KEY POINTS:
England's Kevin Pietersen and New Zealand's Jacob Oram were cast as the potential batting stars of the current three-test cricket series.
Both, however, are in awful slumps and for Pietersen his first tour of New Zealand has so far been chastening.
His average has slipped below 50, his
four test innings tallying just 96 runs at 24.00.
The usually free-scoring No 4 has been suffocated by accurate New Zealand bowling.
He needed 91 balls to score a boundary after an early six and crawled to 42 off 131 balls in England's first innings at Hamilton.
In 11 innings starting with the Twenty20s in the early days of the tour, Pietersen has scored 364 runs at 33, hardly the output expected from the confident 25-year-old.
He hit only 31 and 17 in England's series-levelling 126-run victory in Wellington on Monday and was noticed more for his fielding - a missed run out, and dropping Ross Taylor on 26.
Pietersen is clearly not enjoying himself - a point not missed by New Zealand's coach.
John Bracewell credited his bowling unit for keeping Pietersen in check.
"I've been really pleased with the way we've bowled to him, delighted with the way we've cut him down in terms of his strike-rate and put pressure on him," Bracewell said.
Pietersen typically scores at a decent clip but his strike-rate in the test series is sluggish by his standards - 40.85 per hundred balls.
Of the 235 deliveries he has faced, only eight made the ropes. One cleared them.
Ironically, Oram, suffering his own batting woes, has been mainly responsible for constraining Pietersen with his medium pacers.
Until recently Oram was the only New Zealand batsman to average better than 40.
In this series he has so far managed only 48 runs at 12.00 with a top score of 30 in the second innings at the Basin Reserve.
While he leads the bowling stats with eight wickets at 14.87, and concedes a miserly 1.60 runs per over from his 74 overs, his scoring at No 6 in an often-fragile batting order has been negligible.
He scored 10 and a first ball duck in Hamilton - to complete Ryan Sidebottom's hattrick - and since then the swing bowler has caused Oram plenty of angst.
Sidebottom had him again, leg before, in New Zealand's first innings last Friday and Oram's reaction to that dismissal cost him 20 per cent of his match fee.
The Yorkshireman struck again in fading light on Sunday, getting Oram taken in the slips just when he was finding some form.
"Sidebottom has bowled extremely well to him," Bracewell said.
"He's struggling a little bit to get out of his crease to Ryan, there's no doubt about that. We're working hard to trying to make a slight adjustment to his front foot so we actually get his shoulders back into the ball and drive.
"Ryan's bowling reasonably full at him, he's not forcing him onto the back foot but Jacob is struggling to get to the length. We need to work on that."
- NZPA