John Bracewell's test record is plain poor. Photo / Simon Baker

John Bracewell's test record is plain poor. Photo / Simon Baker

John Bracewell failed.

There's no point sugar-coating the pill: he was brought in to do a job and, at best, he only did half of it - the easy half.

The one-day side varied between good and very good under his stewardship; the Twenty20 side has struggled; and the test side, the true judge of a coach, has slid embarrassingly and inexorably backwards.

We know this because we can look at the statistics and see, for example, that New Zealand did not win a test away from home against a nation

other than Zimbabwe or Bangladesh, during his reign. We can see that New Zealand won just 13 of 40 tests played under Bracewell - Adelaide not included - and seven of those were against the combined might of
Zimbabwe and Bangladesh.

We know this because we saw what happened at Adelaide Oval yesterday, when another woeful batting effort has likely condemned New Zealand to another loss, pushing them to No 8 in the world.

But as he crams his kit into his New Zealand Cricket luggage for the final time this week, the more pertinent question is not whether he failed, but why, and how much of that failure is attributable to himself and the environment he either created, or had to work within?

The New Zealand team he presided over for his last series looked more like an Emerging Players XI than a test side. There are players learning how to bat while playing test cricket.

That this has been allowed to happen is in small part attributable to bad luck and in large part to bad management.

"If you look at the history of the side that has moved on, they were all about the same age, they all grew up together from the age of 16 in Christchurch and they all got to the point they started to have families and looking for easier commercial opportunities than international cricket, which is hard work. It's a lot easier to go to ICL and get the big bucks for six weeks," Bracewell said last week.

Sorry, that is a massive cop out.

The likes of Stephen Fleming, Chris Cairns, Nathan Astle, Craig McMillan, Shane Bond, Lou Vincent, Scott Styris, Hamish Marshall and Andre Adams did not all stop playing because they lost the appetite to play for their country, preferring instead the less wholesome delights of a quick buck.

Some of them probably did, but not all of them.

Some of them were in fact passionately committed to playing for the silver fern, a passion that only began to wane under this regime. Coincidence?