I feel sorry for New Zealand. For so long suffering in the shadows of Australia, their cricket team has struggled to make an impact, especially in Test cricket. Their series against Pakistan began with a crushing defeat which highlighted their current lack of a competitive team with both bat and ball.
On paper, their Test record in the past decade looks OK, with eleven series victories. However, factor in the opposition - seven of those wins have been against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe - and things look less rosy. It's not that they have no good players. Captain Daniel Vettori is one of, if not THE finest all-rounders in world cricket, with more than 4000 runs and 340 wickets to his name, and he is still only 31. Brendan McCullum is a big-hitting wicket-keeper batsman who now opens the innings, but he remains best suited to one-day cricket, especially Twenty20. Ross Taylor is also making a name for himself in all forms of the game, and has hit five Test hundreds in 29 Tests, not only against the minnows. Chris Martin has been a mainstay of the bowling attack over the past ten years, closing in on 200 wickets but I was surprised he has played only 60 matches. He is, however, better known for his appalling batting: 104 runs in 87 innings, averaging barely two!
So far, so good, but they rarely seem to gel at the same time. So often their scorecards read like a heart monitor, all peaks and troughs down the innings! They have few bowlers with any real pace and, while Pakistan may have had their woes in the past few years, they always seem to be able to bring in new brisk seamers to worry opposition batsmen. The Black Caps have slipped to eighth in the ICC Test rankings, above only Bangladesh, and seventh in ODIs where they have enjoyed relative success in the 'noughties'. They won series against just about every other nation, including the Aussies, South Africa, England and India, and indeed claimed six series wins on the trot between 2007-8 and early 2009. Stephen Fleming was a shrewd captain who got the best out of a good but not great side, and their finest moment was reaching the World Cup semis four years ago. Apart from Fleming himself, NZ had a number of useful all-rounders like Oram, Styris and James Franklin, whose record in county cricket should earn him a spot in the 2011 Test line-up. The there was Shane Bond, one of the world's fastest but most injury-prone bowlers.
It's easy to hark back to the days of Sir Richard Hadlee, Martin Crowe and present-day coach John Wright but such spectacles are rose-tinted because New Zealand were never world-beaters. Only when those three were in the same team did they pose a real threat and in the early eighties they were a match for the transitional Aussies, misfiring English and Javed Miandad's Pakistanis, especially on home territory.
It's hard to see them achieving such heights again for a while and even in 50-over competitions, which rely on tight bowling and solid all-rounders, they look sadly feeble these days. Maybe Vettori can inspire the squad in the World Cup but they need men like Franklin, Taylor and McCullum to fire on all cylinders and recreate the excitement once provided by Crowe, Cairns and Styris to bring a ray of sunshine back to the 'land of the long, white cloud'.
