Cricket: Changeable Caps cause confusion

Kyle Mills

This has been a tough tour, and not only for the players.

Faced with an exercise book full of notes, but containing barely a lucid thought, the only conclusion is the Black Caps are as close to an incoherent team as you'll find: just when you think you've got a read on them, they find new ways of confounding you.

At times like this you need others to find words for you.

"The greatest blessing is that there is no third test against New Zealand, preventing further ridicule and plummeting ticket sales," wrote the oh-so-superior Australian at the conclusion of the test series humiliation.

Despite the sheer arrogance, there was probably a little of what everyone thought in there.

And then came Melbourne's Telstra Dome and game one of the Chappell-Hadlee trophy.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Johnny Depp in Secret Window - this is serious split-personality territory.

The madness was everywhere.

John Bracewell, his test record feeling like a recurring nightmare, is rewarded by having his contract extension through to the end of the World Cup in 2007 made public.

Not that this is a bad thing. Martin Snedden knows what pays for the butter for his bread and it is one-day cricket, not tests. Here, despite the odd slip, Bracewell's credentials are near faultless.

As long as the punters are pouring through the turnstiles in the short game, the national body's tills will be ringing.

But the cracks in our test team can't be papered over by heroics in pyjamas.

There is some seriously muddled thinking going on here.

"Without a massive amount of pace on this tour we've got to look at other ways to skin the cat and there's not a lot, to be honest," said a gloomy Fleming before the first test.

So what did they do? Reduced their pace attack even further by dropping Ian Butler.

Kyle Mills was preferred, and if there was an embodiment of the confusion that exists in the ranks, it is the woolly-haired Aucklander.

Someone, somewhere has mistakenly told Mills that he was a bowler, when it is clear to most onlookers that he is instead a batting allrounder.

He turned in a gutsy knock at the Gabba, followed by a star turn in Sydney (44 n.o.), where his four sixes in four balls overshadowed anything Chris Cairns could hit the Australians with.

When he's bowling though, he has been used as anything from an opening swing bowler to third seamer, to stock bowler, to a scrambled-seam closer.

Is it any wonder he's struggled to nail down a regular place in what is now almost four years since his debut? He probably wakes up some mornings wondering who he is.

Mills has been the personification of a weird tour, where Fleming continued his policy of being especially harsh in his assessment of the bowlers' efforts while watching the top order singularly fail to impress in either form of the game.

"That is some of the best bowling I've ever seen in test cricket,"said Fleming of the Australian attack, following the tests in which only one New Zealand top five batsman (Nathan Astle) aggregated more than 100 runs.

"The two starts we've had [bowling] have been a little disappointing," Fleming said after game two of the one-day series.

When analysing the tour it is difficult to quantify its worth, but here's a useful exercise: after the two tests and three one-dayers, name any Kiwi players who on this form would have forced their way into the Australian team.

This is when you realise that despite the brief rays of sunshine, ultimately it has been a wet blanket.

Chris Cairns would surely push Andrew Symonds for the allrounders spot in the one-day team.

Daniel Vettori might get a run in the one-day team, but in test cricket Australia puts finger spin right up there with left-handed tea cups in terms of usefulness.

Staying with the test team, only Jacob Oram would challenge for a spot and would probably push Darren Lehmann into retirement.

That, by anybody's standards, is a pretty poor return.