Mark Richardson: Making a pitch for the leader board

Trent Boult of New Zealand is congratulated by teammates. Photo / Getty Images

That's the way it should be done and I feel like a hypocrite for saying so.

There was a time when I would have said that conditions like we had at the Basin were detrimental to the development of New Zealand Cricket.

I believed that conditions that brought our fast-mediums and along-the-wicket bowlers into the game would do nothing for developing cricketers to take our game forward.

Maybe I'm still right, time will tell, but right now I'm sold on the importance of winning and our best chance of doing that is in our own back yard in conditions like we saw over the past few days.

New Zealand cricket needs to regain its strength at home and the best way to do that is to maintain a home town advantage - and home town advantage looks like what we saw in Wellington.

That was not a bad wicket but, yes, it offered the bowlers assistance. It was in no way unplayable, it was just a case of playing better on it than the tourists. This is something our cricketers can do.

Our bowlers know what length to bowl and life in the surface most definitely suits them.

Our batsmen have an understanding of the requirements of batting in bowling conditions.

Players from areas where the norm is flat pitches that offer turn struggle to adapt fast enough when touring here and being able to tip them up quickly in our conditions is an advantage we have to take.

Things could have been different in Wellington had we been playing Australia or South Africa with their expert bowling - but we don't beat them in flat conditions, so why not take our chances in a bit of a lottery? However, when it's Sri Lanka, or Pakistan, or the West Indies, I'd say the odds are in our favour when there's life in the pitch. These are the teams we must send packing if we are to climb up the rankings and stay there. I'm not talking about minefields here either, because the Basin Reserve pitch was far from that; I'm just talking about life. That pitch was fair, after all our lot batted first and got 440.

We need to breathe life into our test cricket and a few wins in front of our own people will help no end with that.

Now let's show some courage and put the Indians on a Basin-like pitch.