Being McCullum

It's quite something to be Brendon McCullum in the early summer of 2015. At Lord's you could feel it even as the wicket fell and Ross Taylor began to walk back with New Zealand at 337 for 3. The stage cleared and the buzz began, the electric shiver that runs through a crowd when a really big player makes his entrance. The Lord's pavilion offers a backdrop like no other, too, the incoming man centred in the Long Room doors before descending the chute of steps and out onto the great island of green ahead, a lone white figure moving towards the enemy guns.

They take this stage in many ways. McCullum comes out coiled, taut, ready to unwind. He has the frame of a middleweight slugger - a body-puncher - and the jaw of Desperate Dan. He rolls his shoulders, chews his gum. Every eye is on him. The Lord's murmur ups in tone. He plays an innings that is part madness, part inspiration - he feels the pulse of the game and interprets it in his own way. Not everyone agrees. Almost everyone wanted more.

For his second innings he emerged in the middle of a wild afternoon, the punters let in for 20 quid, the game somehow listing queasily away from him. This time, the murmur has become a roar. He goes through the same routine, the shoulder rolls, the gum, but now the gods - and Stokes - are against him and he chops on, first ball. Amid the tumult around him, the camera catches his face, which hardly changes in expression. The eyes narrow, the mouth opens, he chews and shakes his head, because he knows this is what he signed up for. The joy in the hearts of his opponents is a compliment to him.

The same thing had happened in the World Cup final, his stumps knocked back before he knew it, and yet by then McCullum had seized the imagination not just of the New Zealand public but also of a global audience. His team and his country had put soul into the tournament and he had led that by playing with a fearless unselfishness, his mind clear, his batting a thing of brutal beauty.

It followed one of the most extraordinary years of Test match batsmanship in which he had made 224, 302, 202 and 195 across sixteen innings in which his next highest score was 45. All-or-nothing cricket of sublime quality.

It was not always like that. Jarrod Kimber, who has a knack for nicknames that nail a player, used to call him Prince Brendon. And he was a flashy, third-in-line-to-the-throne type, a man who had found acclaim rather than purpose. It took him five years of Test cricket to raise a hundred against opponents other than Bangladesh or Zimbabwe, and it seemed as though his legacy might become the innings he played on 18 April 2008 in Bangalore, the inaugural day of the IPL, when he launched the tournament with 158 from 73 deliveries, a talismanic, futuristic knock that was the stuff of Lalit Modi's dreams.

With the captaincy of his country, taken on in ugly circumstances, the real transformation began. His triple-hundred, full of meaning for New Zealand as it was the nation's first, crowned his ascension. McCullum had married the mindset that brought the IPL alive with the requirements of a captain and a leader. His country has moved forwards with him. That, and the World Cup, will be his legacy now.

It's why Lord's came alive when McCullum walked out. He has found a way of galvanising all of the sides of his character, of keeping his instincts free and fearless while offering real gravitas. A leader less loved may have taken some stick for each of his innings at Lord's, but McCullum is loved, and not just in his own land. He is charging towards the future, and the game owes him a debt for it.

As with all the best gladiators, one way or another we have been entertained.