KEY POINTS:
Jacob Oram has been given the green light, Kyle Mills is still waiting for his, but there was some bad news for Scott Styris as New Zealand prepared for tomorrow's one-dayer against Australia.
Styris, one of the three front-line players expected to be sent across as reinforcements this weekend, pulled out of his Auckland team's State Shield match against Canterbury yesterday with a calf strain - reported to be minor.
The setback means New Zealand's much-needed top-order batsman will miss tomorrow's game and probably Tuesday's showdown with England at Adelaide before he's fit for consideration.
Mills, on the comeback trail from a knee injury, was being assessed by New Zealand Cricket personnel during yesterday's Auckland-Canterbury game, with a view to sending him over to the tri-series if he demonstrated form and fitness.
If he is called up, he'll probably fly straight to Adelaide tomorrow with Oram, who - according to team manager Lindsay Crocker - had satisfied the selectors of his readiness to return to the international scene.
New Zealand at present have a 14-man squad in Australia, one short of the maximum threshold, and Crocker said the issue of who might be returning home would be answered when decisions had been made over Mills and the injured Shane Bond.
Crocker said: "What it means in terms of the squad, we don't quite know yet.
"We've got the ability to go up one to 15, so Jacob's impending arrival won't be at anyone's expense.
"But if Kyle does come as well, then we'll need to make some decisions, and that'll probably happen within the next day or two, depending on what happens to Shane."
Bond has been unable to train since leaving the field with a back complaint against England on Tuesday, but cleared his first hurdle on Thursday when he was cleared of a potentially career-ending stress fracture.
Crocker said there was an extra sense of urgency being shown over the need to find out what was wrong with the fast-bowler before the squad moved on to Adelaide for their fourth game of the series.
Crocker said: "We've escalated it a bit because the weekend's approaching and we kind of want to get it out of the way before then.
"We have to shift on Monday which means we'll be changing doctors and support crew, so we're doing the MRI to try and find out exactly what's wrong."
Crocker confirmed it was extremely unlikely Bond could play tomorrow or on Tuesday at Adelaide, and suggested it was more a case of seeing if he was right for the following double-header in Perth.
But he agreed that there was still a strong chance the fast-bowler could return home.
"I guess there's that likelihood but we're not anticipating it yet," he said.
"We just want to see what the problem is, get on top of it and get him back playing again. Probably Perth would be a realistic timeframe for that if he's good to go."
As for the idea of wrapping the kingpin in cotton wool to preserve him for the World Cup, Crocker said management preferred to take it one step at a time.
"I guess it's too early to speculate on that until we get an idea of what's wrong," he said.
"He had something similar last year, when it wasn't as bad as he first thought and we had him back playing reasonably quickly.
"So we hope it's something similar this time. At this stage we've got no plans to send him home because we're still hopeful he'll play on the tour."
ODI tri-series
New Zealand v Australia,
tomorrow 4pm, live Sky Sport 1.
New Zealand: Stephen Fleming (c), Brendon McCullum, Nathan Astle, Ross Taylor, Peter Fulton, Daniel Vettori, Hamish Marshall, Craig McMillan, James Franklin, Andre Adams, Mark Gillespie, Michael Mason, Jeetan Patel, Shane Bond.
Australia: Ricky Ponting (c), Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Brad Hodge, Michael Clarke, Michael Hussey, Andrew Symonds, Cameron White, Brett Lee, Mitchell Johnson, Nathan Bracken, Glenn McGrath, Brad Hogg, Stuart Clark, Ben Hilfenhaus.
