Without Shane Bond and Iain O'Brien, the Black Caps can't take advantage of Australia's vulnerability says Chris Rattue.
The New Year beckons and it would be nice to herald it in with good cheer yet the IOC, those buffoons who run the Olympics, got in the way unfortunately.
This column was to concentrate on Australian cricket, our own mid-summer days lacking anything worth talking about in the leather-on-willow
department. Between the accumulating of Christmas calories and vain - in both meanings of the word - attempts to immediately shed the excesses, Ricky Ponting's baggy greens were spied putting Pakistan to the sword.
From what we saw in New Zealand, these Pakistanis are so bad at catching anything that it was a miracle they arrived in Australia on time for a battle they aren't tough enough to win. Australia are no longer invincible, but that doesn't mean you can start counting them out.
Long gone is their fabulous opening partnership of Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer, and ready made replacements are not jumping out of the woodwork. So at one end the Aussies have stationed Simon Katich, who is far from stationary, moving around in his crease and waving his pads at the bowlers a-la red rags to bulls. At the other end is Shane Watson, a straw topped all rounder, a sort of poor man's Ian "Beefy" Botham. Faced with a lack of finesse in trying to protect the classy batsmen that still remain within, the Australian selectors have - in picking Watson - responded by putting a bouncer on the door. And it is working.
Watson and Katich may get out in the 90s, but we - in New Zealand - would settle for that in our Black Caps, any day. The Australian cricketers always mean business. What about our lot?
With the prospect of an exhilarating two test series against a weaker than usual Australia, Iain O'Brien announces he is off to England and Shane Bond doesn't want to put a broken body through any more stress. Fine reasons indeed, and economical.
In these quarters, O'Brien and Bond's decisions have been greeted with extreme disappointment, because the players have opted out of a golden opportunity, for them and their team. What was shaping as a terrific contest might now be a dud. That the great and the good around cricket seem so resigned to their departure, and almost supportive, makes it doubly disappointing.
New Zealand's cricket leadership has hardly been inspirational in this either.
The IOC are clowns.
Its president Jacques Rogge was reported as saying over the weekend that he is "disappointed" with the revelations of Tiger Woods' serial infidelity.
"We call for our athletes to be a role model for youngsters and that is evidently not the case with Woods," Rogge told El Paris.
"We will see how this evolves but it's not a worry for the IOC ... an athlete of this level must realise that his personal life is indelibly linked to his professional life."
How a far-off adult's marital infidelity relates to "youngsters" I do not know. If moral guidance is the issue, you might have hoped that parents and guardians played the major part, letting golfers get on with golf.
At least Woods can claim his "transgressions" happened behind closed doors, vehicular and otherwise.
The IOC's own indiscretions were far from private matters however, although no doubt they would have wished they remained that way. The closed shop which runs the Olympics is a fiefdom where corruption has thrived. Fine investigative journalism exposed the selling of favours by IOC members to prospective host cities, a large stain that continues to seep into the mind every time the IOC's name is mentioned. The corruption was so deep that it found its way into the competitions, where money changed hands to rig boxing matches.
The IOC has no platform of integrity to stand on where it can lecture anyone else. It was only ever interested in golf - which has been admitted to the 2016 Games - for one reason: Woods.
Woods alone raised golf to a place where the sport was an object of desire for the Olympics, which consumes anything that can make another buck.
Role models. Image. These concepts are all about keeping the sponsors happy, of selling products to the masses. This business of making money is, with little doubt, the very reason why Rogge poked his nose into Woods' business in the first place.
