Cricket: Lacklustre McCullum needs rest

There is an inescapable truth reaching out to New Zealand Cricket every time the Indian Premier League is screened: Brendon McCullum needs a rest.

Actually, the tense needs to change. McCullum needed a rest, long before he got on a plane to South Africa to collect his fortune.

That is the only possible explanation why such a good player could look so poor. That is not McCullum bumbling around for the gold-plated, yet tarnished Kolkata Knight Riders, but a pale imitation.

He is not handling pressure particularly well. He was made captain in controversial circumstances - native Kolkatan Sourav Ganguly would have been a more politick choice - yet appears to want to give it up all too easily, telling reporters he would quit if the Knight Riders did not make the play-offs.

There is New Zealand's next captain, giving the signal to the rest of the world that he will walk away if things don't go his way. Anybody who has had anything to do with McCullum will tell you it is not his nature to walk from a scrap, which, again, goes to show how far removed McCullum, IPL version:2 is from the real thing.

Daniel Vettori, who has done considerably better with Delhi, will meet McCullum tonight and hopefully offer advice that will lift his heir apparent.

Misery loves company and his performance is mirrored across the Kiwi participants who have rustled up a ghastly aggregate of fewer than 300 runs among six of them and Kyle Mills is yet to bowl a ball or swing a bat in anger. It has, with the spin spin in the world, been a disastrous tournament for New Zealand.

Jesse Ryder and Ross Taylor have been squeezed out by a South African cabal for Bangalore - it might say in the brochure that it represents Bangalore but that team is run by Jacques Kallis, Mark Boucher and Ray Jennings. Yet for all that, Ryder and Taylor have not helped themselves with some fairly average displays in the few chances they have had.

Add to that the fact that Scott Styris has been barely needed for Deccan Chargers, and Jacob Oram has been a bit-part for the Stephen Fleming-coached Chennai.

Vettori has been pretty good for Delhi but overall New Zealand's reputation has taken a large dent.

You get the sense that the franchise owners won't be rushing out to add New Zealanders to the roster for next season if this is the best they can offer and that has long-term implications. More than ever NZC would love to see the ICL fall over (news that some players due payments from the "rebel" received them on Friday will not necessarily have been greeted with smiles at NZC) and the American premier league fail to get off the ground. The fewer players signed by the IPL, the more players tempted by other glitzy tournaments.

It's a matter of timing and that's where this IPL has all gone wrong for New Zealand. The tournament comes at the fag end of a long season: a trip to Bangladesh, a shellacking in Australia, two inbound tours, and the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy. The last thing these guys needed before the Twenty20 world championships was a Twenty20 tournament played halfway across the world. Apart from Oram, who managed to sneak in his rest during the season, they needed a break.

But how can you tell them to forfeit their riches, even if it is for their long-term benefit? Australia can, because the contracts that Michael Clarke and Ricky Ponting et al have with the Australian Cricket Board are lucrative enough for them not to need the loot. You can't reasonably expect McCullum to turn down US$750,000 because it is the biggest pay cheque of his year.

On Friday, Cricket Australia brought three more players - Shane Watson, Nathan Bracken and James Hopes - back from the IPL under instruction to rest up before the Twenty20 world champs.

But NZC might need to look at capping the amount they play in future because the stats make for grim reading, especially so for McCullum who surfed into this tournament on a wave of expectation after becoming the instant poster-child last year.

Things surely reached a nadir when he was shuffled down the order, presumably at the behest of coach John Buchanan rather than himself, and then played a leading role in butchering what should have been a comfortable run chase as Kolkata fell to Mumbai. His 5 from 7 balls was the sort of innings his side didn't need at that stage.

Next game he was back to the top of the order - you can debate all you like about tests and ODIs but this is the only place he should ever be placed in Twenty20 - and pretty much flubbing it again, scratching 19 runs at considerably less than a run a ball.

All good players have slumps and it is unrealistic to expect McCullum to ever play the sort of innings again - 158 not out - that he did to launch the tournament last year. But this McCullum will struggle to aggregate that for the entire tournament.

That is a genuine cause for concern.

Which McCullum will turn up to England in June at the World Twenty20 Championships? Hopefully not the broken shell of a figure that is masquerading as McCullum in the Republic.

Because if he does, New Zealand has zero chance of winning the tournament.