Sellsy's Monday Supplement

Alastair Cook, won the toss and stuck New Zealand in to bat, on hindsight not the wisest decision he had made during his tenure as England captain.

To be fair to Captain Cook (how apt and we have the Aussies coming over this summer), along with the English hierarchy Andy Flower, David Saker et al, would of looked at the pitch and thought things through quite thoroughly before making any decision in what to do in the event of winning the toss.

If you look at the previous two Test matches the pitches had got easier to bat on as the game went on, giving bowlers no hope and the batsmen being allowed to score freely, hence two draws. Was this another factor which influenced their decision?

Looking at the English bowlers on Sunday night they looked well below par, not firing on all four and as a unit they looked ordinary. A result of a long winter or are they woefully unprepared, could be either, but only one warm up game before the first Test? You make your own conclusions.

With a day to go and England still 400 runs in arrears, but more importantly only six wickets left England are staring down the barrel somewhat. If we take the runs out of the equation, are England good enough to hold out all day to earn a draw or will I be going to bed early? We shall see.

Good news coming out of the County Ground this past week is that Nick Compton will be available for selection in Somerset's first batch of fixtures, and with Alfonso Thomas ruling himself out of the IPL, the mighty Set look strong for the first part of the season, just hope they can stay injury free.

They should be playing some warm-up games this past week, but rain intervened against Worcester, and against Gloucester it was blooming freezing but the game went ahead.

Anyway, back to my “Further Adventures of My Tour of New Zealand.” I did meet up with Marcus that evening in the hotel bar, after a few minutes these blokes started too turn up whose faces I recognised, well in fact the English cricket squad who were of to some reception in the city. After a chat with Nick Knight and Mike Atherton we decided to have a trip around the bars of downtown Auckland to blow the froth of a few, two Englishmen having a quiet drink abroad, yeah right!

First bar, live music and great fun with the locals. Second bar a “bucks” night was going on, yes we got involved in some pranks with the posse and crawl around a few more bars ensued.

About midnight we headed back for the hotel, I had to change my shirt, so after a trip to the 22^nd floor and back Marcus was chatting at the bar to an attractive middle aged lady, but he was getting some funny looks from this guy from the other end of the bar with a massive moustache.

What happened next was quite extraordinary to say the least.

Find out more next week, as it’s 6.57, time for a few pints of Thatchers and skittles!