Victory!

Monday mornings are much easier to deal with when you have a victory under your belt. And what a victory! What a shot in the arm! A sensational match to remind us all that the one-day game is not yet a dinosaur that Twenty20 will make extinct.

Intelligence won us the match. It was the cleverness of Cairns' slower ball and Vettori's control which reduced the Australian batting and the impish innovation of Marshall and McCullum with bat in hand that saw us through to 247. Prior to the intervention of the imps, Astle and Sinclair laid down some rock-solid foundations. Bill Lawry busily wrote us off at this point, lamenting the lack of aggression. I see hope for the future in the fact that Australians no longer know what it means to build an innings. What will they do when Gilchrist finally hangs up his super-charger? Peter Roebuck saw more than mere imps running around in the New Zealand team, in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald he remarked how the side seems so much the stronger by virtue of the inclusions of a bearded gentleman who gave his name as Chris Cairns and a little chap apparently taken straight from the set of The Lord Of The Rings. Hamish Marshall might well have just won himself a new nickname.