Given it’s the time of year for messages to the North Pole under the heading “Dear Santa”, maybe the Black Caps’ list should start with the urgent need for an off-field boss.

With the 32-run win over Pakistan, the first in more than a year, the team are on the cusp of returning to a semblance of success on the stage all good sides are measured - test matches.

The return of Shane Bond’s venom, the wilyness of Chris Martin, the crisp strokes of Ross Taylor and the all-round cunning of Daniel Vettori mean the team have incumbent talent. Vettori was delighted with the victory and with good reason.

But, even though the win was a good one, with character and doggedness, let’s wait before we give ourselves totally over to the illusion of a rosy future.

There are severe deficiencies, particularly in the batting. Can Daniel Flynn make it as a No3, averaging 21.50 in the position since his promising start of 95 against the West Indies a year ago?

Will New Zealand be able to return to an era where Flynn doesn’t have to think about striding out to bat when the ball is still brand new - having only touched the pitch, the stumps or the edge of a bat and a member of the slip cordon’s hands - due to a lapse in an opener’s concentration? Is Jesse Ryder, a man blessed with sensational hand-eye co-ordination, capable of a prolonged career or will a lack of fitness or discipline get the better of him?

There was enough in the dismissals of batsmen like Flynn, Grant Elliott, Peter Fulton, and even Taylor and Vettori himself to suggest that more help would not go amiss.

In Vettori’s era as skipper, with coaches John Bracewell and Andy Moles, there have been 22 tests with five wins - three against Bangladesh, one against England and yesterday’s Read more…

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This is the silly season of cricket, so being to the point (literally) and maybe even inane, is quite in. So here’s my take on why the Champions League T20 isn’t justifying the pre-event hype… as yet.

1. T20s… just too blah
Whatever anyone says about the death of Tests or ODIs, perhaps people are finally waking up to the fact that one T20 game is pretty much like the other. Yawn…

2. Where are our He-Men?
We Indians like our desi big brands. Other than a few good men, Dravid and Kumble in Bangalore, or Gambhir and Sehwag (and to a lesser extent Nehra and Karthik) in the Daredevils, there’s not much for Indians to get starry-eyed about. (Except in that cool boat ad). No Sachin, Dhoni, Yuvraj, Bhajji, Ganguly, Zaheer or even poor Ishant.

3. Phoren teams? So what?
When we don’t care about our own domestic cricket (am sure Neo isn’t even asking for the ratings of this year’s Challenger Series) what chance of our caring about cricket or cricketers from clubs most of India has never even heard of?

4. Howzatt! You mean, ‘Who’s that’?
We Indians also like our designer foreign brands. And they’re not around. No Smith, Ponting, Hayden, Flintoff, Pietersen, Warne, Vettori, AB… and no melodramatic Pakistanis! Okay, so we have Gilchrist holding the Deccan flag aloft and Gibbs disappearing before he can say hello for the Cobras. Then there’s Brendon McCullum (traitor!) on for Otago, that quiet Kallis, and a subdued, shorn Kallis. Not enough, mate.

5. Big-ticket event doesn’t equal big crowds
Basically, despite the tournament being cricket’s richest prize, the BCCI-IPL is treating the event just like they treat domestic cricket in India — with disdain. Outside of the corporate Read more…

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One good reason New Zealand didn’t win the Champions Trophy final?

They avoided having to prance about in those white jackets - awarded to the winning team - which made the Australians look like a bunch of cruise ship crooners who had unexpectedly run aground at Centurion but were ready to break into a verse of Copacabana.

Still, the New Zealanders would have tolerated some dodgy dressing up if they’d been able to pocket the title yesterday. They collected US$1 million ($1.34 million) for their efforts, but money comes and goes; in the overall scheme of things that will amount to loose change for some of them once the divvying up is done; silverware would provide a validation for their efforts, plus the satisfaction of a line in the history book as the first two-time winner of the trophy.

And if they had it would have been a remarkable achievement, given that three first-choice players - Jesse Ryder, Jacob Oram (for bowling, if not, at the moment, batting) and the rejuvenated Daryl Tuffey - were lost to injury during the tournament, and inspirational captain Dan Vettori withdrew on the morning of the final with a hamstring injury.

It turned out to be a game too far for New Zealand, who had overcome a poor start to beat Sri Lanka, England and Pakistan in the space of nine days to improbably reach the final.

New Zealand then needed its best players to stand up yesterday. A bad day, then, for acting captain Brendon McCullum to have a nightmare - 14 balls for a duck and dropping a crucial skier - Ross Taylor to miss out again, and Grant Elliott, who carried New Zealand past Pakistan in the semifinal, to get a good ball from Brett Lee.

Above all, an awful day for Vettori to miss altogether. He is the team’s best bowler Read more…

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There are things New Zealand can do to beat South Africa’s Proteas other than pray for invasions by dogs or raindrops - although I note that last time I checked it was thunderstorms and lightning, very, very frightening over there.

Here’s a quick 10 to consider - feel free to chip away with your own…

* See if we can arrange to play somewhere other than Centurion. Too late for this of course but it would be nice as the Africans have beaten us there all three times we’ve played. Let’s at least pray we have packed our economy rates in our coffins as we’ve conceded 314 and 324 in front of the grassy embankments of the ground formerly known as SuperSport Park.

* Eradicate legside addict and compulsive puller Graeme ‘Le Muppet’ Smith early. Might be worth putting 5 bucks on him to be dismissed bowled too: he is 4th on the all-time list of most likely to get out in that fashion (27% of all his ODI dismissals).

* Not succumb to the skiddy pace of the man who looks like Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden, Dale Steyn. We shouldn’t either - his only return against us in ODIs is 2/50 from 9 overs although he did snare both openers that day back in December 2007.

