Went down to Hamilton to watch yesterday, was really looking forward to seeing the Under 19s but tbh it was pretty disappointing. I wasn't at all impressed by their batting, except for Kane Williamson who I thought looked a class above the rest, but **** running cost me the chance to see him and Corey Anderson batting for a while. From their bowlers, I liked the look of Trent Boult - he looked pretty sharp, got in close to the stumps and it looked like he was swinging it a bit too. Its a bit hard to judge spinners in 20/20, especially when the game's already lost, but I thought the Under 19 spinners looked pretty decent too.
From the other game, I thought we played like complete ****. Our batting in particular was awful, though I don't know what was with our team selection - guys like How, Hopkins, Marshall (though he actually did ok) and O'Brien just aren't suited to 20/20, or in O'Brien's case just aren't suited to international cricket at all. Oh well, charity game I guess. Southee looked quite quick and swung it too (gave away a few too many wides though), was a bit unlucky with Ashraful scooping him over fine leg 3 or 4 times, Fleming should have put a man back there. O'Brien was crap as expected, Patel bowled way too flat - we needed to take wickets, we were never going to strangle them out of the game - while Mason was pretty good.
Overall, I thought the standard of cricket was piss poor all day. I'm not sure what it looked like on tv, but live the pitch looked pretty dodgy in terms of the bounce - quite a few stayed really low, especially off the slower bowlers, so maybe that had something to do with it. Dion Nash looked good though, just wish he hadn't been ridiculously injury prone like every other decent bowler we've produced.
I don't want to read too much into it, since it was only a 20/20 with half our players not in contention for the ODI side, but we should still be winning these games IMO.
The last wicket at Eden Park was excellent and produced nearly 700 runs.
