Listening back to Craig McMillan’s TV commentary, as Corey Anderson arrived at the crease in the Black Caps’ 2014 New Year’s Day ODI against the West Indies in Queenstown, makes for quite the chuckle.

“Well, Anderson’s got time now,” McMillan professed. “He can just get himself in, feed the strike to Jesse Ryder, who’s seeing it like a beach ball. Get yourself in, get yourself set.”

Just 37 minutes later, Anderson was raising his bat and helmet aloft, the burly left-hander having just set a new world record for the fastest-ever international century – a mere 36 balls.

It’s now 10 years to the day that the then-23-year-old batted himself to cricketing superstardom, with an innings that proved to have massive ramifications, both good and bad.

“It seems a little bit like yesterday,” Anderson recalls to Stuff of that incredible day.

“It’s kind of a combination, if I do think about it, that does feel like a long time ago.

“I guess that was the first kind of thing that put me into the limelight a little bit, no-one really knew who I was before that.”

One rainy Queenstown New Year’s Day

There was absolutely no sign of what was to come.

Firstly, the form books. Sure, Anderson, in this his second season wearing the silver fern, had hit a maiden test century a couple of months earlier, on the tour of Bangladesh, but his returns in the 2-1 home test series win over the Windies, and the ODI series-opening defeat on Boxing Day at Eden Park, had been modest.

Secondly, the weather. With game two in Napier abandoned without a ball bowled, the Black Caps headed to Queenstown in must-win territory if they were to still be a chance of claiming the series, however, in what was turning into a miserable holiday period, rain again looked like spoiling the fun.

In fact, so remote looked the chances of play at the Queenstown Events Centre (now Sir John Davies Oval), that Anderson, who, he quips, as a youngster in the team hesitant to rock the boat, reckons he was one of the few who hadn’t indulged in a big New Year’s Eve the night before, remembers coach Mike Hesson loading all the gear back into the changing room, and everyone just awaiting the umpires’ official call that the game was off.

And then, about 3.15pm, the rain just stopped. All of a sudden, a start, scheduled for 11am, became possible at 4.10pm, allowing a 21-overs-a-side contest.

Sent in, New Zealand lost Martin Guptill (1 off 7) early, then captain Brendon McCullum after a 33-off-11 blitz, and while they had Ryder flying at 41 off 20, when Ross Taylor (9 off 8) departed, they were 85-3 in 7.4 overs and as McMillan – who had also been doing some batting consultancy work with the side – noted, Anderson could indeed take some time to build an innings.

‘Yeah, right’ might have been an appropriate counter from the new man to the crease, considering the Tui beer promotion of the time, which had a heap of orange-shirted punters in the crowd vying to take a one-handed catch and earn themselves $100,000. And while no-one managed one of the lucrative snares, it certainly was not through lack of opportunity.

Off the mark first ball with a single, Anderson crunched his third delivery for four through mid-wicket off Dwayne Bravo, and smoked his seventh for a massive slog-sweep six off Sunil Narine, and he was away.

Starting the next over by sending Jason Holder for a straight four and a vicious flat-pulled six proved just an entree for the next over, from Narine, which went 66.6.6 as Anderson combined timing and muscle and brought up his 50 off only 20 balls.

Two overs later, he went even better, hitting four maximums in a row off Ravi Rampaul (0-64 off 3) – cover, straight, then a double dose at mid-wicket – to break Brendon McCullum’s record for sixes in an ODI, with Anderson’s 11th coming off just his 28th ball faced.

“Boundaries in Queenstown aren’t that big, especially square, and all of a sudden we were just miles ahead of the game,” he remembers.

“That’s when it becomes pretty fun, because you’re not really thinking about anything, and you’re just trying to hit boundaries, and if it comes off, it comes off.

“There’s those days where you get caught on the fence, and then there’s other days where they just sail over someone on the boundary. You can have great days, and then you can have bad days. What happened could have been very different. But this was just one of those ones, it was just starting to become a bit of carnage.”