* Whoooooh big ol’ Jesse Ryder to make his debut against South Africa in one-dayers with an innings to remember, punctuated with limited running between the wickets, cheeky grins, crashing drives, Kluseneresque slogs, and a memorable bandanna.

* Put pressure on AB de Villers - he is the South Africans’ banker in terms of runs. He Read more…

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I almost got stuck out in the middle when the covers came from all corners, I had to get a bit of a sprint on to avoid being trapped in the middle in the pouring rain!

On Day Two, Dan [Vettori] joined a very, very special club. He became just the eighth player to reach 3000 runs and take 300 wickets. I know this meant a lot to Dan but you wouldn’t have known that by any of the actions Dan makes. He goes about his business, reaching his own milestones, sometimes some of them go unnoticed, and doing his job without the ego lesser players carry. He doesn’t carry on after taking wickets like some; he doesn’t run about pumping the air after scoring a ton. He is Dan, he is what you see; strongly motivated to be the best player he can be and take this, and the next NZ team to the top of our sport. And while being a great player, team-mate and captain, has made me a better bowler and it’s still a great thrill to walk out alongside him.

This morning, again, didn’t go to plan. Five down overnight and we needed to bat and bat and bat. We were back in the field just before lunch 182 behind. I was pretty angry, angry at getting out how I did and also about having to be back out fielding before lunch. I took the new ball straight after lunch and went as hard as I could. I put my anger into the ball and bowled a good spell. No wickets but the intent I was trying to bring was something I hoped we could keep going with.

157/2, 339 runs in front when the rains came. I almost got stuck out in the middle when the covers came from all corners, I had to get a bit of a sprint on to avoid being trapped in the middle in the pouring rain! We could sure do with a bit more of it!? Read more...

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If I could place my order for anything in the second test against Sri Lanka starting today, it would be preceded by an entree of 5-wicket bags, but the main course would have to be a smorgasbord of batting partnerships and high scores.

I’m not thoroughly obsessed with winning but if New Zealand can consistently score 450-plus that should stop us losing matches, even if the Ws do not begin to belch forth in the result column.

In the past 12 months of Test cricket, the record of Kiwi batting partnerships is dire. Only eight times have our pairings made it past 100 and then only one passed the 200-run threshold (Taylor & Ryder’s 271 in 60 overs vs India at Napier).

It is Big Ol’ Jesse Ryder who stands out as our player most likely to feature in a decent partnership - of the eight returning a century or more, he features in five of them: Taylor, Vettori, McIntosh, McCullum and Franklin are there twice, and Daniel Flynn put on 118 with Timmy Mac against the West Indies at the Fruit Bowl.

Another indictment on the top order is that the bulk of our best partnerships are clustered around the 4th, 5th and, disappointingly, the 7th wicket. None of the top six collaborations have been from “the top” of the batting order with our best opening partnership a paltry 55 (the two discards How and Redmond vs Bangladesh at Chittagong), for the 2nd wicket the Flynn-McIntosh effort above was the best, while the highest for the third wicket is an even more Read more…

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We walked off after day one at 293 for 3, as I said, not the best day in the field; that’s obvious. Day two was better though. We picked up the remaining seven wickets for 159 with Dan (Vettori) and Tommy (Chris Martin) both thoroughly earning their four wickets each. Dan bowled tightly throughout the innings and it was just a matter of time before he’d pick up wickets. Dan and I normally, in the past, have bowled well together, we’ve both been able to control the runs and then put scoreboard pressure on the batters to score. The ends we like to bowl from normally works that it suits us both too. I couldn’t hold up my end in the way I’ve been able to do enough in this first innings. So it took a change of ends for Dan so that he and Tommy could bowl together. And it worked, perfectly; the last four wickets for just eight runs, all of them off Muralitharan's bat. We love the way he bats, we all wish we could be that free. It’s raining right now, it’s almost 9am and we’d normally be at the ground by now.

An amazing storm came through around 5am this morning, thunder banging about and lightning as bright as I’ve ever seen; with it, torrential rain. The rain has eased but is still steady and doesn’t look like stopping anytime soon. We’ve watched the covers go on and come off, an amazing mission by the lads at the ground. The whole ground gets covered; I don’t know if there are that many covers in New Zealand, I’ve never seen anything like it. As we’ve watched them being taken off we know that it’s about a 90-minute even so there is no point going to the ground until the rain stops completely. There’s nothing we can do about it so it was a longer breakfast than normal and most of the boys will be in their room resting up some more.

Yesterday afternoon we got through to stumps two down and 87 on the board. McIntosh played a traditional Test match openers role. He blunted the bowlers and scored where he Read more...

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And here is the first update from Sri Lanka ... Oh, and for the record, it’s hot. Honest! Sweating is probably the easiest thing to do here.

We all arrived here a week ago yesterday. So eight days here to acclimatise, train and play some warm-up games. We had three days before the first warm-up match to try, as much as possible, to get used to the heat and humidity. We all struggled to a certain extent with overheating, some more than others. Guppy [Martin Guptill], at the first training, was the first one to feel the effects, his fair skin and ginger hair not helping, I’m sure. It wasn’t anything serious but he did have to stop training and get the ice bags on to cool down. It was my turn yesterday to have a few issues during training.

The combination of the heat and humidity is so hard to combat. Getting enough water on board is hard. It often feels like you are sweating as quick, if not quicker, than you can drink the water. It is so important to keep a water bottle nearby.

Our first warm-up match, at the Colombo Colts ground, pretty much went to plan. I wasn’t to play; I had this game off, mainly because my bowling loads have been good while at Leicestershire. We lost the toss and were asked to bowl first; not the worst thing Read more...

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