Who is there left to insult? the unbelievable politics of New Zealand Cricket

Hello and welcome back to my blog

The New Zealand general sporting public would have been quite happy to enjoy the recent victory in Sri Lanka as it always has - that one amazing result that keeps their faith alive for another season ala Hobart 2011 or Seddon Park 2008.  By 'general' sporting public I mean the vast majority of us that don't really care for the particular sport in question in a passionate way, the kind of mass of human beings that populate sport without needing or wanting to know too much about it.  You know who you are.  You should also know that, by your consistent paying of Sky Sports fees and match tickets, it is you that keeps these sports alive and the administrators and their machinations that come along with it.  As I said, the general sporting public would have been quite happy to enjoy the recent result but those administrators and their machinations just had to undermine the whole thing by allowing the current fiasco regarding the team captaincy.

We are to believe the 'facts' stand roughly as follows: that prior to the second test match in Sri Lanka Mark Hesson asked Ross Taylor to resign the leadership, or at the very least offered him the option.  This headline necessitated every sports journalist across the land to trip over their own shoe laces in the hurry to divulge all manner of rumour, feeling and inkling about the context in which this request by the coach was made.  This includes questions over whether senior players (how many is that then?) had no respect for Taylor, Hesson wants Taylor out and McCullum in, and the contrast in style between the aloof Islander and the aggressive Southern Man (at least the press is passed stereotypes...).
Just before I look at the real problem, there are a number of missteps to highlight about this cavalcade of hearsay and conjecture (sorry Mr Hutz but those aren't 'kinds of evidence').  Now first I want to know just when the senior (again I question the use of the word 'senior') players abandoned Mr. Taylor and if it was some time ago, you lot sure as hell picked a useful time to bring it up - 'widely viewed that he has lost the respect of senior players' widely: only in the last 48 hours in which you keep repeating this in your articles.
Now one point the press couldn't wait to ram home was that Hesson, formerly of Otago is and always was going to be a McCullum man.  This is not an excuse though!  If anything the quiet but incessant suggestions by Hesson that Taylor had to go should have been called out earlier as selfish, damaging and dictatorial: I'm the new coach and we're doing it my way.  The idea that the coach & captain relationship needs to be one of close friendship is as wrong as it is over invested in by the press - Fleming and Bracewell were said to be of a friendship and remember how wonderfully that turned out?
OK to play devils advocate for myself here, perhaps Hesson believed he had to make sure his tenure as coach was to be played out on his own terms and that that meant a captain he could work with - given the experiences of his predecessors that might be a wise strategy for self-preservation but also for team stability and growth.  I may grant you that excuse for Hesson's behaviour but it's barely the ghost of a point when it comes to the question of Taylor or McCullum.  Something I have found quite baffling so far in this drama is the reaction to the statement 'Brendon would bring a more aggressive approach to the role' - a statement whose meaning goes beyond its words to include notions of prior-success as a captain as well as 'aggression' being the desirable or even missing trait at the moment.
The reaction to this loose babble about McCullum's captaincy credentials has been a sea of nodding heads essentially, which looks past the following facts that a) his main captaincy took place with the Kolkata Knight Riders to their detriment as you may/should remember, b) aggressive captaincy is better executed by quiet orders that unleash fast bowlers, than emotional displays in public that even the press used to accuse McCullum of being prone to (when did they forget about that?), and c) Ross Taylor is anything but passive (something inferred by touting McCullum as the opposite) and given time could be capable of building a captaincy style built on both.

However, media melee aside, by far the most bizarre aspect of the whole thing is the contempt with which New Zealand Cricket has treated the general sporting public.  We are used to a clean out of management, coach and captaincy when a team loses but how NZC had the gall to create such an atmosphere after one of our more memorable and professional performances is beyond even your humble your correspondent.  Who, even in New Zealand Rugby would be stupid enough suggest a key player should be sacked after a victory let alone the key player being the captain, least of all that that captain should also be the hero of said victory.  People aren't going to stand for this, the relationship between cricket in this country and the people who enjoy it is tenuous enough without this kind of absurdity.  What is going on?  Either New Zealand Cricket just has no real respect for the populous that keeps its money and therefore lifeline flowing or, more likely, they lost control of the situation which speaks to something far more rotten in the structure than mere disdain.  If the latter is true then I suspect it goes all the way back to the haphazard way in which John Buchanan was allowed to establish himself and call the shots.
Don't misconstrue my point at all, I am not suggesting that just because public opinion lies with Taylor that the situation is amiss - one should never take shelter in the false security of consensus - but merely that for the sport's governing body in this country to appear so bereft of logic and understanding as to how it survives in the balance between sports and the public is an indictment of its operation and management.  The danger here is that the general sporting public is the last group a sport can get away with insulting in this way.

But enough of this, look forward to my profiling of Ricky Ponting and then my last post for the year which will feature a very interesting take on the current state of cricket, one I have been working on for a few weeks

Well that's it from here and I hope you join me again
It's good bye for now