‘Shahid Afridi, goodbye! Hello, Corey Anderson!’

Heading into the 18th over, Anderson had rocketed to 95 off 35, and all of a sudden came the possibility of a world record.

Pakistan’s Shahid Afridi, in his first-ever ODI innings, had belted a century off 37 balls against Sri Lanka in 1996, and no-one had come close to eclipsing it, in any form of international cricket, in more than 17 years.

Until now, with Anderson just needing to clear the ropes with his next ball faced. Not that he had any sort of inkling there was history in the offing, mind you.

“I had absolutely no idea,” he recalls.

“Early on in my career, I hadn’t got an ODI hundred, and I thought, ‘If I hit a six here, I get a hundred’. That was kind of the only thing I had running through my head.”

Left-arm spinner Nikita Miller, amongst the batting assault, had, to that point, the very tidy figures of 1-17 off 3. But, with his fingers having no doubt cooled after seven overs out of the attack, it was a sloppy offering from the bowler for this most crucial of deliveries – dropping it short and outside leg-stump.

Anderson still needed to do the business, but duly made no mistake, swinging it high and long over the fine-leg boundary, as Ian Smith summed up the magical moment on TV commentary:

“Gives it to him, it’s gone, it’s over the top, that is a world record! Unbelievable! Shahid Afridi, goodbye! Hello, Corey Anderson!”

As the crowd rose to their feet in applause, a beaming Anderson gave Ryder a hug and raised his helmet and bat, an extra shake of the equipment evident when the realisation of his world-record feat hit after the announcement over the PA system.

And all the glory did not halt his charge. As if just for good measure, the next ball was also dispatched over the fence, in an over that was blasted for 27, as the Black Caps went to post a monstrous 283-4 in their 21 overs.

In one of the most overshadowed innings ever, Ryder made 104 off just 51 – the sixth-fastest ODI ton of the time. But it was his efforts which Anderson says helped him immensely, and calmed his nerves, too, with Ryder (12 fours, five sixes) at one stage quipping to him mid-pitch when struggling to loft the ball: “I’ll hit the fours and you just hit the sixes”.

Anderson went on to finish 131 not out off 47, with six fours and 14 sixes, which, at the time, sat behind only Shane Watson (15) and Rohit Sharma (16) for most sixes in an ODI.

To put it in even more perspective, the West Indies, who were never close in their chase, finishing 124-5 for a massive 159-run loss, hit just 13 sixes all up through the remainder of the series (which ended 2-2).

Celebrations consisted of a few drinks that night with team-mates, but it wasn’t really until a few days later when it all really sunk in for Anderson. What actually have I just done?

“All of a sudden your name’s being put in the media more, and some of the international papers are starting to talk about it – that’s probably when you start thinking, ‘Okay, wow, obviously something good’s happened, it’s not just another ODI hundred’.”

In fact, just six weeks later, essentially solely off the back of that knock, Anderson became $866,000 richer, after being picked up for that figure by the Mumbai Indians in the Indian Premier League auction.

“They are life-changing, those kinds of events,” he admits.

The big burden of expectation

For how great it all was, though, on the other side of the coin came a whopping burden to carry, even as Anderson was still trying to find his way in international cricket.

“Because you’re young and you’d done something like that, the expectation from the public, and media, is that this is a repeatable thing, and you should be able to do something close to it most of the time. That’s obviously not the case, it’s very hard to do it, it just sort of comes off.”

That’s where Anderson said the advice of Brendon McCullum proved crucial, the captain having sought him out for a sage word about the pressures he could now come to expect.

“He said he had something similar in the first game of the IPL when he got his 150, set the world on fire. He felt for many years of his career that he had to live up to that expectation, that if he got 50 it wasn’t good enough, he had to try and get 150, and he had to go at a strike rate of 300 and just try and blast it all the time.

