Old habits die hard. Nasser Hussain's new-model England are fighters, thinkers, a team who make the best of what they have ... but they are still England, which means they are prone to collapse. And they have yet to master the art of winning from in front. In a New Zealand autumn, just like in the English spring against Pakistan, they contrived to slide from dominance to parity in the space of a couple of days. This time they had better excuses. The Auckland pitch was a lottery, in which Stephen Fleming drew a winning ticket by his bold decision to bat first. And the key players were palpably exhausted. Hussain, Marcus Trescothick, James Foster and Matthew Hoggard have been on tour for 20 weeks this winter. Hussain puts so much into the captaincy that he is always knackered by the end of a series, and this time he had the death of one of his players to cope with too. Taking that eight-hour flight to Ben Hollioake's funeral showed more generosity than sense.

Even so, he was England's best player on the last day of the series just as he had been on the first. After his annus horribilis, Hussain has fully re-established himself as the batsman he was before: a very respectable Test No.4, and a bad-track bully.

Rather than bemoaning a defeat, England supporters should be dwelling on a memorable tour. This was a three-Test series, further shortened by the weather, which had all the action of five Tests. There was exhilarating batting from Nathan Astle, Graham Thorpe and Andrew Flintoff, and unstoppable bowling from Hoggard, Andy Caddick and Daryl Tuffey. Three times 400 runs were rattled up in a day, and there were sixes galore. The New Zealanders who stayed away from their echoing rugby grounds missed some rich entertainment.

Hussain's England have tended to prosper through attrition, but here they scored fast all series, and when they sent in Flintoff at No.4 and he thrashed 75 off 44 balls to set up a declaration, it was clear that they had made a quantum leap in the three months since Ahmedabad. Michael Vaughan went too far in this direction for his own good, metamorphosing from a vicar to a vaudeville act. Mark Butcher slipped back into his classy-30 habit, and Mark Ramprakash's new-found freedom evaporated as he returned to troubled-soul mode. He is too good against Australia to be written off altogether, but with Ian Bell waiting in the wings, it could take an injury for Ramprakash to get another last chance.

Above all, the series was an exhibition of captaincy. The two best current captains whose name is not Waugh had a fascinating duel. Hussain had the better of it for three-quarters of the series, as Fleming dropped him, flopped with the bat and struggled to marshal a popgun attack. Somehow, with two players on the point of retirement and all three of his first-choice seamers missing, Fleming had the wit and wisdom to bounce back, and to seize on the little openings that a weary opponent gave him. Today, as England set off in a blaze of boundaries, Fleming just stood there at slip, still as a film star. He even dropped Hussain again, but still he kept cool, posted extra gullies, turned to Nathan Astle, and waited for the pitch to misbehave. And one day he will tell his grandchildren how he managed to bowl a good team out twice with an attack consisting of Tuffey, Drum and Adams.

Tim de Lisle is editor of Wisden.com and of a new book, The Best: The 40 Leading Cricketers in the World Today, to be published this week, free with Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2002.

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