Relief was the feeling at end of series victory over England

Chris Cairns

February 28, 2002

When you win there can often be different kinds of emotion.

When we beat Australia in the first VB Series game in Melbourne in the beginning of this period of 15 successive one-day matches there was pure euphoria. Beating South Africa in Brisbane was disbelief and huge joy at a surprising victory.

When we won the game on Tuesday night the feeling was relief.

Sure there was happiness at what we had achieved but we all knew that the season would be judged on what happened in Dunedin.

Wrongly or rightly this happens in sport often.

Just ask the All Blacks in last year's Tri-Nations.

If they had won that game in Sydney and not lost it in the last second, would there have been as big a public examination resulting in pressure for the coach to stand down?

If we had lost on Tuesday night what would have been the headlines?

As it is we won the series and have achieved a satisfactory outcome. But are there things that we need to address even though we have won?

Yes there are.

Too often we win games through an individual performance. While this may sound strange, to be a complete side capable of winning next year's World Cup we need to put more performances together as a unit, to get everyone chipping in with their efforts.

Then we will still have brilliant individual efforts to win games but hopefully in between these times we can lift our winning percentages with team performances.

Before the game in Dunedin, the batters focused their efforts into batting, real batting. Not the traditional hitting over the top stuff normally reserved for the one-day game. No balls were hit in the air at net practice and batsmanship was the goal.

This was personified in the match by Craig McMillan. He got in and then played a great supporting role to Nathan Astle.

And what an innings from Nathan!

He loves playing in Dunedin and after getting a few dodgy decisions in two of the one-dayers, the English felt the full brunt of his talent.

Nath is a bloke who doesn't say too much and prefers to let his batting do the talking. I have played a lot of cricket with him and the innings the other night was just awesome and right up there with his best.

The game itself revealed to the English that they have areas to work on.

One of them is off-the-field where last week Andy Caddick stated that this English team was better man for man than us and that they would win the series.

Now, he may have been trying to get some confidence back in his side by saying these things but to do it publicly can often backfire on you.

Maybe he should just focus on getting in the England team first.

Now to the Test series and to the whites! I am really looking forward to this series as I think we are playing very good Test cricket.

It will be important for the guys to get back into Test mode but having a week or so off, and a game before the Test, will definitely help.

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Chris Cairns

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England tour of New Zealand

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