KEY POINTS:
It's hard not to fear a little for Daniel Vettori.
Already with a decent claim to being New Zealand's best ever one-day cricketer, it seems the game he has toiled for over a decade to perfect is about to desert him. Not his personal game; the changes of
pace and flight, the unerring accuracy and the deadliest of arm balls are all intact. It's the one-day game itself that seems in danger of a terminal decline.
Plenty of people in the cricket world believe the 50-over version has already begun its death roll and will soon be supplanted by T20.
Genuine cricket fans can only hope that isn't the case.
But the disinterested nature of England's home-and-away ODI series losses to the Black Caps lends credence to prophecies of the doom-sayers.
England's one-day team is in an awful mess, managing just two wins in 10 ODIs against a Black Caps side propped up by a podgy self-destructive booze hound (at least briefly), a boy who is still learning to shave and a kid with a new set of false teeth.
There is, of course, nothing new in this. England have been woeful at one-day cricket pretty much since the ice thawed.
The real question now, given the cash-fuelled rise of T20, is will the English even bother to try to turn their 50-over fortunes around, or will they simply pursue the fortunes on offer in the Cricket For Dummies version of the game that is T20?
Given that they swept the Black Caps 3-0 in T20s and have been granted a free-pass into the big money winner-takes-all matches being bankrolled by Texas billionaire Allen Sanford, that would seem a no-brainer.
Where England focus their intentions is obviously their business but it will have an impact here. The financial powerbase of the game may have switched to Asia but England, the home of the game, is still the country from where the cricketing world takes its lead.
Martin Crowe's Cricket Max, a similar game in many respects to T20, was successful enough in New Zealand years ago but never threatened to make a global impact.
T20, by contrast, took off globally only after a massively successful introduction to County Cricket.
England's influence is still significant, all right, and if they decide to abandon the 50-over game it is as good as dead.
Given the packed grounds, impressive broadcasting figures and incredible amount of private equity being pumped into cricket by its bastard child, why should we even worry if the creaking dinosaur that is the ODI lumbers into extinction?
Well, Vettori provided a compelling reason in the early hours of Sunday morning. The spell he weaved over the English middle order was a thing of beauty. He turned a few early, floated a few up and never veered from just outside off stump.
Just when the English batsmen decided giving themselves room to play through the off side was the only scoring option, he snuck in with the arm ball to smash the stumps. His first seven overs produced three wickets for just 14 runs. Game over.
And it was proper cricket. Absorbing, clever cricket.
The 50-over game retains enough of the game's purity to produce such cricket. T20 does not.
T20 is short enough that batsmen can play with impunity. Vettori's great strength is that he can instil caution and insecurity in an opponent, breaking them down mentally before finishing them off physically.
In T20 there is no mental element. There is no subtlety, no nuance.
There is also no tedium, which in cricket serves to highlight the sublime. It's what makes test cricket so absorbing and what provides the vital substance to 50-over matches.
T20 has its place, such as mid-week evening social league games and pre-tour hit and giggle warm-ups. But it's just not cricket. If it does supplant the 50-over game, Vettori - who is too easily defended to be a force in test matches - faces spending the latter years of his career sending four overs of darts at the leg stump while hoping not to get plonked over the grandstand too many times.
That would be a tragedy, not just for Vettori but for those that had to watch it.
* England may be rubbish on the field but their commentators excel off it. The likes of Michael Atherton and Nasser Hussein don't let their own extremely modest records as one-day players and strategists get in the way of asking the tough questions of the latest crop of failures.
Despite being horribly outnumbered and copping plenty, our boy Ian Smith more than held his own, sticking it to the Poms whenever he got a chance.
Athers, though, got in the best shot of the tour when introducing Smithy into the analyst's "Third Man" chair.
"I suppose you'd have to say we have an extremely wide third man today," he quipped.
