With the 10th Cricket World Cup just a week away, I thought I’d put up my list of the all-time greatest New Zealand ODI team. This is always much more fun when the Black Caps are doing well, but if you cast your mind back just a few shortish months, we were ranked second in the world for ODI’s. Then we preceeded to get thrashed to the tune of just two wins from the next 17 games, but that will all be a distant memory if John Wright gets the team firing on the subcontinent.

Let’s not forget that just prior to New Zealand’s best ever Cricket World Cup performance in 1992, we’d been trounced by England to such an extent that everyone had written us off. Then Martin Crowe found the form of his life with not only the bat, but with his captaincy. He scored four 50s and one hundred in that tournament, but just as crucial was his decision to open the bowling with spinner Dipak Patel, his prominent use of the dibbly-dobbly bowlers like Rod Latham, Gavin Larsen and Chris Harris, his inventive field-placements and his reinvention of Mark Greatbatch as a swash-buckling, Curtly Ambrose-charging opening batsman.

That tournament was right when I was first falling in love with cricket. I was nine years old and would video-tape each game with my own homemade highlights which normally consisted of me trying to employ my psychic powers to know when a wicket or a boundary would occur and hitting record just in time. I watched one of my videos with my great mate Richard Webster about two years ago and we couldn’t stop laughing at how most of the time I’d recorded balls where nothing happens and then all of a sudden you see the crowd cheering because Crowe, Greatbatch, Andrew Jones or Ken Rutherford had just hit a four.

On my tapes you don’t tend to actually see the four being hit until the replay is shown. Rudimentary filming and editing, but nice archival footage none-the-less (if you don’t mind a fairly frustrating watch).

In 1992 New Zealand won their first seven matches in a row, only to stumble (twice) against Pakistan, the ultimate winners. Since then we have regularly performed above average at World Cups, but always falling victim in the final stages – hopefully this year will be different. Here is the team in batting order:

1: Stephen Fleming (vc)
2: Nathan Astle
3: Ross Taylor
4: Martin Crowe (c)
5: Scott Styris
6: Chris Cairns
7: Brendon McCullum
8: Richard Hadlee
9: Daniel Vettori
10: Kyle Mills
11: Shane Bond

There are some notable omissions with none more-so than Roger Twose who averaged nearly 40, but Styris takes his spot due to his superior bowling, his longer career and the fact he has averaged even more than Twose over the second half of his career to make him one of our finest ever ODI batsmen. Plus he rattled Aussie thick-quick Mitchell Johnson enough to provoke a head-butt last season; he is a fighter who wins us games that otherwise seem lost.

What I hope bodes well for next week’s tournament is that five of the all-time team are in the current team (including Styris) and new coach John Wright knows India better than any other person within New Zealand cricket. Hopefully 2011 will be the year.