New Zealand's captaincy controversy
It's hard to know what's more unfortunate: the timing of the great captaincy controversy, or the hypocrisy of the debate over the potential switch of skippers from Ross Taylor to Brendon McCullum
ESPNcricinfo staff
25-Feb-2013
It's hard to know what's more unfortunate: the timing of the great captaincy controversy, or the hypocrisy of the debate over the potential switch of skippers from Ross Taylor to Brendon McCullum, writes Dylan Cleaver in New Zealand Herald.
Taylor is a good man and a very good player. He doesn't deserve this humiliation. McCullum is a good man and a very good player. He doesn't deserve the opprobrium and innuendo that's about to rain down on him if he is handed the captaincy at the expense of the former.
Also in the New Zealand Herald, Andrew Alderson writes: If you measure the health of a sport by the performance of the flagship team, and you grade the success of the flagship team by the high-performance mechanisms that service it, then by any measure NZC is failing abysmally. You need only to look at the comings and goings to realise this is a body that has been unable to set a course and follow it.
If you listen to notable critics, particularly Martin Crowe, the seeds of New Zealand's decline were planted in an emphasis on biomechanics. For others it was the creation of a centralised academy at Lincoln. Most acknowledge a poor domestic scene is a key problem. Put another way: the only thing everyone agrees is that it is broken. In the latest survey by the players' association, one figure stands out in flashing neon. A staggering 64 per cent of the country's professional and semi-professional players "are not aware of, and do not understand, how the NZC high-performance programme works".