Lance Cairns was an all-rounder cricketer known for his legendary eccentric batting and bowling action playing for the New Zealand cricket team.
He had played almost 278 matches combined in first-class and List A cricket throughout his career. However, his batting career was marked by a pronounced lack of centuries on the domestic level, where only managed to bag a single century in a match between Otago and Wellington – and this was surprisingly also a tremendously fast century, where Lance had scored 9 sixes in an hour, hitting a 110 run mark at only 51 balls. The charm of Lance Cairns was not the familiar charm of a glamorous achievement in terms of score sheets, but a charm of eccentricity and raw quality of play.
Batting and Fielding Averages of Lance Cairns
| Mat | NO | Runs | HS | Ave | BF | SR | 100 | 50 | 6s | Ct | |
| Tests | 43 | 8 | 928 | 64 | 16.28 | – | – | 0 | 2 | 28 | 30 |
| ODIs | 78 | 6 | 987 | 60 | 16.72 | 941 | 104.88 | 0 | 2 | – | 19 |
| First-class | 148 | 25 | 4165 | 110 | 20.72 | – | – | 1 | 23 | – | 89 |
| List A | 130 | 10 | 1885 | 95 | 18.12 | – | – | 0 | 9 | – | 37 |
Bowling Averages
| Mat | Runs | Wkts | BBI | BBM | Ave | Econ | 5w | 10 | |
| Tests | 43 | 4280 | 130 | 7/74 | 10/144 | 32.92 | 2.41 | 6 | 1 |
| ODIs | 78 | 2717 | 89 | 5/28 | 5/28 | 30.52 | 4.06 | 1 | 0 |
| First-class | 148 | 12544 | 473 | 8/46 | – | 26.52 | 2.37 | 24 | 5 |
| List A | 130 | 4384 | 167 | 5/28 | 5/28 | 26.25 | 3.83 | 1 | 0 |
Coming from an unbecoming hamlet in rural Marlborough, he was much unacquainted of the standard cricket conventions, resulting in his unorthodox stances and plays in both batting and bowling departments. He played with a massive bat that he carried throughout a large chunk of his international and domestic career – which had a conical cutaway shoulder and came to be colloquially referred to as the ‘Excalibur’ after the Arthurian legends.
While he played for three different teams on the domestic level throughout his career, Lance was also a staple for the NZ ODI and Test team between 1974 and 1985, appearing in 78 and 43 matches respectively. His most well-known batting spell was in the much-acclaimed and hyped Australian Tri-Series in 1982, where NZ had gained a victorious momentum to win over the defending champions, Australia. After winning through the tournament, eliminating England from the scene, breaking two world records in a single match (in Adelaide), where Australia had begun to fend them off, taking them one-nil into the second finals match at MCG, where the demoralized NZ team sorely felt the absence of Richard Hadlee.
Although they would lose the match, and thus the tournament, Lance Cairns had for the first time awakened the spirit of his team even if for a brief while, by hitting six sixes, the last of which was a one-handed shot with the ‘Excalibur’ off Dennis Lillee’s bowling.
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