OPINION: Why so many bunnies having field day against bowlers?

ANENDRA SINGH
Last year was the Year of the Rat on the Chinese calendar and this year belongs to the ox.
So how come so many rabbits are thriving?
No, not those pests introduced surreptitiously to the calicivirus in the past few decades on farms but those irritating mongrels in whites whose tails wag endlessly.
In effect, there are two types in the game of cricket - the basher and the blocker.
South African Dale Steyn, Australians Brett Lee and Mitchell Johnson, Indians Ishant Sharma and Harbhajan Singh, and Black Caps Daniel Vettori and Kyle Mills are among the swingers.
On the end of the spectrum are the stonewallers, such as Englishman Matthew Hoggard, who will kill delivery after delivery to eat up valuable time to stumps and, consequently, prove to be more frustrating than someone who smashes 50 runs. How hard can it be to shoot these rabbits down?
Cricketing fans are sick to death of watching the Black Caps doing the hard yards to have opposition sides teetering on the brink at six or seven down for not much, then letting them wriggle off the hook because they seemingly lack the fire power to blast out the tailenders.
At times, it borders on ridiculous.
Touring Windies bowler Jerome Taylor, for instance, never had a first-class 50 but he got a ton against the Caps.
Not long ago, Australian seamer Glenn McGrath also got a huge score in another embarrassing moment for New Zealand cricket, as did his fellow tailender Jason Gillespie when the impotent Caps could do little to dislodge his bails.
It would be an interesting exercise to see how many rabbits have scored well against the Caps. Perhaps during a training session, before going to Australia, Caps coach Andy Moles should put the world's worst batsman, Chris Martin, at the crease to see how many balls he can survive and how many runs he can eke out against the Caps to test if the problem lies with the mindset of the Caps' bowling attack.
To be fair, tailenders in just about every team are making a lasting impression.
That they have scant respect for the reputation of bowlers - largely because the tailenders are seldom educated in the art of batting - they habitually miss balls with width, and bludgeoning bodyline ones.
Employing a flurry of yorkers is often handy, primarily because if the rabbits don't hear the death rattle, then chances are the bowler will trap them leg before wicket for the simple reason that the tailenders do not move their feet much.
Beating the edge of the bat looks beautiful on TV but it seldom yields wickets. But if you do your homework, like Central Districts international Ewen Thompson did, then you can contain explosive batsmen such as Windies skipper Chris Gayle.
After the Proteas failed to go for the jugular against the Australians in the test series across the Tasman, South African coach Mickey Arthur correctly impressed on his troops to stop delivering ``glory balls' to rabbits.
``We need to probably treat them as batters and bowl batters' lines rather than looking for too many glory balls, as you do against tailenders,' Arthur said.
``You perhaps look to bowl them out instead of building that pressure, as you do if you're bowling to No 5 and 6.'
Tickling a non-batter around the ears seldom has the desired effect.
Of course, some teams have tails that wag because they have genuine allrounders. The question to ask is: Does the player bat at the tail because they are inept or simply because those above him are technically better?
Black Cap James Franklin, who has failed to fire against the Windies, is down the order but he did score impressively at State Championship level.
The purist will argue that the Caps need bowlers with genuine pace but benign New Zealand wickets do not offer the platform for cultivating such bowlers.
I say speed is never enough. In fact, speed kills in cricket unless you have line and length.
If the New Zealand Rugby Union can fly some sod to France for the World Cup, then I don't see why New Zealand Cricket can't import drop-in pitches conducive to producing genuine pace to expose future Caps for spearheading attacks overseas.
If New Zealand are genetically defeated in that they aren't physically cut out to be fast bowlers - just like we don't have fast-twitch fibres to produce Olympic sprinters - why can't they follow suit to recruit a few guns from overseas as the ABs did with Joe Rokocoko and Sitiveni Sivivatu?
No doubt the debate will rage on whether bowlers have lost the art of death bowling or the world powers' experiment to produce hybrid rabbits immune to top-class attacks is paying off.