Chris Cairns: It's fight or flight for us all

I made a point of having a quiet chat with Nathan Astle after he was dropped from the side following the third one-day international against Sri Lanka.

I was in the same position not long ago when I was dropped for the South Africa tour.

Nathan is adamant he wants to keep going - we call it 'fight or flight' - but that doesn't mask how tough it is when you find yourself suddenly out of favour, particularly when you carry the sort of mana he does in the team.

That's the environment we're in now. The selectors are effectively putting everybody on notice. Nobody's untouchable and that's the way it should be.

The selectors have made it clear that they want to build depth, which will end up being better for our game. That's what I had to get my head around as well, though it doesn't ease the pain when you're first informed.

But it was tough on Nathan. The guys really felt for him.

On the flip side, the benefit of building depth was perfectly illustrated by Jeetan Patel at the Cake Tin.

He bowled superbly. It's so important for the development of our group that we find someone who can support Dan Vettori or, if Dan is injured, step into the fold.

Jeetan seems to be keen on taking that path and that's a huge bonus for the side.

There has been a bit of talk about my bowling of late and the runs per over I've conceded. That's fair enough, to be honest. Although I did OK at Wellington, I'm still leaking far too many four balls.

If you look at my stats, I'm not getting worked around the park as such but I'm letting the batsmen off the hook with too many balls that are being hit to the boundary.

It's enormously frustrating because I'm there to do a job during that second powerplay period which is becoming increasingly important in the one-day game.

Friday's game was important. We have become so accustomed to chasing, we needed to test ourselves in our ability to set and defend totals.

It was nice to be able to do that but, let's be perfectly honest, Sri Lanka are in bit of a hole and they just can't seem to get themselves out of it. They were in a position to win but we did a good job of holding them down.

The key to defending is fielding: holding catches and making your run outs. We did that pretty well.

I was relieved to hold on to a good one after putting down a couple recently.

We didn't set a particularly good target but a lot of that came down to the pitch. It was a difficult one to get started on.

We really needed one of the guys who got set at the top of the order to bat all the way through.

If we bat first today, it's vital somebody takes that responsibility.