The Black Caps will have to sit down and analyse what went wrong in the Twenty20 World Cup final at some stage.
But it will have to wait as they leave for India and a three-match T20 series that will start less than 72 hours after Australian batsman Glenn Maxwell hit the winning runs in Dubai [first ball Thursday 2.30am NZ time].
They are set to welcome back Lockie Ferguson from injury, but might have to do without Kane Williamson, who starred with an innings of 85 off 48 in the decider, as coach Gary Stead confirmed players would be rested with an eye to the test series that follows.
Williamson’s work in lifting his side to 172-4 was in vain as the Black Caps then turned in their worst bowling performance of the tournament to lose by eight wickets.
To make the final, the Black Caps had to win five matches on the trot after going down to Pakistan in their tournament opener, and in doing so they dispatched both of the pre-tournament favourites – England and India.
As he spoke to the media back home after the defeat, Stead was hurting, but proud of what his side had accomplished in a run that earned them US$960,000 [NZ$1.4 million] in prize money to share.
“If I’m perfectly honest, when I arrived here with a number of the support staff and Devon Conway in early October, it was quite disjointed at the time,” Stead said.
“We had the [players who arrived in September following the abandonment of the Black Caps’ tour of Pakistan] who had already spent a couple of weeks here, we had the IPL guys arriving at different times, and then almost as soon as we got the whole group here, we were into our warm-up games without any real preparation time beforehand.
“I think as a team, we did remarkably well to, first of all, compete the way we did and to ultimately make the final, which was a huge achievement.
“Everyone was talking about England versus India and neither of those teams sort of made it there at the end. For us and Australia to make it was probably against the odds or what everyone was predicting.”
The Black Caps lost Conway ahead of the final, after it emerged that he’d broken his right hand while punching his bat in frustration when he was dismissed in their semifinal.
That came after they lost Ferguson on the eve of the tournament to a calf strain, and had to do without either him or his replacement, fellow quick Adam Milne, for their first match.
Ferguson has been back bowling in the nets for more than a week, and while he was unable to rejoin the World Cup squad, he is set to take part in the bilateral series against India.
“He’s pretty close,” Stead said. “We’ll just make sure we get over there, travel OK, and there are no issues like seizing up on the flight or anything like that, but I would expect that he’s going to be available for selection, which will be fantastic”.
The Black Caps have 15 players available for the Indian T20s, but Stead confirmed the six who are also in the squad for the two World Test Championship matches to follow would play small roles.
Williamson, not training as much as he would like to while he manages an elbow issue, and Tim Southee, who will lead the test seam attack in Trent Boult’s absence, are the two most likely to skip the T20s altogether, with fellow seamer Kyle Jamieson, who didn’t play at the World Cup, Daryl Mitchell, Glen Phillips, and Mitchell Santner the others set to be managed carefully.
The Black Caps’ defeat to Australia was their second in a white-ball World Cup final, following the one-day decider at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 2015.
Williamson led the way with the bat and Boult took 2-18 off his four overs, but David Warner, who made 53 off 38, and Mitchell Marsh, who was unbeaten on 77 off 50, ensured Australia were never under pressure chasing 173 to win.
The Black Caps may have beaten an understrength Australian side 3-2 in a five-match series at home last summer, but winning a trans-Tasman clash on the big stage proved beyond them once again.
Even when they won the inaugural World Test Championship, they still had a 3-0 loss in Australia along the way, but Stead didn’t want to get dragged into a discussion on whether it was an issue to be overcome.
“It’s actually not talked about within our team at all, it’s probably more media and other people that are bringing it up and talking about it.
“Every time we play Australia, we know that they are going to be huge competitors. In this tournament here, they had a team of superstars or people that could break the match open, and we were acutely aware of that.
“I guess right throughout this tournament, we have just kept talking about competing for long, long periods of time and trying to take the games deep, so we put the opposition under pressure at the back end of the game.
“Unfortunately they felt like they were 15 to 20 runs ahead of where we wanted them to be for a fair chunk of tonight, and we didn’t quite get those wickets that we wanted.”
