Out In The Middle With Scott

End of 2010

It’s fair to say that I didn’t have the best finish to 2010.

It was all looking pretty good up until last week.

Then both the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights and the BLACKCAPS slipped up in their respective Twenty20 games.

For the Knights it felt like we fell off a cliff a little bit.

We went through the first half of the competition really well and then couldn’t get a win in the second half.

In Twenty20 that can happen because you have to be fearless in your play but every time you lose that really starts making dents in your confidence and you start doubting whether you should be so aggressive.

I could sense a little bit of that creeping into the guys but I’m sure the Knights will be better next year for it.

What happened for the BLACKCAPS in the last games against Pakistan was very disappointing.

We’d already won the series and it was an opportunity for us to go out and put the boot into the Pakistan side early in the tour.

If the Pakistanis had kept losing it would have made the job hard for the Test side and their One Day players much harder.

Winning is a habit in whatever form of the game you play.

By giving them a victory and a good victory at that, we’ve given them a bit of confidence going into the rest of the tour.

But being a cricketer these days doesn’t give you much time to sit around and smell the roses or cry about the losses.

We have to move on and move on quickly.

Either way you look at it there’s another match to play either the next day, the next week or pretty soon afterwards.

That’s the major difference between a cricketer or say a rower or an athlete who is peaking for one particular event.

We have to go for 10 months of the year.

You try to earn from your mistakes and put those learnings into place as quickly as you can for the next game.

It enables you to get back on the horse quickly.

I’m not in the Test team to play Pakistan so my focus goes now to the domestic one day series for the Northern Knights and we get started on Sunday against Auckland.

The Knights go into the competition with a healthy record behind us and it’s fair to say we’re the favourites for this year as well.

It’s like any other format of the game – we need to win early and get on a roll.

I think the team that can adapt the quickest from Twenty20 back into one day cricket will do very well.

And I think the signs are good for the BLACKCAPS in the Test series as well.

Most of the players did some really good work up in Whangarei.

I followed the scorecard of the New Zealand 11 – which was almost a Test side – they had the better half of the match up there.

You’d like to think they’ll take that confidence into the first game which start Friday.

The guys played really well in the first two Tests in India and I think they can look back on that with confidence.

The skill is there, the talent is there and they just need to build on that.

It’s good that they have played as many test matches as they have in a reasonably short period of time because it will allow them to click back into gear reasonably quickly.

We don’t play as much Test cricket as some of the other nations but I’m sure the guys are looking forward to hopefully chalking up another Test match victory.

After the tests the BLACKCAPS face off with the Pakistanis in a one day series which will be our last chance to fine tune for the World Cup.

At this stage no one knows who will be in the squad to face Pakistan.

The World Cup 15 is named on January 19 so I assume if you make that squad you’ll be involved in the series against Pakistan.

That makes these next games for ND even more important.

If you can do well you’re obviously getting your name in front of the selectors.

So there’s a little bit of water to flow under the bridge before I start worrying about the one day series against Pakistan.

There’s also the IPL draft which is due to be held in Bangalore on January 8 and 9.

The IPL cut back the list of players available for auction just before the end of 2010 to 350 but that still leaves plenty of action to be had as the teams look to build their sides for this year’s competition.

It’s going to be an interesting few weeks that’s for sure.
 

Cheers, ScottY