“He said it weighed on him quite a bit, because he was trying to do something that wasn’t achievable all the time. So that gave me a pretty good understanding. I felt exactly the same at the time, you felt like you had to get going quickly, because that’s what people were expecting.

“So I’m glad I had guys like Brendon around me to be able to settle it down and take the load off a bit.”

As it was, Anderson’s record stood for just over a year, before South Africa’s AB de Villiers blitzed it in January 2005, with a 31-ball ton against the West Indies in Johannesburg.

Anderson’s innings still remains second on the list, though, while even with the advent of T20 cricket, there have been just four quicker in that format at international level.

“All records are there to be broken,” Anderson notes, “but quite cool, in the history of cricket, to hold it for a period of time.”

Out of “the wilderness”

Indeed, it’s an achievement the now 33-year-old will be able to revel in telling the kids about – he has a one-year-old son, Luca, and another child on the way – that’s if, he quips, he can get their heads around cricket, considering they are growing up in the United States.

That’s because in 2020, Anderson, having struggled with a multitude of injuries and fallen out of the national reckoning, with the last of his 95 internationals coming in 2018 – opted to part ways with New Zealand Cricket and make the move abroad.

“You’re all of a sudden walking away from what you know, but at the same time, also walking into different opportunities,” he says of what it was like making that call, which was based around a much broader view than just cricket.

Anderson’s American wife, Mary Margaret Shamburger, had already lived three years in New Zealand with him, and after she went back, there was a period of long-distance, before Anderson opted to join her in Dallas, Texas. As it turned out, he got out the day before Covid-19 shut the borders.

With three-year citizenship requirements also meaning he was limited to how long he could travel for each year, there wasn’t actually much cricket for Anderson to get stuck into, until this year’s inaugural Major League Cricket T20 tournament in the US, where he quickly made a splash again, with 91 not out off 52 balls in his debut for the Shane Watson-coached San Francisco Unicorns.

“You could say I’ve become ‘relevant’, a little bit, in the cricketing world again,” he notes of a coming “out of the wilderness” which has also seen him land a deal in the BBL in Australia, with the Hobart Hurricanes.

With the Unicorns run administratively by Victoria Cricket, there would have been a more obvious connection to the two Melbourne BBL teams, but with senior Hurricanes statesman Matthew Wade playing with Anderson at San Francisco, it was the good word from him that Anderson believes helped secure his gig, via the pre-season draft and Hurricanes head of strategy Ricky Ponting.

“I’m grateful for people to give me an opportunity, and hopefully I can repay them with performances, and just enjoy the time I have left,” says Anderson, who on this trip back down under has also been able to make a couple of brief visits back to New Zealand to connect with family he hadn’t seen in more than three years.

Back on the circuit, then, straight after the Hurricanes’ last round-robin game, it’s off to the ILT20 in the UAE for MI Emirates. However, it’s not just franchise cricket which Anderson is likely to be consigned to.

Having completed his three-year residency required by the ICC, Anderson became eligible for the United States in 2023, albeit missing the mid-year World Cup qualifier tournament in Zimbabwe (where the US finished 10th and last) due to his documentation still needing to be sorted.

But now fair game, there’s plenty to be excited by. The US have qualified for this year’s T20 World Cup as hosts (alongside the West Indies), while cricket’s inclusion in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles will also be a boon for what Anderson notes is cricket’s “untapped and most appealing market”.

So, are we really about to see him don the Stars and Stripes, then?

“If the opportunity comes up, it’s definitely something I’d look at, and be intrigued by,” Anderson says of this potential second-coming on the international stage.

“It’s cool to think that I might be involved in another World Cup at some point.”

Indeed, who would have foreseen life taking such twists and turns, for a talented all-rounder who never even thought he’d leave Canterbury after, at 16, becoming the youngest player to ever earn a New Zealand domestic contract.

“It’s funny how it works, you make plans and God laughs,” Anderson says.

“The mindset of never say never to everything always has to apply.”