Should New Zealand be considered an all-time great side?

Whoever wins on Sunday between New Zealand and Australia will not dictate who has been the best team in the tournament. Instead it will simply dictate who was the winner. There’s a difference. And it’s a difference that’s okay. Volatility creates excitement and uncertainty provides hope.

But it makes things tricky. Because in cricket and life we love nothing more than to quantify things. To fit things in a box which will make sense in our head and then allow us to base an opinion on it from there. A batter who averages 40? Good player. 50? Great player.

But whilst that works with individuals, it doesn’t with teams. Cricket has no perfect measure of how we quantify the teams in front of us. Despite the World Test Championship’s best efforts, it is not a true-to-form, everyone plays everyone home and away system, and even if it was, is that what we’d want? And so from there you have the team rankings which are flawed, the ICC competitions which are one-offs and bilateral series which are just glorified friendlies won by the side who are at home.

Those points are deliberately oversimplified. But, the fact is that success in any one respect can be immediately caveated. However, what’s happened now is that in New Zealand, we have a team who have succeeded on every single imperfect measure.

They won the inaugural World Test Championship, they are the No.1 ranked side in Test and ODI cricket (No.2 in T20), they have reached the final in three of the last four ICC competitions and have won 10 of their previous 12 bilateral Test series.

They are also a far more eccentric team than their clean-cut image allows you to believe. In this tournament, Daryl Mitchell has opened the batting having never done so before in T20 cricket. Whereas in the Test side, they have the world’s most unique bowler in Neil Wagner and, in Kyle Jamieson, a potential future all-formats superstar who at 6’8” is the physical anomaly that any maverick side worth their salt possesses.

They are a highly-skilled, asymmetrical team who have succeeded across all formats. Perfecting the imperfect system that they have been presented with. And yet the overriding response to all of this is, “yeeeah…but.”

Yeah but, they barely win away. Yeah but, they lost to Australia 3-0. Yeah but, the conditions for the WTC suited them. Yeah but, they only play two and three match Test series at home. Yeah but, they’re full of South Africans.

This isn’t to say New Zealand are underrated. Because they’re not. Everyone thinks New Zealand is a good team, it’s just taken the world by surprise to have looked up from our imperfect measures and be presented with a team who could be considered the side of this generation. West Indies 1980s. Australia 2000s. New Zealand 2020s. On Sky Sports, Michael Atherton noted that “across formats, you have to say they are the strongest team”.

Have to. An inconvenient truth like global warming or doing the washing up. There’s only so long you can leave that plate on the side and only so long you can dispute New Zealand’s place at the top of the table.

Our reluctance, or perhaps surprise, at the success of New Zealand doubtless reflects a calendar of cricket that is relentless to the point of losing meaning. After Sunday, New Zealand’s reward for their tournamentl toil will be a three-match T20 series against India that starts just three days after the final. In the same way that alcoholics use the excuse of it’s always 5pm somewhere in order to have a drink, cricket’s administrators muse it’s always summer somewhere and cram in another fixture.

However, following that T20 series is three Test matches against India. Away. Bizarre as it may be, one of the true barometers of success that we measure teams against is their ability to win away from home against one of the “big three” in India, Australia or England. It’s not enough to just beat what’s in front of you as New Zealand have been doing. You have to win in the right way, time and place in a lengthy and expensive four or five-match Test series. If you were interested, the last time New Zealand played a Test series longer than three matches was 1999. Their only four-match Test series in the last 36 years.

But that isn’t their fault. Instead, it’s evidence of a cricket world that is loaded up in favour of helping England, India and Australia play each other in blockbuster series’ of increasingly regular occurrence. By way of another statistic, 57 of Michael Clarke’s 115 Tests for Australia came against either India or England.

Cricket as it is set up makes it incredibly difficult to consider a team outside of the main three to be in contention for true glory and the hesitation to laud New Zealand for the team they may well be is evidence of that.

Overall, perhaps the true worth of this New Zealand side isn’t to be found by judging them against the success of other nations, but against their own. This is a country of five million people where cricket isn’t even the main sport. A nation whose cricket board has an annual revenue that is less than Surrey’s. In the modern era of sport, the size of your wallet equals the size of your ambition. And New Zealand are proving themselves to be the exception to that rule. Not just in cricket but in sport as a whole. And whether they win Sunday’s match against Australia or not. Nothing about that will change.