The Black Caps are low key bad again

What can be done to reinvigorate New Zealand’s most inconsistent team?

 

The Black Caps, midway through their home summer of cricket, have just finished dealing to two sides that don’t travel well in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Looking only at the win-loss column a casual observer would think that they’re pretty good at cricket. But with Australia and South Africa coming in February (both very good at cricket), it seems a good time to ask an awkward question: Are they really though? (good at cricket).

In 2015, and the first few months of 2016, we experienced the golden age of New Zealand cricket. Brendon McCullum’s team were the darlings of the international scene, leading to gushing praise and a world cup final. However, in the less than twelve months since Baz retired, the Black Caps have slipped back into a style of mediocrity so consistent and specific to them it has it’s own genre of Facebook memes.

If Baz’s Black Caps were cricket cocaine, the current squad are the last two mouthfuls in a can of Double Brown. It won’t make you gag, but it will probably disappoint you.

If you look at the test and ODI results of the last 12 months, victories over anyone within the top five are scarce. So recently the most feared in the game, this team has quietly slid back to what they have always been: A mid-tier side that can beat other sides like them but get soundly beaten by any team ranked in the top 5.

How has a team made up of largely the same players regressed back to their norm so quickly? And what can they do?

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Shane Bond left, we need him back.

A big part of the “good ol’ days” of 1.5 years ago was that the bowling unit was among the best in the world. This stopped being the case almost immediately after bowling coach Shane Bond left at the end of 2015 world cup.

Bond was replaced by Dimitri Mascarenhas one of the more mediocre bowlers to play international cricket, who was then replaced by Shane Jurgensen who already had the job once between 2008 and 2010! It’s staggering that they hired that guy AGAIN, (look at the first line of his cricinfo description!).

During Jurgensen’s first stint, apart from beating Bangladesh (the second worst test side in cricket), the Black Caps won two tests. TWO. A bowling unit that was once disciplined, fast and regularly swinging the ball are now none of these things and instead bowl like the 90’s to 00’s battlers that coach them.

I’m not sure how you can look at this footage of our guys relentlessly bowling the same awful boundary deliveries to Mitchell Marsh, or see Boult bowling the first three overs on a green pitch for 26 runs as he did against Bangladesh recently, and not see it. This is perhaps the most obvious problem to fix in New Zealand sport currently. I’m sure every cricket group chat in the country has been pleading for Bond to return since the day he left.

Please come back Shane.

We need a different approach to the captaincy

Kane Williamson is already, by far the greatest batsmen New Zealand has ever produced and will finish among the greats of the game period. However the early results suggest that right now he isn’t quite the right personality to successfully captain the team that NZ cricket can give him. Which is painful to write but true…

While Kane is so understated, methodical, and quietly a god amongst men as a batsmen, this doesn’t translate into making the players around him better. He is prone to being over conservative and letting games drift without changing tact. By contrast the things that made McCullum an infuriating batter to watch also made him an incredible captain. He never let games drift, was always making buzzy, aggressive moves that made things happen.

If McCullum is pirate radio, Williamson is a perfectly mixed techno set. I love both of these things but they each satisfy different needs at different times.

The Black Caps will never have more than one to three world class players in the team at a time, which means every game they play 80% of the team is out of their depth. The Black Caps need a leader with the charisma and inventiveness to get something extra out of those guys every game. The kind of guy that’ll smoke darts in the middle of a game if he feels like it.

The problem is I have no idea who that guy is. He may not exist at all right now. Maybe the closest thing is for Williamson to conquer his one true hurdle which is approaching his captaincy in the exact opposite way to his batting.

He essentially needs to loosen up, do something irresponsible. Like Baz would.

Be a young, fun, gunslinging team

The most common lament of a Black Caps supporter is “who do we replace them with though?”. The sentiment being that there is such a small talent pool due to a substandard domestic competition.

I think the answer to that should be, not someone that took til the age of 30 to become the biggest fish in that small pond. Why do they keep putting old journeymen that aren’t even that good to begin within the team? Especially bowlers. Are they hoping that by age 35 Colin de Grandehomme will have perfected the 125km length ball?

Here’s an idea: If our domestic competition is so bad, why even bother with it? We’ve seen time and time again that the domestic competition doesn’t prepare players for the standard of international cricket.

If that is true then what difference does it make if the black caps bring someone in when he’s 22 or 30? Those extra years in the domestic competition won’t make them any more prepared for international cricket so why waste that time? If a young player has talent we should bring them into the fold as soon as possible so they can learn from the good players we do have. They can’t be any worse than the guy they’ve replaced.

Outside of the few established world class players, the Black Caps should be full of young guys that have potential. And we should let these guys go ham in search of that potential. The Black Caps should be a fun team that burns out rather than fades. If they were fun and young we would forgive them for being bad because at least they would be entertaining in the pursuit of one day being great. Similar to young NBA teams learning how to win.

They need to hit rock bottom

It’s widely reported that the catalyst for the Black Caps two year run near the top was actually hitting rock bottom against South Africa in 2013. That performance was so embarrassing that fans used to dealing with New Zealand’s second most frustrating sports team experienced anger rather than just disappointment.

It was so bad that the players themselves had no recourse other than to throw everything in the bin and start again fresh. They essentially used the same technique George Costanza did to turn his life around. It all came from hitting a new low.

As crazy and horrible as it sounds, this is what needs to happen to the current team for their own good. Continuing to scrape unconvincing victories against middling opposition will not force anyone to consider the changes above.

Continuing to lose most games against the top teams will just bring the same excuses that have always been used like “who do you replace him with” or “not our main sport”, yada yada. We’re too pragmatic and understanding when it comes to any sport other than rugby.

We need to truly be obliterated before we realise we need to just try literally any other approach and see if it works.

 

The Chappell-Hadlee ODI series against Australia starts on Monday. The South African tour to New Zealand begins on February 17th