It’s just not cricket!

It is fair to say that New Zealand’s chances at the upcoming Cricket World Cup are about as likely as Tim Southee’s alleged scoring on the plane flight to the competition.
Much like Southee’s misreported on-flight antics – where there was very little substance to the rumour – the Black Caps chances of performing well at the World Cup are very much in the same league. Not even the most tragic of New Zealand cricket fans rates this team much of chance. And the miserable form of the Black Caps leading into the tournament backs this pessimistic outlook.
In October last year, New Zealand was beaten 4-0 in a one day series against those giants of the international game – Bangladesh. Just two months later, they took another pants-down pasting in a five match series against India – five to zip!
Most recently the New Zealanders have come out the losers 2 games to 3 in a five match one day series against a Pakistan team that has been embroiled in a match-fixing scandal and has not won an away one-day series since 1998!
One also has to question if our two wins in this series were actually genuine – or courtesy of the Pakistanis’ favourite bookies in London!
Our bowling attack has all the venom of a dying bumble bee and the batting line-up is flakier than Auckland’s new super mayor Len Brown on a good day! We only have two real world-class players in the team – in Daniel Vetorri and Brendan McCullum – with the rest made up of numerous also rans and never weres.
On the batting front, Brendan McCullum is a genuine talent. However, he is just too inconsistent. McCullum’s matching-winning innings are too few and too far between for New Zealand to rely on him to bring home the bacon.
The rest of the batting line-up is rather fragile – much like vice captain Ross Taylor’s current form. Taylor – like McCullum – has the ability to take any bowling attack apart. But does this far too infrequently. Jesse Ryder also has talent, but is too fat and fond of the giggle-juice to be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, the likes of Guptil, Styris and Williamson are fair-to-middling domestic batsmen, but this does not make them of international standard.
Our bowling attack is held together by the barely, held-together Daniel Vetorri. Dan the Man is a great player and good captain, but is says something about the state of New Zealand pace bowling that our leading attack weapon is a leg spinner! Both Tim Southee and Kyle Mills can be useful on their day, but they are hardly world-beaters. Meantime, Jacob Oram is so injury-prone these days, that he is likely to get hurt climbing on the team bus.
To win the World Cup you need more than two world-class players in your line-up – more like six or seven. Australia, South Africa, India and England all do.
New Zealand doesn’t, therefore we need to be realistic about our chances and rely on good-old fashioned luck!