Being nice has always had a bad rap, but arguably never more than in the preening toxicity of the times we currently inhabit. These days being nice is positively unfashionable. It's never been more a sign of naivety, of not knowing how the world works, because the world works only for those who are bad. It's weakness. Calling someone nice is a way to not call them something worse, at best. Otherwise, it's an out and out slur.
Which is often the context within which people talk about New Zealand in this era. A team of nice guys who finish second, which, in sport, is sometimes worse than finishing last. Both bits of this statement are true. This generation of New Zealand cricketers are nice, like choirboy-nice, and more so when placed against the contrast of the gnarled bad boys who preceded them. Also, they do finish second a lot. Sometimes gallantly - as in the 2019 World Cup final - and sometimes annoyingly, like when they overperformed to beat a better side in a semi and then underwhelmed in drab finals (the T20 World Cups of 2021 and '22, and earlier this year).
And now the head choirboy has called it a day and though it doesn't necessarily bring the era to a close, it does carry its own atomised sense of deep loss. Kane Williamson's decision to leave international cricket is abrupt and unsurprising. Unusually, it has come mid-series but it has also been a while coming - since when he began quiet quitting (maybe rebalancing the work-life balance is the appropriate terminology?) a couple of years ago by turning down an NZC central contract.
Retirement has lurked around his every move since. When he made 156 in the win over England in Hamilton at the end of 2024, it seemed like the right moment to go. He became a strategic advisor in the IPL, a very retirement-adjacent move. Instead, we're five Tests further down the road from Hamilton, one Test into a three-Test series, and 485 runs short of 10,000 runs. Endings, as cricket does so well to remind us, are rarely perfect, nor do they always feel whole.
Because the entire point of Kane Williamson was usually to divert your gaze away from Kane Williamson, his retirement announcement was zero frills and ten words long: "I stand here to announce my retirement from international cricket." He delivered it with an unseemly perkiness, and with a smile less rueful than the one we've become familiar with in his bearded years (confession: I no longer remember un-bearded Kane).
And he then stood there for about 15 minutes, hands steadfastly on hips, a little like Superman in his iconic pose, and answered some questions in a session that, at times, sounded like he was counselling people through grief. Which he kind of was.
All right, so it is a bit of a disservice to dwell on all the niceness first up. To remember his cake-eating with fans in Colombo. The unearthly grace and patience with which he dealt with losing/not-losing the cruellest game this sport has witnessed. His surprised "Me?" when told he was player of the tournament at the 2019 World Cup. And the press conference with the cat… okay, stop it.
Nice has just been an easy - lazy - way to label a player and team for a world that pays ever more attention to only three teams and their players. Like Pakistan being mercurial, Sri Lanka unorthodox, West Indies fallen. But it has also served to downplay Williamson's generational quality (and that of the sides he has played in). We are, after all, farewelling here almost certainly the greatest New Zealand batter ever, and one of the greatest of the modern age. That's more than just nice.
There'll be some hard-nosed assessments of his career no doubt. His Test numbers against so-and-so. His record in such and such places. This is very much not that space. Here there is only room for moist-eyed goodbyes. Not only has Kane left the building, there is an acute understanding that the building is crumbling while simultaneously undergoing a comprehensive facelift. It will never be the same again. Rachin Ravindra, as the likely next New Zealand batting genius for example, will not be a resident of this building in the same way Williamson was. Maybe that's just the nature of buildings.
But here, I am with the reporter who asked Williamson how on earth he was handling the momentousness of his own departure with such composure. Williamson began by asking - jokingly - whether the reporter was about to tear up (he was, and it's unlikely he was alone in that).
Duly, Williamson was asked for his thoughts on his own standing, and his status as a Kiwi great. Duly, he sidestepped the question, elegantly and self-deprecatingly and naturally it turned into an unassuming little stroll into the tolls of selflessness.
One bit of the response is worth focusing on: "One of my little things, I would remind myself, and you feel different every day, is that the runs aren't yours. They're of service. And that's what draws a lot out of you, because what's enough? And so you do everything you can to be a little bit better and give more, and that's how I've gone about my career. Also, it's brought a lot of joy when you give them [the runs] to something else, rather than [it] being about you all the time."
The runs aren't yours, but of service to a team.
All batters' runs ultimately tally up for their team, but this is such an evocative framing of that contract, and from Williamson, an utterly genuine one. Because what stood him out - and what stands any great batter out - was his capacity to play not the bowler, or the pitch, or the team, but only the situation in front of him. As he did, for example, in his legendary 140 at the Gabba in 2015 where, in Luke Ronchi's telling Williamson made significant changes to his technique mid-innings to combat the specific way Australia were trying to get him out. It wasn't the attack, hardcore as it was, with Mitchell Johnson, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon. It was whatever was needed to keep the match alive.
As was the 49 in the first innings of the first World Test Championship final, a gruelling mini epic compiled over nearly five hours against a first-rate attack in tough conditions. New Zealand needed a lead and when he was eighth out, they had one. Less than six months later, he took Starc for 22 in the 16th over of the T20 World Cup final, turning a pedestrian start into something of a total.
A personal favourite was his third-innings 139 in Abu Dhabi, on a slow and low turner into its fourth day, against a red-hot Yasir Shah. This was five hours of pure Williamson, the feathery touch, so late but so assured, the timing pristine, and the footwork around the crease as if he was gliding along on an ice rink. The sun was out, there was barely a crowd in, and watching him bat was to be transported onto the deck of a boat, gently, meditatively swaying along on calm waters. Except that at (minus) 14 for 4 early in his innings, against a red-hot Yasir, New Zealand were very much not in calm waters. They won the game, and with it, historically, the series.
All those runs and many, many more, were of service to his teams, yes, but what Williamson overlooked was the service they were to us. Every single one of the 19,346 he made in international cricket over the years, whether made beautifully or scrappily, slowly or hurriedly, inevitably or as if another might never come, in whites, in black, against red, white and pink, in crises, in triumph or in defeat. With each one, and along with the other three members of Martin Crowe's Fab Four, Williamson has been a flagbearer for early 21st century batting.
There's every chance, with the way the game and batting are mutating that Virat Kohli, Joe Root, Steve Smith and Williamson come to represent a last of a breed - able to flit effortlessly across formats. Only two are left now (with a bit of Kohli in ODIs). Williamson leaves with the second-highest Test average of the four, and could conceivably end up with the highest. Which isn't so bad for such a nice guy.