Call it the perfect storm: the once-in-a-lifetime set of circumstances that has put cricket in this country in a dinghy in the middle of the Southern Ocean with just a bailing bucket for protection.

New Zealand Cricket has never operated in the calmest of seas but a series of separate but interconnected fronts have combined to increase the conditions from choppy to rough.

Some of the fronts have been forecast and the defences should have been set up better but others just couldn't have been foreseen.

The "first front"' is simply natural attrition.

After the dark days of the early 1990s, New Zealand got a clump of very good players all at once. Out of the once robust age-group system came the likes of Stephen Fleming, Dion Nash, Nathan Astle, Adam Parore, Geoff Allott, Matthew Hart, Matt Horne, Jeff Wilson, Gary Stead and Blair Pocock. Immediately preceding them were Chris Cairns, Craig Spearman and Chris Harris. Immediately following them were Craig McMillan, Shane Bond and Robbie Hart.

In the context of New Zealand, that's an extraordinary crop of talent over a short period. Sure, not all of them fulfilled their potential but several did and all played international cricket at one point or another.

But age either wearied them or just plain broke them. Back injuries meant Nash and Allott finished well before their time, Bond was a "sometime" superstar, while the likes of Pocock and Parore had interests outside of cricket. Of that group, Fleming is the only one still playing international cricket and he is planning to call it quits soon. McMillan and possibly Astle still should be but their demise can be directly linked to "front two", which can be facetiously referred to as the "Charlesworth effect".

Change agent Ric Charlesworth rolled into New Zealand Cricket with a CV sent from heaven and a modus operandi that several senior players thought was straight from hell.

The key was to ensure that the big names never felt they had a sinecure; that their spot in the side was as dependent on results as the rest.

In theory, it is sound thinking and even in the light of what has happened, it is hard to argue with the principle. What Charlesworth, or the selectors who implemented his thinking, would not have counted on was the ingrained arrogance of cricketers who have never been truly challenged before. Some reacted with indifference, others with hostility. Instead of wondering why they might have been dropped and embarking on a programme of self-improvement, they thought only of the match fees they were missing.