Hello Mr Kiwi! Good to see you here. You may notice that one of your posts has been copied on to here, with many approving comments and many people wondering how we could lure you onto these boards! Glad to see you are here. I too am glad these boards are open all hours, as I've been keeping some pretty anti-socail hours of late. This is bcause I quit my job three days into the first WI vs Eng Test match. Friends have suggested politely that this is, perhaps, due to the cricket...of course I reject such suggestions - if I was going to quit a job in order to watch more cricket I'd quit in the summer, when Test matches start at 11 British time, not 2.30 or 3.30. Even when I was in the job I saw most of the action in the WI.

Anyway, Mr Kiwi, I have a question for you. According to the BBC website, the following six players all toured England in 2000, as part of a NZ A team: Mark Richardson, Scott Styris, Michael Papps, Daryl Tuffey, Jacob Oram and Chris Martin. These are six very good, important players - how do you do it? We've been having a big discussion on here about the relative merits of A tours, county cricket, ODIs, the Academy etc., but I can't think of any England A-tour that has ever produced such a number of good Test players. What is the secret?

Also, (I raised this point a couple of months ago on the Beeb's boards) both NZ and SA have an abundance of all-rounders. England have in the past (and regrettably, in the last few ODIs) tried to imitate this policy, but it has resulted in playing lots of pretty useless bits-and-pieces players. Why is this? A South African friend told me that this was because budding cricekters in SA were taught to bat and bowl, and even if they showed exceptional proficiency at one discipline, they were not allowed to drop the other one. He said this was the reason SA were the best all-round cricket team in the world - as he put it, and as others have suggested, in the 1999 World Cup they played Total Cricket, with nearly every member of the team proficient in all three disciplines.

Before he told me this, I'd have thought it ridiculous that a promising young bowler should be made to work on his batting instead of concentrating on perfecting his bowling and getting it up to Test level. I'd have called it an indictment of the ridiculous bits-and-pieces tendency sweeping through cricket. But if my South African friend is right, it's responsible for turning out players like Kallis, Pollock, Klusenor, Hall etc. Is the SA policy right? Or is it just a fluke that they have so many great all-rounders? And what is the policy in NZ? In your post called the xenophobes guide to NZ cricket, you said of Styris "Originally a bowler who could bat a bit (I’m getting sick of writing that sort of thing)". So, can you shed any light on why there are so many "bowlers who can bat a bit" in the NZ team? Is it a fluke, or is it a conscious decision by coaches, the academy, etc.? Will be interesting to see what you have to say.