Also, Peter Kennedy is my second cousin. His career ended with a car crash in Holland where he was injured (I think his back). He was awesome at family bbqs though. After getting a bit wasted he was real funny aye.

My favourite memory of Rod (apart from the catch mentioned above, where Rod hovered above the ground for what seemed like an age, like a Soviet ground effect plane, mesmerising yet cumbersome) was at Lancaster Park, as it should forever be known. It was sometime in the mid-to-late 90′s, at a testimonial match for Chris Harris and Chris Cairns, who, even though they were still in the national team, and would be for sometime, were being celebrated for 10 years playing for Canterbury. We were in the old number 1 stand (or at least the stand on the east side) and there weren’t a huge number of people there. So few, that when Rod came out to bat, we could heckle him (we were teenage boys) and he could hear us out in the middle. Rod had been retired for sometime, in which he had enhanced his rotundness to some degree. We were riffing on his tubular appearance for a while, before he managed to get hold of a shorter delivery, which he successfully pulled out in our direction. Four. After watching it hit the hoardings, he turned towards us and slowly raised his chubby-gloved middle finger.

We stopped heckling him after that.

Look at that Canterbury team, Astle at 10 and about 5 CBHS old boys. Only one who never played for NZ was Peter Kennedy but he took one of the greatest catches I’ve seen to dismiss big hitting Richard Reid, shot would’ve gone for 6 otherwise which by istelf would’ve won the game. Asked afterwards about it, Kennedy said that he gave it everything to take the catch as he was out of position ‘cos he was giving his phone number to a young lady in the crowd. Class!