You wouldn’t want to be Gary Stead today, would you? Or Cricket NZ for that matter.

If you’re an angry cricket fan, I think you have every right to feel this way. Cricket NZ is taking the mickey

How can you send your coach off on holiday, in the middle of what Jeremy Coney quite rightly describes as the biggest cricket of summer in New Zealand in a decade, when you’ve lost eight games in a row, and when you’ve got months of free time in just a few weeks? 

The squad has all of April off, all of May off, and then the first couple of weeks of June off. Why couldn’t’ stead take a holiday then?

It’s not as if the Black Caps can spare him right now. They’re missing a lot of experience. The captain’s down with injury, so are Trent Boult, Matt Henry or Lockie Ferguson.

They’ve been thrashed by the Australians, where their performance was described as watching club cricket. They’ve been thrashed by the Indians, losing the T20 series five nil.  

They need to turn this thing around, or this is going to go down as the summer of misery for cricket fans.

Behind the scenes, Cricket NZ is making excuses, drawing comparisons to Aussie coach Justin Langer who just took a week off in January.

But this is completely different. Langer’s team were on an away tour, and an away tour never matters as much to fans.  And Langer’s team weren’t on an eight game losing streak.

Look, fans aren’t deluded, are we? We know the Black Caps aren’t really going to give the English or the Indians or the Australia a hiding.

But we turn up because the Black Caps are battlers and there’s always a chance that you’re turning up for the one game where they pull one out of the hat.

Well, it’s hard to keep hoping and turning up, when the coach himself isn’t turning up.