Cricket: Coloured clothing remains our best option

Nathan McCullum celebrates with team mates during the 1st T20 match between England and New Zealand. Photo / Getty Images

The two-ball washout at The Oval yesterday brought an end to 54 days of cricket for New Zealand in various forms in England.

The tour began on a damp note at Derbyshire and ended in light rain but events in between reconfirmed certain firmly-held convictions; that New Zealand are competitive with anyone in the shorter forms. The test game, and you've heard this before, remains a work in progress.

One big plus was the continued development of the seam attack, topped by Tim Southee's 10-wicket haul at Lord's. The flipside is the flakiness of the batting was again shown in sharp relief on one dreadful day in that first test.

That loss of all 10 wickets in 22.3 overs for 68 chasing 239 was embarrassing. A real chance of just a second win at Lord's beckoned like a siren on the rocks. New Zealand, faced admittedly with top class seam bowling, were nowhere near up to the task.

They were well done over in the second test at Leeds, the sight of specialist batsmen bowled between bat and pad by offspinner Graeme Swann a gruesome memory of that contest.

But pull on a coloured set of playing gear and New Zealand are in business.

On the back of Martin Guptill's remarkable two centuries, the ODI series was won before the third game.

Their 201 for four last Wednesday was New Zealand's third highest T20 total and, with the help of yesterday's rain, set up a second limited-overs series win in a few weeks.

All that said, New Zealand disappointed in the Champions Trophy, failing to make the semifinals. So a Curate's Egg of a tour.

Now it's home - apart from those with English county deals - and time to reflect. New Zealand's next assignments are away to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in October/November, where their batting against spin will come under close scrutiny.

Before that there's an important New Zealand A tour to India - important particularly in the areas of spin and batting development - and the announcement of the 20 players to receive national contracts.

The tour group is expected to be named in the next couple of days; the contracts are due out early next month.

There will be changes to that group. Kruger van Wyk, Tarun Nethula, Rob Nicol, Daniel Flynn, Rob Nicol and Chris Martin are unlikely to survive.

Room must be found for several players, with Mitchell McClenaghan, Tom Latham, Hamish Rutherford and Neil Wagner heading that list.

The 20 players are paid on a sliding scale of $6000 increments, with the top-rated player receiving $181,425. The bottom three all get $73,000.

On top of that are match fees, $7508 per test, $3250 for each ODI and $2120 per T20 appearance.