David Leggat: A drubbing to stir painful memories

Brendon McCullum. Photo / Herald on Sunday

John Reid was doing the honours at the New Zealand Cricket annual awards in Auckland on Thursday night.

He looked full of good cheer too, presenting Brendon McCullum with his award as test player of the year.

Yesterday morning, you'd wager one of New Zealand's finest players, the country's first captain to win a test, would have been spluttering over his bacon and eggs as he heard Australia had been 21 for nine in their second innings meltdown at Cape Town.

They reached 47 only courtesy of last pair Peter Siddle and Nathan Lyon. Had either followed their more esteemed batting mates down the drain yesterday, New Zealand's darkest test day would have been expunged from the record books.

Twenty six all out, Eden Park, March 28, 1956. It sounds as awful today as it must have done at the time.

Reid would most likely have growled a meaningful "about bloody time", maybe phoned his one surviving teammate, Matt Poore, from that test against England, drunk a silent toast to their old departed chums, and got out the old book for a last look at that scorecard, then closed it for good.

Instead, curse Siddle, rail at Lyon. The record still resides here.

Several of those New Zealand players never really saw the funny side of that day, tired of the decades of ribbing.

Bert Sutcliffe made 11 of those 26. There wasn't much left to go around among the other 10 batsmen.

And remember, too, it was the Australians who, after rolling New Zealand for 42 and 54 at the Basin Reserve in 1946, decided they weren't worth the effort for a further 27 years.

How they sent B teams across the Tasman in the late 1960s, a condescending nod to helping the Shaky Isles along.

That's why the rain which washed out the final day of the Sydney test at the start of 1974, with Australia 30 for two chasing 456, hurt; and why so great was the jubilation at Christchurch a couple of months later when Ken Wadsworth hit the winning runs as New Zealand finally beat Australia in a test. A point had been made.

How New Zealand fans, especially those with a keen knowledge of their cricket history, would have savoured Australia taking the low mark yesterday.

Don't doubt, either, that the South Africans would have been going flat out for that final wicket. Take a look at the record book.

After New Zealand, the next four lowest test totals are by South Africa, two 30s, a 35 and a 36.

You think they wouldn't fancy squashing Australia under that lot?

There have been other seriously low scores in the recent past, but most have involved the second half of the innings folding like a dodgy souffle.

One exception was England's 51 in Jamaica two years ago, when they teetered at 23 for six.

You can imagine the fear racing around the dressing room then, as it must have done in Cape Town yesterday: "just get to 27".

The Cape Town pitch was certainly a help for the seamers. Dale Steyn, debutant Vernon Philander and Morne Morkel shared all 20 Australian wickets.

But 18 overs? That's all it took to blow away Australia's best, and raise fresh questions over their state of mind, technique and willingness to scrap.

New Zealand's players will have taken an interest in yesterday's events, as they face both teams in the next few months.

What to read into Australia's batting, save captain Michael Clarke's fine first innings 151? Three other batsmen - apart from Siddle and Lyon at the death - reached double figures.

There's a view that batsmen have lost the ability to play the swinging ball; that the inexorable rise of T20 cricket has robbed batsmen of the desire and skill to knuckle down and battle through a crisis.

That the money comes too easily and is earned using methods foreign to "traditional" cricket.

Or maybe this was just a one-off situation, one of those aberrant days - 23 wickets for 294 runs - when the entertainment factor was off the scale.

For all that, it was a sobering reminder to the New Zealand batsmen of the quality of the attack they'll face in February-March.