1st ODI, Christchurch
Wednesday, February 13, 2002

This has happened before - again and again. We get ourselves in a good position batting early on and then we collapse. There's no excuse: it's just not good enough and there's a lot of hard work ahead of us.

I haven't spoken to the boys tonight. I'm not a great one for taking matches apart afterwards in the dressing room. There'll be time for all that. Duncan and I will have to have a chat on the way to Wellington, and then I expect we'll have a team meeting and try and sort it out.

It's not like this just happens the odd time, it's every two or three matches.

It's true we haven't had long between India and here – but I'm not going to use that as an excuse. We've had plenty of time to acclimatise, and there's only so many warm-up matches we can play. We can't just have more and more matches on every tour – the schedule is the way it is.

For 60 of the 82 overs today I actually thought we played some good cricket, but then for the other 20-odd overs we were very poor. The stands between Nick Knight and myself and Thorpey were important and got us into a strong position. Then we suddenly found ourselves all out for under 200.

There's only so long you can go on managing to protect low scores and pulling matches around. As a team we're actually getting pretty good at rescuing lost causes – but we really have to start giving ourselves more of a chance.

This team has a lot of fight in them. The way Darren bowled today in that comeback spell was so impressive. I threw him the ball and told him we needed wickets and quickly. That's why he's such a valuable player – he can put in those performances and turn a match in the space of a couple of overs. I bowled him out before the final overs today, because we needed to take wickets right then, not later.

I don't yet know if there will be any changes for the Wellington game. Obviously down the order is where the problems are. Someone really needs to hold their hand up in those last 20 overs and keep their head. We're just not building on those good starts – and we have to start doing that if we're going to compete.

Nasser Hussain was talking to Camilla Rossiter. His thoughts appear on Wisden.com, other duties permitting, at the end of each international that England play.

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