In Visitors, I invite one person each month to share perspectives on a sport, a sporting event, sporting aspects or any thing in between. This month, Sportsfreak joins us to speak on John Bracewell’s ways and New Zealand cricket. I know, more cricket, but what can you do? With the Champions Trophy going on, Ashes coming up and then the world cup, cricket is bound to appear more on this blog over the next few months. If you would like to contribute for a future edition of Visitors, do not hesitate to e-mail me.

Greetings Sportsfreaks; it’s been a long time between drinks as they say, but I’m glad to be able to report from the battle front again; this time from India.

This season will truly be one of The Great Campaigns. My good friend Martin Snedden has organised a lot of great challenges for us over the next few months. First, there’s the Champions Trophy, followed by ODI series against Sri Lanka, Australia and England; ending up in a World Cup which is in my favourite touring place; the West Indies.

He certainly is still a very loyal commander-in-chief, although I do wonder if he gets a little over-worked at time. He told me he can easily organise a coaching job at home in England for me next year. The guy obviously forgot I’ve already got a job!

We have had our fair share of bad luck so far, but let me tell you this will not weaken our resolve one little bit. Poor Shane Bond is pretty sure that he’s probably injured, which has come as a blow that we need to overcome. At least we’re used to it so we can certainly take a lot of positives out of this. He’s working very hard with Gilbert Enoka the whole time to get through this problem, and I’m sure he’ll be playing again before the World Cup. Mark my words.

And the fact that we still beat South Africa earlier in the week shows that it was still the correct decision to take him on tour with us anyway. I’m pretty sure that just having him with us puts a lot of fear into opposing teams.

The loss of Scott Styris is nowhere near as much of a set-back. We knew he was injured before we got here, so we’ve been able to plan accordingly. That’s what being a top manager is all about. Some of my former friends like Ian Smith have suggested that we shouldn’t have taken him with us, but that really shows how little he knows about how we operate.

Scott Styris has been a very important member of this team for a long time now, and takes a full part in helping me out in practices, and devising his famous trash-talking strategies that other team members can use if they like. I wanted him here, and was not going to change my mind. And Gilbert told me that to leave him out of the squad would make his injury even worse. Anyway, he needs to work on his tan at the start of such a long campaign.

So as you can see we’ve started the campaign just where we left the last one; in really good spirits and with the same band of positive and happy players. Stick with us fans, and I’ll keep giving you insights into our brilliant tactical thinking as we look to overcome all the enemy forces.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Cricket. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.