ball format.

His IPL record makes the point cleanly: 71 wickets in 56 matches at an average of 25.39, with an economy rate of 8.49. That economy is not good. Read alongside it, though, is a strike rate of roughly one wicket every eighteen deliveries — three overs a wicket, sustained across five seasons. A bowler like that costs you runs in every match and wins you some of them outright, and a captain has to decide which he is buying.

The one-day international record shows the same shape at a higher level. Forty-eight matches, 82 wickets at 28.20, best figures of 5 for 58. He took 4 for 20 on debut against South Africa in January 2013, the best figures by a New Zealand ODI debutant and only the second time a New Zealander had taken four on debut after Dayle Hadlee. By October 2014 he had reached fifty ODI wickets in twenty-three matches, faster than any New Zealander before him and among the fastest anybody has managed. In twenty-nine T20 internationals he took thirty wickets at 26.30.

What New Zealand did with him, and what they did not

The strangest line in the record is the 2015 World Cup. McClenaghan was in a New Zealand squad that reached the final, and he played one match — against Bangladesh, in which he went for 68 off eight overs and took nothing. Trent Boult and Tim Southee bowled New Zealand to that final, and the selectors were plainly right to pick them. But a bowler who had reached fifty ODI wickets faster than any of his countrymen, watching a home World Cup from the balcony, is a bowler learning something about where he stands.

The wider truth is that New Zealand in the mid-2010s had an unusually deep and unusually accurate seam attack, and McClenaghan was the one who was not accurate. In a fifty-over international, where a bowler has ten overs and a captain has all day to squeeze a batting side, the economy rate carries a weight it never quite carries in twenty. He was in and out of the side for four years, and injuries — the sort of back and side complaints that follow tall fast bowlers everywhere — took chunks out of the periods when he was in.

His last one-day international came in January 2016 against Pakistan. His last T20 international was in May 2018, and the history of New Zealand cricket will record him as a bowler of forty-eight ODIs rather than a hundred, which reads as an underachievement and mostly is not one.

Mumbai, where the economy rate stopped mattering

Mumbai Indians bought him in 2015 and he stayed for five seasons, playing for no other IPL franchise. The fit was close to perfect, for a reason that comes down to squad construction rather than anything about McClenaghan.

Mumbai in those years had Lasith Malinga, the most reliable death bowler the tournament has produced, and a settled plan for the last four overs. That freed a slot for a bowler whose only job was to take wickets early and in the middle, and to be forgiven the cost. McClenaghan took eighteen wickets in his first season, in ten to a dozen appearances, at an average around 22. Mumbai won the 2015 title.

The final of that season is his best forty-five minutes in the competition. At Eden Gardens on 24 May 2015, defending 202 against Chennai Super Kings, McClenaghan bowled four overs for 25 and took three wickets — the best figures on either side in a match Mumbai won by 41 runs. In a final decided by a bowling performance rather than a batting one, he was the bowler.

Two seasons later he was the fourth-highest wicket-taker in the entire 2017 tournament, with nineteen wickets from fourteen matches, and Mumbai won the title again — the closest final in the competition's history, settled by a single run. He appeared again in 2018 as a replacement and in 2019, taking his career total to 71 wickets, all of them in the same blue shirt.

Two titles from five seasons at a single franchise, with a decisive spell in one of the finals, is a franchise career most overseas bowlers would take. It is also, notably, more silverware than his international career produced, New Zealand having reached the 2015 final and lost it.

The batting, and why it belongs here

McClenaghan made 85 runs in the IPL from nineteen innings, six not out, at an average of 6.54. He hit seven sixes and five fours, which means most of his scoring shots cleared the rope, which in turn tells you exactly what he was attempting whenever a bat was placed in his hands. His highest score was 20.

This is not padding for a paragraph. It is the other half of the same disposition. McClenaghan was a cricketer with no interest in the percentage option in any department: he bowled short at batters who hooked, he bowled fast at the death when told to, and he swung at everything from number ten. Sides that employed him knew they were buying volatility and buying it deliberately.

Why the decision made sense

By 2017 the calculation facing a thirty-one-year-old fast bowler with a modest international standing had genuinely changed. The franchise leagues had multiplied to the point where a specialist white-ball seamer could construct a year's work from the IPL, the Caribbean, the Pakistan Super League and the Big Bash, and the total pay comfortably exceeded a New Zealand contract. More importantly for a bowler with McClenaghan's body, the workload was lower and the format was the one his skills suited.

There is a version of this article that treats the choice as a loss to the international game. That version is sentimental. New Zealand had Boult and Southee, later Lockie Ferguson and Matt Henry, and got to a World Cup final and then another one without him. What McClenaghan gave up was a place on the edge of a squad; what he took was five or six more years of being a first-choice strike bowler somewhere.

The economy rate that kept him out of a settled international attack was, in twenty overs, an acceptable price for wickets. That is the whole argument, and the difference between bowling economy, average and strike rate is where it lives. He was never going to be the bowler you built a fifty-over defence around. He was, for five seasons at Mumbai, exactly the bowler you wanted running in first change with the field up and a game to break open.