Oh that was painful to watch. England presented that match to us carefully gift wrapped with a nice little ribbon around it, and we threw it away.
The full list of things that went wrong:
Fielding: Pathetic again. Three dropped chances, none of them difficult. Taylor's drop off Flintoff ultimately only cost 5 or 10 runs, and Fulton's the same again, but in the end those 10 or 20 runs were rather significant. And the drop off Collingwood was one of the defining moments of the match.
Besides the catching, the outfielding was sloppy, the throwing poor, and Styris made himself look like a complete moron by missing the simplest of run outs. I don't know whether the new players in the side are naturally bad fielders, or whether Bracewell has gotten sloppy on his fielding drills or what, but something has gone dramatically wrong since a year or two ago.
Vincent: Did well for the most part, but got out playing a dreadful shot when the occasion called for sensible accumulation for the next 10 overs.
Fulton: Dreadful. Came in and instead of rotating the strike, usually managed to only pick up a solitary single off the last ball of the over he faced. His plodding nature is somewhat masked when there's an aggressive batsman like Vincent at the other end, but his poor batting here allowed England to start building up pressure which would ultimately cost the match. On top of it all, he played a terrible shot to get out, when he needed to make good on his poor start. Play him somewhere else or drop him, Taylor should be the no.3
The Taylor run-out: absolutely disastrous, just when Taylor was starting to pick up the 2's nicely. The end result was not only did New Zealand have to consolidate at a crucial time, but Fleming seemed to lose all confidence in himself as a result of it. This ultimately lead to...
The end of Fleming's innings: When Taylor was dismissed Fleming had scored 85 off 115 balls. He proceeded to score just 21 from his next 34 balls faced. Nice to see him finally score some runs, but even when the scoring rate was only asking for 7.5 an over he fell to peices.
So there we have it. There are some positive things to come out of this tour:
Taylor: looks very promising. His first trip overseas, and in a pretty intimidating atmosphere and he came out of it pretty well to be New Zealand's top run scorer for the tournament.
Vincent: Done well so far, and seems to have eliminated that urge of his to smash everything for six, but needs to sustain his good form this time round.
Franklin: Don't look at me like that, Franklin was New Zealand's second highest wicket taker at a pretty solid average. It could have been even better if Strauss had been given out to a pretty adjacent lbw shout (although maybe that's repayment for the lbw he got earlier in the competition). And he looks to be a nice complement to the other hitters at the death. Not sure how he'll go at the west indies, but for once his bowling in one dayers doesn't look like complete rubbish, and he needs to be, with Mills looking likely to be out for 6 months. He's also normally a pretty solid fielder, so hopefully that'll be the last we'll see of those dropped chances.
Oram: Superb batting, which won us two games and nearly snatched a 3rd. It's not to good that his bowling rapidly seems to be degenerating, but his future is as a batsman anyway.
Bond: Seems fit enough, and once he finally was forced to string a couple of games together, came up with what should have been a match winning bowling effort. While it's always more exciting to watch him bowling up in the high 140's and low 150's, I think he actually looks a better bowler when he settles into a steady pace in the low 140's, which is still quick enough to allow him to trouble good batsmen, but allows him greater control and swing.
