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 Kan