Bangladesh tour a sobering lesson for Black Caps

The quicker New Zealand forget their trip to Bangladesh the better.

Then again there's an argument to say they need to remember it for a long time, to feel the hurt of being repeatedly beaten by their hosts, who are clearly improving but equally no South Africa, England or India.

Two drawn tests, three ODI defeats before a solitary win in the tour finale, a T20 match on Wednesday night, adds up to a bitterly disappointing return, especially as October 2008 - the last time New Zealand won any match in Bangladesh - became a steadily tightening noose around the team.

There's a range of reasons for the average tour, which New Zealand were expecting to use to banish the memory of their shocker in 2010, when they lost the ODIs 4-0.

First off, tribute time to the Bangladeshis.

Time was when they were embarrassingly weak, their place as a test-playing nation regarded as due entirely to India's pushing for an extra sub-continental vote around the International Cricket Council table.

They are better than that now, if still nowhere near world beaters. Yet no team would take them lightly in their own conditions.

They have adventurous batsmen, handy spinners, an inspirational wicketkeeper-captain Mushfiqur Rahim and a couple of decent, if erratic seamers. Their real test will be overseas, how they handle seam, swing, bounce and more pace than New Zealand could muster.

Captain Brendon McCullum reckoned New Zealand were prepared for the tour. In a classic case of being hoist by his own petard, McCullum insisted before the first test that 2010 "was a good lesson of what not to do. We were ill-prepared leading up to that.

"[Winning the series this time is] the expectation of us, and we are better prepared for it."

Take away the T20 and it wasn't a particularly convincing demonstration of being fully prepared.

In the two drawn tests, only Kane Williamson, BJ Watling and Peter Fulton looked in charge. Neil Wagner was the pick of the bowlers and Ish Sodhi made an encouraging debut with his legspin.

In the ODIs, however, even the fielding went markedly downhill at one point.

Anton Devcich, Colin Munro, young allrounders Corey Anderson and Jimmy Neesham, Ross Taylor and Grant Elliot all had their moments. But the ability to dominate their opponents across the board was missing.

As the All Blacks bosses would term it, New Zealand have plenty of work-ons. Take their historic weakness against good spin bowling as one example.

Although Kyle Mills, the stand-in captain for the second half of the limited-over series, denied there was a mental block as things got progressively worse, it was hard to escape the feeling that at times heads were being scratched at finding a way to get out from under the Bangladeshi rock.

They did, with some panache, at the end, but it was far too late for that solitary win to be regarded as anything more than a pleasing finale.