KEY POINTS:
The Black Caps are in a state of transition and it will take a massive turnaround for them to be competitive against South Africa in this second test.
It will take a career-defining performance from one of the Black Caps to put them in the hunt. Otherwise, I
suspect that they will be beaten at some time on the fourth day.
The Black Caps were in this sort of predicament on a few occasions in my career, struggling after heavy first test defeats, and dealing with a few injuries. It happens sometimes and it's from that point that you start filtering out the good players from the bad, and breed a new core. The point is that the turnaround doesn't happen in three or four days.
The public and commentators haven't really noticed the arrival of this current rebuilding period. I think that people really clicked onto it when Craig McMillan retired and you suddenly saw a big gaping hole in the middle order. Where once there were Chris Cairns, Nathan Astle and Craig McMillan, now all of a sudden we are scratching for experience.
The Black Caps' position reminds me of our 1997/98 tour to Australia, when we were rebuilding. We were beaten in every game.
While we were never in danger of winning, players like Cairns, Stephen Fleming, Dion Nash and I started to put a few reasonable performances together. They weren't earth shattering in themselves, but we performed a bit better and grew out of that as a team, and went on to beat England over there.
This team needs to just tough it out. We've never had much depth, but there is even less now.
The loss of Shane Bond to injury is massive. The best part of our heavy first test defeat at the Wanderers was the first innings bowling, but that department has been decimated by Bond's departure.
His loss is bad enough in its own right but on top of that, he creates a lot of the opportunities for the other guys. If you take his four or five wickets a game out, and the four or five others he creates, then your bowling is suddenly down by 50 per cent.
South Africa have three guys making big hundreds, and we have none.
I was pinning my hopes on Fleming providing the big scores but the chances are slim now that he is playing with a dislocated thumb.
It's a fair effort on Fleming's part, but he's only scored nine centuries in the past 12 years and he'll struggle for really big scores carrying that injury.
This is a new generation, and we need to build a side around a core of Daniel Vettori, Brendon McCullum, Jacob Oram and Scott Styris.