'Boring' cricket fight a sign we live in interesting times

PLUS: A goal 14 years in the making and wings clipped at Red Bull

Three stories/ issues to catch the eye. Look out for a special feature tomorrow from former first-class spinner Justin Paul, who broke bread with John Aiken, the Married at First Sight relationship expert who once dreamed of partnerships of the opening kind.

The playing uniforms will bear resemblance to a full-strength Blacks Caps team to face Pakistan in the season-ending ODI series, even if the names on the back of them don’t.

Squad: Tom Latham (c), Muhammad Abbas, Adi Ashok, Michael Bracewell, Mark Chapman, Jacob Duffy, Mitch Hay, Nick Kelly, Daryl Mitchell, Will O’Rourke, Ben Sears, Nathan Smith, Will Young.

Some selections are due to Indian Premier League necessity and some to workload management, but from a strictly developmental point of view, it’s hard to view it as anything but a positive to get some international experience into fringe players in a series that, even at full strength, would be hard to engender a lot of enthusiasm for. Whether international cricket should be “developmental” is another matter entirely.

Regardless of where you stand on that, it will be intriguing to see the undeniable talent of Mo Abbas (21) brought to international cricket. His Wellington teammate Nick Kelly has taken a far windier road to the top but it is good to see weight of domestic runs over multiple seasons count for something.

Pakistan are not a great side but they must be looking at the inexperience of that New Zealand bowling and thinking they could make hay. Michael Bracewell has played 31 ODIs and his tally nearly doubles that of the rest of the attack.

Anyway, the relative strength or otherwise of the Black Caps is far from the biggest issue facing New Zealand Cricket with a capital ‘C’.

That would be this story, headlined: “Stand off between top players and NZ Cricket over digital rights deal.”

Relations between the Black Caps and New Zealand Cricket have soured amid a stand-off over digital image rights, with the Players Association saying its relationship with NZC is at an all time low.

The dispute centres around the digital use of Names, Images and Likeness (NIL) and their use by Indian company Nautilus Mobile in the app Real Cricket, for a game called WorldCricket20.

New Zealand Cricket has a deal with Dream 11, an Indian fantasy sport platform, which NZC says gives them exclusive NIL rights to New Zealand players.

This is an issue that has been bubbling away under the surface for months and is, frankly, incredibly boring. I’ve yet to talk to a cricket fan who could care any less about an administrative squabble over image rights.

And yet sources spoken to believe this has the potential to split the game in a way not seen since the players’ strike of 2002.

Scratch the surface in Cricketland and there are multiple accusations flying, from board dysfunction to player overreach, to conflicts of interest and unhinged commercial “land grabs”, and of irreconcilable personality clashes between key figures on both sides of the divide.

All this comes against a backdrop where the players are demanding more say in the creation of a workable global cricket calendar that takes into account the twin and often competing needs of cash rich franchise leagues and regular international content to satisfy broadcast deals.

The World Cricketers’ Association will shortly announce the results of their review into the “broken and unsustainable, confusing and chaotic” calendar.

What you get when you don’t have a dovetailed calendar, is a Black Caps team recognisable in shirt-colour only playing a context-less ODI series in autumn when attention has shifted to the winter codes.

These are low-stakes games of cricket; what is happening off the field carries far higher stakes.