🇳🇿 diplomat. Now: Senior Adviser to @NewZealandMFA. Ex: HCer to 🇱🇰, posted to 🇹🇱🇺🇸🇮🇳. Samraj’s Dad & @nayantarapple’s husband. Love 🏏🗳. Views my own
Wellington City, New Zealand
Joined August 2009
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Congratulations, 🇮🇳!
A modest proposal: With the T20I series over, and a Cricket World Cup just around the corner, let’s convert the next two matches into fifty-overs-a-side and have a good, old fashioned seven-match ODI series.
In Tests in 🇿🇦 in the last decade:
-the team bowling first has won 12 & lost 27.
-the team to win the toss has chosen to bat 70 percent of the time.
Curious decision from Cummins.
26, 17, 21, 20, 16, 18, 15, 23, 6
There may have been a case for Santner to bowl earlier than the ninth over …
Santner not bowling himself with 🇮🇳 within 65 runs of @BLACKCAPS is an, umm, interesting approach.
In T20Is between teams with Test status, the highest run rate in a successful chase of 180+ is 13.75 (when 🇿🇦 made 259/4 vs 🏝️ in 18.5 overs in 2023).
To break that record here, 🇮🇳 need to reach this target of 199 in about 14 overs.
Reckon they’re going to smash it.
The only silver lining to this @BLACKCAPS bowling performance is that, unlike the first two games, there’s no hope being built up only to be dashed…
We New Zealanders are blessed to live in an open, vibrant, competitive democracy in which we get to choose between alternative visions for how to make our amazing country (even) better.
Get out and vote! vote.nz/2026-general-electio…
📸 Samraj on his first ever election day (2020).
Michael Appleton retweeted
The 79th edition of the New Zealand Cricket Almanack is available now. If you're looking at cricket records which will never be broken, put 44 consecutive editions of a cricket annual by the same editors at the top of your list. No one will even get close, see the following...
Absolutely love The New Zealand Cricket Almanack.
We’ve certainly had some memorable editions this decade for @BLACKCAPS, including 2021 (WTC victory), 2025 (Test series win in 🇮🇳) & 2026 (Test series win in 🏴).
Very excited for the @BLACKCAPS - 🇮🇳 series.
My predictions:
T20s: 🇮🇳 4-1
ODIs: 🇮🇳 3-2
Tests: 🇳🇿 2-0
Michael Appleton retweeted
Overseas voting for the NZ General Election opened today so I took the opportunity to cast my vote in the Embassy in Beijing. Democracy is great!
🇮🇳’s 12 games in 🇳🇿 - 5 T20Is, 5 ODIs and 2 Tests, from 22 October till 1 December - is the longest bilateral tour @BLACKCAPS has ever hosted (in games played).
Examples of 11-game tours:
🏝️ in 2025-26: 5 T20s, 3 ODIs, 3 Tests
🇵🇰 in 2010-11: 3 T20s, 6 ODIs, 2 Tests
Collecting for the Breast Cancer Foundation, and remembering the wonderful mother Caroline, James, Thom Apples and I lost almost sixteen years ago… and all the other women we know who’ve faced the same challenge.
We love you, Mum.
Donate here: fundraise.bcf.org.nz/prsa
Five election podcasts I’m listening to:
1. Gone By Lunchtime (@TheSpinoffTV)
2. Caucus (@radionz)
3. Tame and Tova (@TVNZ)
4. Raw Politics (@NewsroomNZ)
5. Election 2026: The Podcast (@nzherald)
Any good ones I’m missing?
Using our beautifully complicated electoral system, and proposed overhang strategies, to do some Sunday morning maths with Samraj.
His question for if the overhang strategies worked: who would pay to build all the extra seats in Parliament?
Unfortunately Dawson’s Creek, Felicity and The West Wing - which all surely would have otherwise been in the top 10 - all started in the final years of the 20th Century.
Our list of the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century is out now. See what came in at No. 1 here. nyti.ms/4joj3Dm
Of these 24 series in 🇳🇿, 🇮🇳 has won 6:
-Tests in 1967/68 & 2008/09
-ODIs in 2008/09 & 2018/19
-T20Is in 2019/20 & 2022/23
