New Zealand out of the race

As it has been the case whenever Australia faces most of the teams, no matter whether the Aussies take a first innings lead or not but they end up on the safer side towards the end of the match. And, this time as well the situation was no different when Simon Katich continued from where he had left in the first innings of the test match where he scored a valuable 88 runs with the entire team getting bowled out for a mere 231 runs on the boards, which was - needless to be said far behind the standards of Aussie cricket.

This was more so when the opposition - New Zealand surpassed the Aussie total by 33 runs, which is more than enough for the Kiwis to rejoice. However, that could in no way trouble the Aussies who were pretty confident of their comeback to the game which has seen them doing o since the past decade or so. But, with New Zealand being the hosts, a lot more was expected from them and not just a lead of 33 runs and that too in the second test after surrendering the first one without a tough decent fight. New Zealand has been the worst hosts in the recent past.

It is really surprising that Simon Katich who shone with the bat took 137 balls to score his first boundary when he was found driving the 100 test man - Daniel Vettori through cover. However, at the end of his innings, he had 12 hits to the fence to his credit. Katich was also involved in an 85 run first wicket partnership with Shane Watson and a 155 run partnership with Mike Hussey despite having a bad strike rate of a run from every 3 balls. As expected, the entire Australian team batted with utmost cautiousness to take the game away from New Zealand.

Simon Katich stood for 279 balls which was close to 47 overs and 4 sessions before getting out. Katich's score was close to 33% of the entire Australian team total on the 3^rd day's play. The entire Australian side was out on the first day's play and so was the case when New Zealand batted on day 2. Such games are quite rare in today's test cricket. Today's test cricket either has both the teams scoring huge amount of runs with just 2 out of the 4 innings being possible. Or else, there would be one high scoring team with the other team crashing out even before its play has been started.