Tim Southee - right-arm rockstar, unsung from afar

Last week, the world of heavy metal was rocked by the retirement of Iron Maiden's legendary drummer, Nicko McBrain, whose borderline-deranged repertoire of rolls, fills and syncopations earned him the occasional nickname of "The Octopus", as he left barely a beat unstressed in 42 years of timekeeping for his behemoth of a band.

This week, another titan of the global touring lifestyle will say his own farewell to the big stage -though it's hard to imagine the grass banks at Hamilton's bucolic Seddon Park will throb with quite the same acclaim as a Sao Paulo stadium packed with 50,000 metalheads. There will at least be a life-size "Sexy Camel" in attendance, for Tim Southee - much to his own bemusement - was also known to answer to an unlikely animalistic alias.

Either way, Southee's mighty New Zealand career has had plenty in common with that of a drummer, albeit one of a less frenetic variety. A good ball on a good length. From a good height, at a good pace. With a good amount of movement - predominantly away but, occasionally, back in as well. Maintain that beat for 774 wickets across 35,000 deliveries, three formats and 16 years. Thank you and goodnight.

He's had some glorious moments when he's truly stolen the show, and some of the records he's racked up along the way have long since gone platinum. Moreover, he's been integral to the most sustained era of excellence in New Zealand's cricketing history. And yet, Southee's lack of a defining feature has been perhaps his most remarkable feature. When all is said and done, he is just as likely to be remembered for the space he left between his notes, for the room that his matchless rhythms granted for his team-mates to revel in the limelight.

"I've had the privilege of playing pretty much all my Test matches with Timmy," Tom Latham, New Zealand's captain, said on the eve of his farewell match. "To see how he goes about things, day in day out, the longevity that he's had as a seam bowler in New Zealand, to play the amount of Test matches that he has … we'll certainly miss him, the dressing-room will miss him, but he is going to leave a legacy that I'm sure will go on for a long time."

Foremost among those who were elevated by his endurance, of course, was Trent Boult, the Broad to Southee's Anderson, and New Zealand's richest source of "look at me" displays throughout their combined haul of 541 wickets from 65 Tests. Never was this more telling than in March 2018, when Boult claimed four of the first five wickets, and six out of ten all told, as he and Southee combined to rout England for 58 at Eden Park.

And if that left-arm-inswing, right-arm-outswing alliance wasn't enough of a challenge for opposition batters, there was Neil Wagner too (now there's a heavy metal cricketer if ever there was one …) pounding the areas of the pitch that Southee's full and probing methods had little reason to visit. Between that trio, and the freakish trajectories of Kyle Jamieson, now sadly hors de combat with a stress fracture, New Zealand's seam attack was briefly the most complete in world cricket, and at precisely the right moment to land the inaugural World Test Championship in 2021.

Perhaps it's doing Southee a disservice to consider him, first and foremost, as a cog in New Zealand's over-achieving machine. But in so many ways, his absences from the narrative are the killer details of his career. They speak volumes for his drive to stay competitive in the first instance, but also of his acceptance - particularly in white-ball cricket - that there were moments in his career when other players were simply better placed to take on that starring role.

Take his two-year absence from New Zealand's T20I plans between 2015-17, for instance - precisely the same timeframe in which both Broad and Anderson were binned off from England's white-ball plans, never to return. Not only did Southee regain his place for 88 subsequent T20Is, up to and including the T20 World Cup in the Caribbean just gone, he bows out with a record 164 wickets in the format, a tally that only Mustafizur Rahman among seamers looks likely to challenge in a hurry.

And similarly, when he was limited to a squad role for both the 2019 and 2023 50-over World Cups, despite having been one of the stand-out performers in New Zealand's glorious run to the 2015 final, it was a testament to the standards that he'd inspired in his peers - most particularly Matt Henry, for so long the team's understudy, but a man who is now set to inherit his Test mantle too, having racked up 61 Test wickets at 21.93 since taking over as Southee's regular new-ball partner at the start of 2023.

"If you sit still, the game will pass you by," Southee told ESPNcricinfo in October last year. "You're always looking at ways to continue to improve, so you can continue fulfilling the dream of playing this game. For me, I obviously don't have out-and-out pace, so you need to stay with the game and figure out ways you can still be effective in all parts of the world."

He fulfilled that ambition magnificently, with his accolades including a ten-wicket haul against England at Lord's in 2013, and career-best figures of 7 for 64 in Bengaluru some ten months earlier. His white-ball honours include two T20I hat-tricks, as well as New Zealand's best figures in each of the shorter formats - including, at Wellington in the 2015 World Cup, a stunning haul of 7 for 33 to rout England, surely the most storied solo of his career.

And yet, it's arguably only now, as Southee's career winds down and his lacking of cutting edge is exposed by the indefinable lack of "snap" in his action that has limited him to 15 wickets at 61.66 since the start of 2024, that the true extent of his influence can be appreciated. After all, there cannot be many players who arrived at international level quite so fully formed as Southee did, at Napier in March 2008, hence it's been nigh on impossible to judge him against the standard narrative arc that govern such long-term performers (including, it should be said, Anderson and Broad, whose own Test careers had begun in earnest just one Test earlier in Wellington).

"For 16 years, every facet of his game has been more than a notch above the usual bass-line, and so it's in the spaces in his narrative where the body of Southee's work lies"

It wasn't simply that Southee claimed five wickets in his maiden Test innings, including two in three overs as England slumped to 4 for 3 on the first morning, or that he capped that same match with a startling nine sixes in a never-since-bettered knock of 77 not out from 40 balls from No.10. It was that he did so only days after returning from a Player-of-the-Tournament display at the Under-19 World Cup in Malaysia, and with a basic method that has barely altered in the intervening years.

"I was gifted with a nice wrist," Southee explained to Ian Bishop during an ICC masterclass in 2019, describing how the ball always seemed to sit perfectly in his fingers, seam canted for the outswinger that directly accounted for four of those five debut wickets, plus his maiden scalp of Michael Vaughan, who was done in lbw by one that didn't budge.

And if he had to work harder on the ball that ducked back in, then few cricketers became more synonymous with the "three-quarter seam", Southee's answer to an inswinger, and arguably the ball that landed New Zealand their crowning glory in 2021, with his priceless extractions of Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill on the penultimate evening of the WTC final against India in Southampton.

The best measure of Southee's standards remains, however, the man himself. That unrivalled penchant for six-hitting, for instance, has been a central theme of this England series, given how close he is to launching a century of them, but it bears repetition nonetheless: no-one in history can hold a candle to his rate of one six every 27 balls faced, not even the bomb-dropper de nos jours, Yashaswi Jaiswal, who has taken 51 balls for each of the 35 he has struck since the start of 2024.

And then there's his supreme ability as a slip catcher. Southee is one of a vanishingly rare breed of fast bowlers whose bucket hands come with the requisite agility to cling onto a succession of blinders. With 85 Test catches so far, he's safely ensconced as New Zealand's fifth-most prolific fielder, and had he not been bowling some 36 overs in every match, his place on the podium would have been secured long ago.

For 16 years, every facet of his game has been more than a notch above the usual bass-line, and so it's in the spaces in his narrative where the body of Southee's work lies. Is it preposterous graft that has made him the most enduring all-formats fast bowler in international history, or the innate talent and athleticism of this Whangerei farm-boy made good? Or, simply a refusal to face the sort of facts that have been hounding him in these past two Tests at Christchurch and Wellington, where Ben Duckett and Harry Brook have taken turns to beast him towards the exit?