KEY POINTS:
In One-Day cricket it pays to take heed of the obvious. Like, every dot ball you face is one you can't get back.
This is not a revelation that will change cricket as we know it. Anybody with a calculator could tell you that, since the advent of
50-over cricket, barring no-balls and wides, each team has 300 deliveries at their disposal.
It might be that New Zealand requires a refresher course in simple mathematics.
Statistics from the just completed series against Bangladesh - three matches that should be filed to The Hague for Crimes Against Humanity - were horrendous.
Of the 900 legal deliveries bowled to them in three matches, New Zealand batsmen scored off just 339. That is not a misprint - Bangladesh's bowlers were given a free pass 571 times.
This is astonishing. We are not talking about facing Glenn McGrath and Stuart Clark (or even Michael Clarke), but the likes of Syed Rasel, Mashrafe Mortaza and Naeem Islam.
This statistic has to be road-tested for validity and the most obvious point of reference is the Bangladesh-Australia series played recently at Darwin, where the pitches were difficult and scoring was tough.
The two times Australia batted first they were unproductive with 169 and 147 deliveries respectively, a lot of wastage by their standards. Still, they gave Bangladesh an average of 158 free passes, compared to the 190 New Zealand offered.
Even if Australia were to score mere singles off the extra 32 balls they scored from, it is a significant boost.
Forward-thinking and, even by cricket's standards, slightly eccentric former coach John Buchanan believed dot balls were the biggest enemy of one-day cricket.
"The traditional numbers say player X has a 100 per cent strike rate, which everyone thinks is amazing. My view is that the number tells us very little," he once told The Guardian. "I wish to know out of those 100 balls, how many does he actually use?
"Generally what I would find is that player X might typically use 30+ per cent of his balls for most of his innings, accelerating to 50-80 per cent later on, giving an average of around 40-45 per cent."
In other words, Buchanan believed a player who ended up with, say, 100 from 100 balls had still wasted too many opportunities if he had scored off less than half the deliveries faced.
"So we discussed what kind of shots the players had that they were comfortable with, and whether they could use those shots to different balls. We looked at periods of the game or bowling types when there were more balls which we weren't scoring from, and whether individuals could develop new shots in their repertoire."
New Zealand's problem scoring against Bangladesh was most stark at the top of the order where the first 10 overs passed by in a befuddled haze of dot balls, wickets and the occasional boundary. In the first international at Mirpur, just 19 deliveries were scored off in the opening 10 overs; in the second that number decreased to 16; and at the better paced Chittagong wicket it sunk to an embarrassing 12.
That obviously wasn't what the selectors had in mind when pairing the explosive talents of Brendon McCullum and Jesse Ryder at the top of the order.
With a left-right combination the onus is on the batsmen to keep rotating to the strike so the bowlers cannot get a rhythm but New Zealand failed dismally on this count. When they lost a wicket or three, Jamie How, Ross Taylor and Scott Styris were also guilty of waiting on the bad balls to get themselves going.
This is where they miss Lou Vincent.
The ICL-enforced absence of Shane Bond has undoubtedly had the biggest negative effect on New Zealand cricket but the vacuum left by Vincent has been underestimated.
He was guilty of prolonged lapses of form and judgment and subject to the whims of the selectors more often than he should have been, but when he was on form he gave New Zealand an energy at the crease that has not been adequately substituted.
Vincent was the master of the bunt and run. He would block the ball with hard hands into gaps and run with the shot. Invariably he would place it to the side of the fielder that meant he was the one running to the danger end. He nearly always got there.
Despite this seemingly high-risk strategy, Vincent was run out just four times in 99 innings, contributing to 4.5 per cent of his dismissals. Compare that with Stephen Fleming who was run out 21 times (8.5 per cent) and lightning-quick McCullum (eight run outs at 8.7 per cent) and you clearly have a brilliant judge of a run.
New Zealand need somebody to recreate that sense of urgency.
The selectors have not necessarily got it wrong. Ryder and McCullum were brilliant in the home summer and there is every chance they will be brilliant again. However, unless it's impressed upon the top order that there is more than one way to skin a cat, or a Bangladeshi attack, there will be too many frustrating days ahead.
When the boundaries are not coming you need singles.
Simple game really.
