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New Zealand pacer Neil Wagner opened up on the team’s excitement to have won the ICC World Test Championship mace beating India in the final in Southampton, revealing everyone including customs officers in New Zealand were ecstatic. New Zealand beat India by 8 wickets in the ICC WTC final in Southampton, winning the inaugural edition.
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“I don’t think I’ve ever walked into customs and got greeted the way we did. Everyone was just straight away [saying] congratulations, pretty happy, grabbed our passports and all they wanted to ask was, Where’s the mace, where’s the mace? Seeing even police officers stopping wanting to have a photo from a distance with it… it was nice to see the smiles on everyone’s faces,” he told stuff.co.nz.
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“It’s still hard to put into words, to be fair. It still feels unreal. Everything is socially distanced, so you can’t even really shake their hands, and we had the mace, everyone wanted to take a photo, you can’t even do that, or we couldn’t pass it on. It’s a bit of a shame but it’s part of the world we live in at the moment. It was quite nice to see some Kiwis walk past and see what it means to them, albeit in the distance waving away, and saying congratulations, it means a lot to all the boys.”
Wagner revealed how the team passed the mace among each other in the flight back home, and revealed who will have it over the next two weeks.
“We shared the mace around on the plane and throughout the whole night while celebrating, everybody had their turn to carry it around and make full use of that. And then on the plane, Ross Taylor got me to hand over the mace to BJ Watling, he’s going to take care of it for the next two weeks in isolation.
“I think it’s a fitting way for him to send his career off, it’s been an amazing career for us, the role he’s played for a number of years now, just the whole person he is and heart and soul of the team. He epitomises everything we are about as a team, the team-first attitude, being a guy that scraps and fights for everything, he’s led that all the way from the start. He’ll be sorely missed in this team.”
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