From a selectors point of view, whats the talent pool like?
We talk about succession planning these days. Not too may teams want to be in a position where they lose too many players at once. Selectors sometimes haven’t been prepared to unearth new blood, and we saw that with the Australian side in the mid-1980s when we were beating them. I think the situation right now in New Zealand has to do with the turmoil with world cricket, with the ICL coming in. I think what is damaging for us is that we have only six teams to select from. We’ve got South Africans playing in domestic cricket, and we have ICL players in there as well. Canterbury, in fact, have five ICL players, and none of them are eligible to play for New Zealand. It’s different in county cricket where they have 17 or 18 teams to choose from. You anticipate at the end of the day that there will be some sort of equilibrium. The gold rush is on, and in any gold rush there will be short-term problems. Would you say Shane Bond was the biggest casualty? Well, definitely it was unfortunate. O
