Day 5, Second Test, England vs New Zealand

England 1st innings - 337
NZ 1st innings - 174
England 2nd innings - 287/5
NZ 2nd innings - 158/6

The game is nicely poised with us on six wickets down for bugger all runs, facing either defeat or salvation by poor weather. If it is the latter then England only have themselves to blame as they didn't make us follow on and then set a world record highest score for us to try and chase. Ridiculous. There is no chance of us making 250 let alone 450.

Cook's innings was impressive. He seems finally to have adjusted his game to play us and never looked in trouble. Trott was obdurate as usual and just plain dull to watch. His 76 coming off 210 balls in an innings where they were supposed to be setting us a target. Oh well, lucky them to have the luxury of loafing round.

Our second innings was just as bad as the first. Rutherford looked ok and then got bored and tried to smash every single one of an over and a half of bowling before he buggered up against Swann. He needs to learn some patience that young man. Hopefully it'll come with time. Talent is there for sure, but you have to pace yourself and play within your means. Taylor looked good but eventually succumbed to Swann too. The rest were dire.

Update:

It's all over. Weather didn't save us.

NZ second innings 220 - lost to England by 247 runs.

We scored another 62 runs mostly to Southee and Bracewell who had a little tonk to show the batsmen that it was possible to play shots.

So of five tests, we played 3 and a half of them pretty well against the poms. However, we've ended up losing 2-0. Just not good enough really. The bowlers must consider themselves pretty hard done by. All the good work they put in over the last couple of months has come to nothing.

Our batting has been atrocious in England. Almost no-one has played with any patience. The moment they fail to score for an over or two they look to smash the ball out of the park.

Of note, the same day we were getting killed the one day team played a Nottinghamshire XI and scored 350 with Dan the man scoring 150 no. I'm expecting that the one dayers will be a lot tighter than the tests but that should be of no consequence. The real cricket has been lost..