Down the Slippery Slope

Being 2-0 down to Bangladesh in the ODI series represents a new low in what has been a barren year for the Black Caps so far. Yet I can hardly argue that the defeats have not been well deserved.

The tour - whose program was changed to 5 ODIs after it was mutually agreed to cancel the 2-test series - was always going to be a bit of a tricky one for NZ. The players have been short on confidence and practice (the two warm-up games were washed out), but anything less than a 4-1 win would be viewed as a failure. Boy, have those expectations been revised or what.

I've somehow never found myself having a soft corner for the Bangladesh side (which was not the case with Zimbabwe and even Kenya in the 90's), yet have been really impressed with their overall improvement as an international outfit. They are no easybeats anymore, at least not at home, as England found out earlier in the year. So far in the series, they've simply played to strengths and capitalised on the opposition's unfamiliarity with sustained, accurate spin bowling. Also, their batting has long moved on from having to depend on Mohammad Ashraful. If Vettori was the difference between the sides on NZ's last visit in 2008, this time Shakib Al-Hasan has taken center-stage. When you consider that they have been without Tamim Iqbal and Mashrafe Mortaza, and the same NZ side beat them 3-0 earlier in the year, they ought to be proud of this performance.

It looks like NZ might well pay for being slow out of the blocks. They should probably have won the first game after Ryder and McCullum gave them a rousing start in pursuit of 228. Then the seemingly mandatory top-order wreckage set in, and not for the first time, Duckworth and Lewis punished them for losing one wicket too many. In the second game the batsmen treated Shakib and Suhrawardi as if they were up against Murali at his peak.

There are too many individual concerns about the batting to list them all here, but it's the form of Grant Elliott which is the most worrying. He is supposed to be the steady one in a middle order of strokemakers, and now he finds his game exposed.

These two losses should be a wake up call for the players, because the one-day side has been in a bit of a decline since early 2009 despite making the finals of the last Champions Trophy.