Wright timing all wrong

THE critics have had a field day with the Black Caps. Every man, woman and dog seems to have turned against them.
If ever there has been a case of the great Kiwi knocking machine at work, this has been it.
No matter that Vettori, McCullum, Taylor, Styris and Martin have done a sterling job for our nation in recent times, a few ordinary results and they are the country's No1 whipping boys.
Sure, the results in Bangladesh and India were frustratingly below par. But were they as unexpected as much as the host of know-it-alls would have us believe?
Yes, in past years we would have been clear favourites to comfortably dispose of Bangladesh in all formats of the game, short and long.
Not this time, though. Bangladesh had shown enough in their lead-up form to suggest they would be a handful and, remember, they had the advantage of playing at home on wickets which were always going to be in their favour. Beating them on a regular basis was a tough ask - not as tough as we made it seem perhaps but tough all the same.
Playing in India can be a nightmare at the best of times, and that's for teams with far greater depth than the Black Caps.
Anybody who envisaged we would come away from there on the right side of the results ledger had to be dreaming.
In fact, if you had bet we would do well enough to draw the first two tests, you would probably have been committed to an asylum, yet we did exactly that.
Not that you would know it with all the hoo-ha which has gone on since we lost the third test and then got done by plenty in the one-dayers.
As with Bangladesh, any review of the tour of India would say the overall results weren't as good as they should have been and neither they were but, then again, were they as totally unexpected as we are constantly being told? I don't think so.
To me, Cricket New Zealand's decision this week to make drastic changes to the Black Caps management structure was bad timing.
If they were going to happen - and there were several good reasons why they needed to be - they should have been done before the visits to Bangladesh and India.
Not that new coach John Wright would have minded.
Wright, who has looked the obvious candidate for the coaching role for what seems like yonks now, was, of course, a highly successful coach of India for years and he would have understood better than most the perils of touring that part of the world. One suspects he would have been quite content sitting in front of his TV set rather than being in the white hot cauldron which is Indian cricket. Especially as coach of a Black Caps side which was never likely to produce favourable results.
Mark Greatbatch, of course, was on the other side of the fence. To say he was thrown in at the deep end of the coaching set-up would be the understatement of the year and, predictably, he came out with his reputation in tatters ... well, at least in the mind of those who didn't bother to take into account the magnitude of the task confronting him.
For my money, Greatbatch should at least have been given the comparative luxury of taking the Black Caps into their forthcoming home series against Pakistan. There, they will have conditions to suit them and if they didn't perform a whole lot better than in Bangladesh and India, you would have had to start loading up the bullets, wouldn't you?
Not only for the coach but the players as well.