Steady as she goes

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Gary Stead was quietly re-appointed for a further two years this week.

As cricket news goes, it’s about as unsexy as you can get, inflaming neither great debate nor febrile excitement.

Stead is a ‘y’ short of having a perfectly apt surname, and that’s fine by New Zealand Cricket. It’s not just Stead they are looking to extend, but the Black Caps place at the top table - a place they tenuously cling onto despite most key metrics - wealth, resource, climate, player pool - suggesting they should be middle- to bottom-feeders.

A key consideration was Stead’s even-keeled relationship with the players - something that will be vital in a world where, financially speaking at least, international cricket will increasingly seem like a lesser proposition to myriad leagues backed by private money (see story below on the start of MLC).