You can’t blame New Zealand Cricket for the weather.

Last night the Australian men’s T20I team retained the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy when the 2nd of 3 matches was called off due to the aaaaah atmospheric conditions. Yeah, it rained.

The 3rd game, a dead rubber if you will, is likely to follow the same path and the series will be won by Mother Nature 2-1.

Can’t blame NZC for the weather. You can blame them for the scheduling though.

It’s almost as insane as giving McLean Park in Napier a fixture. A drought breaker if you will, a temptation for the weather gods that won’t be ignored.

The spring of cricket has hardly bounced into action. If anything, the opening salvo has recoiled. The tantalising prospect of a rare visit from the best team in the world has been dampened. Or in the case of game one, frozen out of the picture, with the players, umpires, ground staff, commentary teams, and crowd left asking themselves hard questions. For the crowd, the primary question would have been: why did we bother?

NZC has backed themselves into this corner, desperate to provide the national side with time in the middle before next year's World Cup (yup, another one) whilst juggling the demands of franchise T20 cricket and essentially ignoring the concept of a summer of cricket, the traditional season in which we celebrate and immerse ourselves in the game.

To be fair, NZC is a cork in the cricketing waters, and they do a reasonable job of making some acceptable purses from the pig's ear they've been given. But when the cream of the touring matches are set down for spring and the Proteus tour and the only real inbound summer action is confined to 5 ODIs, one wonders where the home fans sit in the pecking order. Evidentially, over the last few summers, based on scheduling, not as high up the chain as we’d like.