Black Cap 'champion' Southee bows out a winner at home ground

Tim Southee, once half of the most feared new-ball partnership in the game, brought down the curtain on a glittering 16-year test career after New Zealand crushed England for a consolation win in Hamilton on Tuesday.

New Zealand's all-time top wicket-taker with 776 victims across all formats, the 36-year-old retires as his country's second highest in tests with 391 behind the great Richard Hadlee.

"Tim is a true champion, a great New Zealand cricketer and sports person," Hadlee said in a ceremony after the match at Seddon Park on Tuesday to mark Southee's 107th and final test.

"Tim's skill-set were admirable," he added. "The classical outswinger, the scrambled seam off-cutter are the feature of Tim's successes.

"It would have been only fitting that Tim could have ended his career if he had reached the 400 test wicket mark. In my opinion, he deserved that."

Many of Southee's wickets came in the company of his strike partner for so many years Trent Boult, who retired earlier this year, and batter Brendon McCullum, who was on hand on Tuesday as coach of England.

It was against England at Napier in 2008 that Southee made his test debut as a teenager with a brilliant performance in a losing cause that marked him out as a special talent.

The then 19-year-old took five for 55 in England's first innings and clubbed 77 from 40 balls with nine sixes and four boundaries in a defiant second knock.

His big tail-end batting was always a feature of his game, even if he did end up two shy of his target of 100 career test sixes after holing out for two runs in his final innings with the bat on Monday.

It is, though, with his tail up, a new ball in hand and conditions conducive to swing that he will be best remembered, with pleasure by New