Partly as a result, the team for the first Test, which starts in Auckland next Friday, is still some way from taking final shape.
Not so New Zealand's, which includes five of the players from the scratch side defeated so thoroughly by England in Palmerston North.
Up to a point that match might have been defensive. Sides brought together artificially to play a touring side, all of the players to some extent vying against one another for places in the Test team, do not generally form a cohesive unit and this one certainly did not.
Of the 12 chosen for Auckland, however, all but Danny Morrison and Blair Pocock played in the two Tests in Pakistan at the end of November. To have won a Test in Lahore, against a team lacking only Wasim Akram and Aamir Sohail, suggests that there was no lack of team spirit then.
Under their new coach, the no-nonsense Australian Steve Rixon who says without blinking: ``I've got a hardness about me, which doesn't accept losing'' - New Zealand should not be as weak under pressure as they sometimes have been in their past.
The batting of Steve Fleming and Chris Cairns, probably the two best players, and the bowling of Simon Doull and two other sometime county cricketers, Justin Vaughan and Dipak Patel, were the chief individual contributions in Lahore.
Doull, who was injured before he could take any serious part in New Zealand's 1994 tour of England, is the player England know least about.
If New Zealand have done their visitors one or two favours so far - easy travel and the right strength of opposition, for example they have had the foresight not to play Doull in the Northern Districts side in the current match.
Instead this lively out- swing bowler will spend the first two days as 12th man, watching his opponents from the safety of the dressing-room, then he will go to Auckland for the two-day game of 115 overs a side, which Rixon has organised especially to give his side some badly needed practice at batting and bowling for long periods.
Like Graham Thorpe, still upset by the death in a car accident of his close friend at Surrey, wicketkeeper Graham Kersey, Doull is carrying sadness with him at present, following the death of his mother from cancer. He should, however, be a more effective bowler still now that he has both Cairns and Danny Morrison for support.
Morrison stood out in Palmerston North as the fast bowler of quality he is, but Adam Parore was out cheaply in both innings, and Blair Pocock, the only other man who did not play in Pakistan, looked a wooden player of spin, staunchly as he batted for 48 overs on Wednesday before becoming one of Phil Tufnell's five victims.
Pocock followed Doull home early from the 1994 tour of England, also with a shoulder injury. This is his third chance as an inter- national cricketer at the age of 25 and he will have seen all England's Test bowlers by the end of this match in Hamilton.
Whatever transpires here and in Auckland, England have been assured that the gimmicks which have been used for cricket at Wellington this season by a specially hired 'entertainment' agency, including hired streakers and personalised loudspeaker music when a wicket falls (Parore, for example, gets You're So Vain) will not be in use for the second Test in Wellington. The one-day internationals will be different, but sufficient unto the day . .
Robin Marlar, Sussex vice-president and former captain, has confirmed he is to stand for a place on the county's committee. Marlar, 65, said: ``I'm still pretty disturbed about what is going on at the club.''
A former cricket correspondent of the Sunday Times, he has been a critic of Alan Caffyn, the chairman, during the exodus of four first-team players.
The funeral of Graham Kersey, the former Surrey wicketkeeper who died earlier this month following a car accident, will be held at Eltham Crematorium in London at noon on Jan 31.