Really, NZC?

One of cricket's oft-repeated truths is that New Zealand's resource pool is extremely shallow; when a few important men go missing, the replacements are usually never good enough.

I don't imagine I'm in a club of one in thinking that NZ's most valuable resource is a certain understated 57-year old. The good people running NZC, however, aren't exactly bending over backwards to retain his services. Strange.

Let's look back at the last three coaches of NZ before John Wright stepped in. Under John Bracewell, the Black Caps were a complete mess, with nonsense theories and experiments on players the order of the day. Brick-by-brick, Braces slowly succeeded in dismantling the house Stephen Fleming had built. His successor Andy Moles was little more than a passenger during a phase in which Dan Vettori did everything from captaining to driving the team-bus. As for Mark Greatbatch, five words he used to describe NZ's performance in Bangladesh tell you a bit about the impact he had.

Under Wright, NZ have stopped being truly wretched in both tests and ODIs, reached a World Cup semifinal in the subcontinent, clinically dealt with a minnow at home and away, won a test in Australia, and escaped a complete mauling from a ruthless South Africa. In the process, they've discovered a few good players (Doug Bracewell, Dean Brownlie) and resurrected a few careers. Doesn't sound too flash, but in the light of all that happened before, this man has turned things around.

But instead of assuring us that every possible effort will be made to keep him, we instead get this gem from John Buchanan: "In any professional sporting organisation you have strong people and sometimes you have positive tension. Sometimes that's a good thing, because you get [positive] outcomes". Months after losing the coaching services of Allan Donald, the men in charge seem happy to let things be.

Come on, NZC. This is the national side, not a bloody set of lab rats for Buchanan and Littlejohn to play Mad Scientist with.