Auckland sprinted away to an eight-wicket win over Central Districts before lunch on the fourth day of the State Championship match on the Eden Park Outer Oval - a performance which should produce a couple of interesting echoes amid the New Zealanders as they prepared for tomorrow's third Test against Australia at the WACA.

The first was that Auckland's comfortable win - after three days of uncomfortable or restricted batting from both sides - should be built round an almost faultless century by Matt Horne, the discarded New Zealand Test opening batsman.

Horne's 18th first-class century was carefully built over 272 minutes, and apart from two rather hairy strokes, did not offer the frustrated Central Districts bowlers a chance.

Horne, who had earned top marks from the selector Ross Dykes during the earlier New Zealand A tour of India, looked every inch a first-rate, technically correct opening batsman - assets which seem to have slipped out of Matthew Bell's gear-bag in Australia.

The second echo was more or less caused by Stephen Fleming‚ scathing criticism of his bowlers‚ ability to bowl the right line and length in the second Test at Hobart, and his subsequent plea that Dennis Lillee should be asked for starting-from-scratch coaching advice in Perth.

A very senior bowler, who shall be nameless, remarked during the first three days of the Auckland-Central Districts match that the indifferent form of the New Zealand seamers in the two Tests in Australia was merely a case of chickens come home to roost in New Zealand.

He was referring to the green Eden Park pitch which for at least the first two-and-half days gave the medium-fast seam and swing bowlers extraordinary help, and which left the batsmen resigned to being inevitably undone by some mischief from the pitch.

This, said the senior bowler, was the precise fault with the production of the recent crop of New Zealand team medium-fast bowlers. On pitches even half as helpful as this mettlesome Eden Park pitch, New Zealand bowlers were given extraordinary help in the matter of whipping the ball into the pads for lbw, or nicking the outside edge for the fatal catch.

The early Auckland and Central seamers had only to land one or two balls an over on the right line and length and they had a fair chance of taking a wicket.

As the senior bowler pointed out, in Australia two balls on target would have left four balls for the home batsmen to murder.

Five or six balls was the required rate of accuracy at Test level, especially on pitches in Australia which generally favoured Australian batsmen gifted both in the arts of driving and cross-batted strokes.

Last evening and this morning Horne and his undefeated partner Aaron Barnes batted with more than a hint of Australian efficiency.

In contrast, the Central Districts bowlers, who had looked like demons in the first third of the match, were as nasty as new-born lambs as the Aucklanders marched away to the win with their record-breaking and unbroken stand of 151.

Central Districts were hampered slightly by the loss through injury of Ewen Thompson, with his broken forearm, which left them only three seamers and Campbell Furlong's genial off-spin.

Faced by poised and patient batsmen, the Central Districts bowlers were reduced to hopeful trundlers, for the pitch had lost almost all its earlier spite.

Horne nearly gave a catching chance when he was 97, and once almost had a ball from Furlong trickle into his stumps.

Otherwise, he and Barnes gave the Central Districts bowlers not the slightest bit of charity, and in a game that had already had 12 lbw decisions (and sufficient roared lbw appeals to satisfy a Cossack choir), there was never even one lbw appeal from the hamstrung Central bowlers this morning.

There may be problems with with the quality of New Zealand Test bowlers and batsmen on the evidence available from Australia. The solution will not be found there, even from Lillee the grand master of fast bowling. If there are answers to the puzzles they are found in the quality, or lack of it, of the pitches on which New Zealanders play their cricket.

© CricInfo