KEY POINTS:
You know that feeling when you wake up from a dream so vivid you spend the next 10 minutes checking your faculties to make sure it was actually not real?
That's happening now.
Are we really debating Stephen Fleming's position at the head of our national cricket team just 28 days out from the World Cup? Have we suddenly been transported to a Jonestown-like community where the deranged denizens of Talkbackland have slipped LSD into our Kool-Aid?
Let's state this categorically: Fleming will be captain of New Zealand at the ninth World Cup beginning in the Caribbean next month. More importantly, Fleming should be captain.
He's the best qualified, the best equipped and, arguably, the best we've had.
It would seem as if the tide of public affection is turning against Fleming. Four years ago at the World Cup he could do no wrong after a scintillating match-winning century against hosts South Africa.
Comments after his latest century weren't so warm.
"After Fleming's abject display of self-glorification to compile his century he's been exposed as a man of straw; all smoke and mirrors; the consummate cricketing artifice," wrote one particularly vituperative Herald reader.
Judging by talkback callers, even on sensible stations, he was far from alone.
If that innings was the catalyst for the anti-Fleming sentiment, it is a perplexing target.
Fleming was out of form, that's no secret, but how many out-of-form New Zealand batsmen have you ever seen make centuries? Surely that indicates a certain intestinal fortitude rather than weakness.
In Perth a week earlier a similarly out-of-form Matthew Hayden rode his luck and a thick outside edge all the way to a century against New Zealand. He's not looking so bad now, is he?
Fleming didn't "ice the cake", as he is wont to say, last Tuesday because of a combination of factors. He got tired, hardly surprising given the lack of serious crease-time he has enjoyed in recent months, and he simply wasn't in good enough nick to find the boundary as fatigue set in.
But the principal reason for New Zealand's failure was that the seven others that batted with him could not pass 31.
One reason that has been raised which I just do not buy, is that he had his eyes only on the prize of three figures. In his test and one-day career, Fleming has been dismissed between 80 and 100 21 times. He is noted for many things but excessive care in reaching three figures has never been one of them.
Captaincy, too, can be a fickle thing. Michael Vaughan las been lauded for his performance in helping to strangle the New Zealanders. It was pretty impressive, but...
When Jacob Oram was on 1, he nicked one between the keeper and a 'funky' second-and-a-half slip for four. Almost immediately, he repeated the dose but this time keeper Paul Nixon plucked it out of the air.
Just imagine for a moment that ball had coursed to the boundary and Oram, by now on 9, had got on a roll and won the game, how Vaughan's application of his slips would have been viewed. On such fine lines are reputations won and lost.
Finally, it has been implied, most notably by Herald columnist Adam Parore, that Fleming has turned into some sort of quitter - a man who remains content in defeat.
Remember Kim Hughes? He became so frustrated by defeat he blubbed on national television and resigned.
Would the same sort of display from Fleming show how committed he really was?
No, that really would be a nightmare. Let's hope it happens after, not before, the World Cup.
