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A whitewash is a whitewash even if it is against a team depleted of its best player and further debilitated by a misadventure to a Japanese restaurant in their local hotel in Karachi that laid low several New Zealand players with food poisoning. Surely the chef of that restaurant could have been considered the man of the match.

A whitewash would suggest a one-sided series but New Zealand braved the heat and with limited resources at their disposal gave Pakistan a fright or two. Particularly at Rawalpindi where they scored 277 and but for Shahid Afridi who gave a momentum to the innings and Abdul Razzaq and Younis Khan who were quite brilliant, Pakistan might have found itself in a bit of bother.

At full strength, New Zealand is a top class team. But they seem to have more than their share of injuries and they certainly don't play more cricket than the others. Compared to them, we seem to be holding out pretty well.

We should be very pleased with the performance of the team but we should not jump to any conclusions. We must accept that the quality of the opposition has not been of the highest class and the team has yet to be tested and we'll get a pretty good idea when we go to Australia to play a few indoor matches. Though nothing will be at stake, the Australians take their cricket seriously.

The two Test matches should at least be played on wickets where the ball seams about, though in this heat, any grass we may decide to keep on these wickets will soon die. The prospect of watching a Test match on a flat track is a daunting one for the spectators and I doubt we will see too many of them. I think the entry of school-children should be made free and some special stand should be ear-marked for them.

There are no surprises in the squad selected for the Test matches. The inclusion of Danish Kaneria would suggest that the selectors are of the opinion that the New Zealanders are suspect against spin. It is true that they had all kinds of problems against Muttiah Muralitharan but they seemed to have managed Shane Warne reasonably well.

But Kaneria deserves to be given a chance. He is a promising leg-spinner and the more he plays, the more he will improve. Taufiq Umer has not been included in the squad which means that Pakistan will open with Imran Nazir and Shahid Afridi though the temptation is there to try and play Shoaib Malik in that spot. It wouldn't be a bad idea against a team like New Zealand and on the dead tracks but he is not the long term solution.

Saeed Anwar finds himself in a Catch-22. He can't play because he is not match-fit. And he can't get match fit unless he plays! He has been allowed to practice and train with the team. This would presume that he is physically fit. Why not watch him in the nets and if seems to be without any pain (or encumbrances) it might be a good idea to play him in the Karachi Test. After all, a start has to be made to get him match-fit.

I am in favour of the rotation policy. The resistance, if any, seems to come from senior players who don't want to be 'rested' because it means a loss of match fee. I think some formula is being devised to recompense the 'rested' player. But it doesn't seem right to me.

For a home series, there should be no squad. A playing eleven with a reserve should be selected. I think we should stop carrying excess baggage. I have been a great supporter of the players and I do not grudge giving them any money or perks. They after all, create the wealth for the PCB. But a distinction should be made between 'enough' and 'more than enough'.

I got involved with Pakistan cricket when donning the Pakistan blazer was the highest honour and to do so, the greatest motivation. No one, in those days, dreamt of becoming cricket millionaires. The PCB has been more than fair to the cricketers. If anything, it has tended to molly-coddle them. Have players responded by giving their hundred per cent at all times? I'm not so sure.

What a wonderful advertisement for Test cricket was the one between India and the West Indies at Trinidad. Both teams were a bundle of nerves on the deciding final day and, in the end, the less nervous team won.

Brian Lara set the tone when he asked the steel band to stop playing. It is one of the best known facts about the sinking of the Titanic that the band kept playing even as the ship was going down.

Even the umpires could not escape the jitters. Asoka de Silva asked for a third umpire intervention for a caught behind. We imagined he wanted to know whether the catch had been taken cleanly. Surely, he could have consulted the square-leg umpire. The replays showed a clean catch, yet the replays kept coming on the screen. Was he trying to establish whether the batsman had nicked the ball? That's not the job of the third umpire.

In the end, the batsman, Shivnarine Chanderpaul was given not out. I thought Saurav Ganguly would go ballistic. In any event, Ganguly was being hyper-active, running around like a chicken with its head cut off. In the end, India won only because the West Indies lost. Junior Murray just tapped the ball and scooted off, like one of those battery-operated sprung toys that my grandson plays with.

One of the things that I have noticed that when the players from the sub-continent use abusive language, they use the Anglo-Saxon four-letter word rather than its vernacular equivalent. Perhaps, there isn't one in the vernacular that is so brief, to the point and graphic. One doesn't have to be a lip-reader to know what is being said. Should cricket commentary carry Parental Guidance?

© Dawn