Cricket: Batsmen must step up says Sinclair

Veteran test international Mathew Sinclair says it's time for the Black Caps senior batsmen to take a hard look at themselves.

"The management structure - with help from people such as [New Zealand Cricket high performance director] Roger Mortimer - gives you everything but once you step over the white line then it's up to you to do the job," Sinclair said from Napier yesterday.

He felt blaming coach Mark Greatbatch for the New Zealand cricketers' appalling performance in Bangladesh over the past few weeks was tantamount to the farcical English soccer scenario.

The team desperately needed some willow wallahs to show stickability on the crease, grinding out a patient 40 to 50 runs.

"I'm not saying the players should have played ugly but they needed to dig their toes in a little bit because the Bangladeshis bowled to the conditions," the Central Districts Stag said, adding Bangladesh players also struggled in New Zealand conditions and shared the burden of adapting.

Winning, he said, was a habit and, while it was always an uphill battle, players needed to bunker in for the long haul.

While it was easy to be critical from New Zealand, Sinclair impressed players had to put up with intense heat and humidity in the subcontinent where players' minds quite often tended to go for a walkabout.

"It's not going to be easy now because the Indians play spin bloody well too."

The 33-test player, who turns 35 on November 9, said the Black Caps often played spin bowlers quite effectively "through the line" at domestic level, something that new CD teammate and spinner Tarun Nethula had attested to as well.

"We needed to run singles, perhaps, and rotate strike.

"Not too many of them were coming down the wicket a hell of a lot either," said Sinclair, a veteran of 54 one-day international matches (ODI).

That a rash of left-arm spinners had dismantled the New Zealanders with ease suggested the Kiwi camp needed more tweakers of the ball before the ODI World Cup early next year.

With skipper Daniel Vettori and Nathan McCullum in the equation, he felt players such as Jeetan Patel, Bhupinder Singh and Otago left-arm orthodox Nick Beard could feature, considering Black Caps coach Mark Greatbatch had alluded to their growth before the New Zealand A team departed for the tour of Zimbabwe this month.