Hamilton Washout: A Toss, No Cricket, and New Zealand's Series Hopes Gone

Some days the most important thing in a cricket match is the sky. Rain had already trimmed the first two ODIs of this series and settled the second one by four runs on DLS. In Hamilton on Tuesday it simply took the whole day. There was a two-hour delay for rain and a wet outfield, a brief window long enough for the captains to walk out and toss, and then the rain came back and stayed. The third ODI was abandoned without a ball bowled.

For India it was a quiet afternoon that cost them nothing. They lead the five-match series 2-0 and cannot lose it. For New Zealand it was a cruel kind of defeat, the kind with no scorecard. They needed to win at Seddon Park to keep the series alive, and now the most they can take from it is a 2-2 draw.

Gill won the toss again and did what India have done all series: he asked New Zealand to bat on a damp day and named an unchanged XI. The four-seam attack that bowled New Zealand out for 185 and 134 never got to bowl a ball. Gill had hoped for a full game and said so at the toss, that going on and off was frustrating. He got neither.

It was also his last game of the ODI series. Gill and KL Rahul are leaving the one-day squad to prepare for the Test series, and vice-captain Shreyas Iyer is expected to lead India in the last two games. A series win will now have to come under a different captain, with a side that will look quite different from the one that walked out in Hamilton.

Mitchell Santner said at the toss that New Zealand would have to read the conditions before deciding what a good score was, and he had a point. In Wellington 134 nearly won the game, and New Zealand have not reached 190 in this series. Fisher, who took 1 for 23 as Tickner's concussion replacement in Wellington, kept his place, with four specialist seamers in the side.

They will feel they never got their chance. A batting side that had looked stuck rather than out of form was hoping Seddon Park, usually one of the better batting grounds in the country, would give them room to play. Instead the series is gone, and the job at Bay Oval is to make it 2-2.

There is nothing to say about the pitch, because nobody got to use it. Rain has now touched all three games of this series, cutting the first two short and settling both on DLS before washing out the third entirely. The weather has had more say in this series than either set of batters.

Our preview leaned towards India, narrowly, and wondered whether Hamilton would favour the bat more than Auckland and Wellington had. We also said the toss might matter more than anything else. India did win the toss, but there is no result to grade our call against. We will take this one as a no-score and carry the lean into Mount Maunganui.

The fourth ODI is at Bay Oval, Mount Maunganui, on November 13, with the fifth at the same ground two days later. India need one more win to take the series, and Iyer will be in charge for the first time on this tour. New Zealand need two wins to draw it, and they too are losing players to the Test camp. Whichever side handles the changes better probably decides how this series ends.