Loony BoB said:
Ah, fair enough then. I still think Harmison was the biggest difference between the two sides in England, though. If we had a player doing as well as he was, well, yeah. If if if if if if.
I don't really buy this.
For one thing, it fails to explain why New Zealand never achieved this sort of dominance over a side when they had Richard Hadlee leading the attack.
For another, it ignores my pet theory of Test series, which is that they are generally lost by the side with the worse change bowlers.
Mediocrity in your change bowling allows batsmen to wait out the good bowlers and then make hay on the rubbish. The good bowlers are partly blunted because there is no incentive to try and score off them, and the poor bowler leach runs all over the place, allowing the batsmen to get really well set, thus making the task of the good bowlers more difficult still.
England's backup bowlers, Hoggard and Saggers for the most part, performed better than did NZ's nominal strike force of Tuffey and Martin.
Cairns's performance at Trent Bridge was actually better than any of Harmison's match performances in the series, and Franklin's performance there was at least the equal of any of Flintoff's (and he was basically England's second-best bowler) - yet NZ lost. So it can't have just been Harmison. But at Trent Bridge, Harmison and Flintoff had Giles as useful backup and Hoggard and Saggers to fill in the gaps, whereas after Cairns and Franklin, NZ had Styris and an injured Oram.
I'd agree that Harmison was a cut above the rest of the bowlers in the series, but the reason that NZ lost was that their weak links were very weak and England's only really weak link was Butcher - and even he came up with a pretty useful 59 in the last innings.
The real difference between the sides was that England had eleven players who all contributed strongly, while New Zealand were carrying at least three passengers in every match.
Cheers,
Mike