New Zealand's batting was, frankly, deplorable. None of them looked like they even got a start, let alone convert it. They were tentative, rigid and far from threatening. While the Indians, or at least Nehra, bowled well in this match, the batting was unusually weak- we'd expect a team with such a long batting lineup to do better than this. When they're all out for 155 in the 47th over, with three wickets going to Yuvraj (bad umpiring notwithstanding), you know there's something wrong out there. The tail did well again, but that wasn't enough to cover for these top order failures.
Their bowling was reasonably good, although they had six proper bowling options unlike India. Karthik was a victim of an umpiring error, but looked scratchy out there. Dravid fared a lot better, even if the figures don't show it- he spent enough time to assemble a partnership with the 'stylish' Tendulkar. Raina did well low down, batted smartly and played the spinners/seam-ups very well, and did a lot better than in the T20 World Cup and around. Maybe those extra overs in hand and fewer runs to chase helped here. Dhoni wasn't spectacular, but got the job done. The real hero, for India, was Ashish Nehra, who bowled tight and made the Kiwis sweat.
I have to add- this hyperactive product placement is completely and totally needless. Have you noticed how much the commentators went ga-ga over Yamaha Fazer and Compaq? They went on to describe the wonderful features of the Fazer after mentioning it as the Stylish Player award and spoke like a marketing campaign. This makes it worse than the IPL- at least they stuck with "DLF Maximum" and "Citi Moment of Success"!
