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They're at it again.

The British sporting press, that paragon of rationality and reason, has opened up with all barrels blazing at their hapless cricket team.

The general conclusion is that this England side, having achieved the impossible and lost to the world's softest touch in cricket, New Zealand, should be taken out at dawn and shot.

In a less civilised society that might be a real prospect.

The headlines have been indescribable, little short of libellous and filled with the kind of bilious scorn that only British commentators seem capable of; a scorn reserved for British sportsmen who take the ``Great'' out of Great Britain once too often.

The England team, it has been pronounced, is the worst ever. This is strong stuff considering the fact that England has produced some real stinkers over the last few decades. But when your team has just been beaten by what you have convinced yourself is the dunce of the entire cricket world, it is perhaps understandable that feelings might be running rather high.

But this time all pretence at objectivity has been abandoned and while this particular media frenzy might be edifying about the state of the English psyche, it has little to do with the realities of this cricket series.

The New Zealand team is a modest one; no doubt about that. It only has a handful of players of genuine international class. It is capable of the mood swings of a schizophrenic. For just this once, however, the team stuck to its medication right through the tour and the results have been quite stunning.

Nobody can take the sweet taste of victory from this team, not even the British media. The truth is the New Zealanders hardly dropped a single session right through each of the tests, a remarkable feat of consistency given their traditional topsy-turvy track record.

What has been most satisfying, however, is that it has been done in considerable style.

The Black Caps were hailed as the most charisma-free team ever to slither under English cricket's door. Yet this series has delivered up more drama than English test match watchers have been treated to for years.

Every one of the four tests has been well worth the price of admission. Each one has wavered in the balance. The perpetual prospect of rain has not diminished the drama. If anything it has intensified it. More than once the elements delivered England from ignominy.

It has been New Zealanders who have served up the high moments. And none more so than Chris Cairns, a late maturer if ever there was one, who in one exhibition reminiscent of the glory days of his father, put the English bowlers to the sword in the final test with a series of imperious sixes at The Oval.

Several of these, by coincidence, could be seen ricocheting dangerously close to the press boxes filled with the despairing faces of British media experts who had foretold the opposite of what was happening.

But it isn't just the British media that has been excessively hard on the Black Caps. We in New Zealand have hardly been unwavering in our support.

This team deserves better than that. They have triumphed in spite of derision and ridicule. And the last laugh is unquestionably theirs.