New Zealand team bosses to meet in England next week

Preparations for New Zealand's tour of India move up a level next week when team manager Lindsay Crocker and acting coach Ashley Ross travel to England to meet with new coach John Bracewell and captain Stephen Fleming.

Bracewell is not accompanying the New Zealand team to India due to his coaching commitments with Gloucestershire and Ross, New Zealand Cricket's player development manager, is filling the role on a stand-in basis.

Crocker, who started his duties as team manager this week, said the trip offered the only chance for the New Zealand-based group to meet with Bracewell and Fleming before the tour which starts in mid-September.

Fleming will return to New Zealand from Yorkshire before the tour, however, Bracewell will not arrive to take up his new position until late-November. "We have a whole new management structure and it is important to sit down and talk about how we intend to do things," Crocker said.

"That way we can start as we mean to continue. Ash and Braces hardly know each other so it is important they meet, and I need to reacquaint myself with Braces as well as it is several years since we worked together."

Crocker said Ross would also be catching up with other members of the New Zealand side who are in England. Crocker said he was looking forward to India as it was somewhere he had always wanted to go and it had been on his list of places for a holiday before he was appointed team manager.

Meanwhile, Indian captain Sourav Ganguly has reminded the New Zealanders, as if they needed to be reminded, that they will face a tough series as India look to regain some ground lost during their tour of New Zealand last summer. He said India at home would be tough opponents and reinforced his comments by pointing out their World Cup success over New Zealand.

Ganguly did say that doctored tracks to suit India's spinners, Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh were not on the menu. India had been developing more pace-friendly wickets in recent years and he expected that trend to continue.