Dylan Cleaver: There's no such thing as a holding pattern in India

You cannot legislate for genius. So New Zealand should not worry too much about the never-ending threat of Sachin Tendulkar.

He has flayed far better bowlers than Mills, Franklin and friends over the past 20 years and the chances are he's a got a few more in him.

The guy has made Shane Warne look like Bryce McGain in the past so the thought of facing Daniel Vettori, for all his class, is not going to have him shuffling to and from the dunny as he waits to bat.

The same could be said, with varying degrees, of his mates Dravid, Sehwag, Laxman and co.

Sometimes these guys are going to hurt you, so you learn to live with it because if you don't, life will become pretty unbearable.

No, more worrying for Andy Moles and New Zealand was not the rather large discrepancy in skill level that contributed to this win, it was all that other stuff that is so hard to measure.

India out-thought New Zealand; they out-hustled them. Find a word prefixed by 'out' and India did it to New Zealand.

Everything they did on the field had positive intent. When they batted, their first instinct was to score, their second to defend. This might give the impression to the bowler that they are always in with a chance of a wicket but, more importantly, the positive intent decreases the bowlers' margin of error and eventually forces them to think defensively.

Likewise, when they bowled, it was always with the intention of picking up wickets. In MS Dhoni, they have a skipper who is never prepared to let the game drift. An hour with few runs and no wickets is an hour wasted in his book.

India is a country of extremes: full of flavour and an assault on the senses. Their cricket is now being cast in a similar image to their land and the sporting world is all the richer for it.

So what can New Zealand take out of this test? Unfortunately, they've ended up learning more about India than they have about themselves.

They know that India don't do holding patterns; that the only time the switch flicks off is at stumps.

So Mssrs Vettori and Moles are left with an unenviable task. The one-day series demonstrated that the "fighting fire with fire" method is largely futile. This test showed you cannot hope to dry them up and frustrate them.

So they are going to have to get clever, get creative.

Problem being that they have just four days to come up with that plan.