Rotation

After sitting through the winter watching the All Blacks play around with their selections, now it's the turn of the Blackcaps (a.k.a. the NZ cricket team) to do the same as they enter their long build-up for the Cricket World Cup.

Now, when you're the best team in the world you can afford to fk around with who plays where. When you're a middle of the road team, you cannot. Seeing Fleming (and Bond) "having a rest" (from what? NZ plays the least amount of cricket amongst the major playing nations) from the first two ODI's against Sri Lanka gets up my jaxi big time.

Selfishly, of course, as it makes it more difficult to assess how the teams will match up. But my gut feeling is the NZ batting line-up looks a tad shaky (perhaps the understatement of the year) and for this reason Sri Lanka deserves to be favourites for the opening game tomorrow.

It's also a pity as both these teams at full strength had the potential to offer an entertaining and competitive series - and now we have to possibly wait until the third game to see this happen. So the visitors to strike first blood tomorrow - unless our bowlers can overcome our batting frailties.

P.S. After watching Mark Gillespie in the 20/20, why the hell has he not been selected to play for NZ before yesterday???