What's the whole Taylor mess about? Did he fall out with the coach, what over?
Ryder left on his own accord though, I think he said he had depression.
If they had those two in, they may have made above 100 today but not much more the way philander apparently bowled. Saw his wickets on highlights and some of them were rippers.
Ryder's break was completely understandable but he could come back into the squad tomorrow if he liked. He's been playing domestic cricket for the last couple of months and is in great form but he isn't making himself available until the February tour (probably waiting for Taylor to come back).
But the Taylor debacle... Get ready for a long story. So where do I start? I mean, I could go on for hours talking about all the fuck ups NZC have managed to pull off over the last decade. Between John Bracewell basically pushing Fleming and Astle into retirement, Justin Vaughan stabbing Shane Bond in the back at the behest of the BCCI, Vettori's coup that instated him as the coach-captain, 2011's captaincy "election" and the mess between John Wright and John Buchanan (appoint a coach and then hire a guy that the new coach doesn't get along with, what a great recipe for success). The basic thing to get out of this is that NZC are fucking useless and have been killing cricket in NZ for years.
So basically what happened is in early 2012, John Wright decided he couldn't work with Buchanan any more and quit. The CEO of NZC tried to come up with a compromise but the board said no (they, of course, had to go with an Aussie over the NZer). So they went looking for a new coach and created a panel, which included Stephen Fleming, to go through the applications and appoint one. They ultimately ended up choosing former Otago coach, Mike Hesson, for the job. Why am I bringing this up? Well alongside coaching in the IPL, Fleming also manages a number of NZ players, including McCullum (and Vettori). And who does McCullum play for? Otago of course. So there's a ridiculous conflict of interest there but no-one notices until well after the fact.
Hesson moved into the coaching role once Wright moved on, went through a poor tour of India and a mediocre T20 WC performance. Along the way, Hesson came up with the "brilliant" idea to shuffle around the batting lineup against Pakistan in the WC, resulting in Vettori coming out before Taylor and it was a resounding failure. Then came the tour of Sri Lanka. After losing the T20 and ODI series and a couple of days before the test series, Hesson decided to meet with Taylor in his hotel room and ask him to step down as captain. Taylor refused and Hesson then told him that he'd recommend to the NZC board that Taylor be dropped as captain. Again, this was just a day or two before the test series. The first test went as most NZ tests go; decent first innings, collapse in the second. But in the second, Taylor stepped up and carried the team to victory.
Once the team got back to NZ, word of the meeting before the test series leaked out and shit hit the fan. Given that he'd only just given a MOTM performance to get a rare away test win and that his figures since becoming captain were fantastic (50+ test average), fans weren't impressed. A couple of days later, word then leaked that Taylor hadn't been asked to take part in the review of the tour and that NZC's new idea was for Taylor to stay as captain of the test team, with McCullum taking over the ODI and T20 teams. It reeked of a last ditch effort to avoid public scrutiny in the wake of Taylor's performance. But when they brought it to Taylor, he refused, saying that it'd be a confusing mess and that he was deciding to take a break from cricket for a couple of months to get his head back together.
So the NZC and Hesson fronted with the news that "Taylor had declined the test captaincy" (seriously, no mention that they had dropped him), that Hesson had from the very beginning intended on keeping him as test captain (LIE!), that Taylor had been part of the review (LIIIIE!) and continually pushed that "Ross has made himself unavailable for the SA tour" line to the point of absurdity. In other words, they tried to throw all of the blame on the best fucking player in the country.
It was absolutely mind boggling. No-one but a handful of gullible fools bought it and people got angrier at NZC. Taylor took a couple of interviews the next day to defend himself. He gave his version of events (that he hadn't been part of the review, that Hesson quite obviously intended on dropping him as captain in all three formats and so on), mentioned a couple of things that bewildered him about Hesson (Hesson wanted Nathan McCullum to captain the T20 side if both Taylor and Brendon McCullum were out sick... NATHAN MCCULLUM!) and confirmed what everyone though, that someone was lying.
At this point, NZC finally realised that no-one was buying their bullshit and that Taylor wasn't going to sit back and let them throw him under the bus, so they went silent for 4-5 days before holding a press conference. They apologised to Taylor, said that a special election for NZC board members would occur in 2013 and mentioned that "new information" had come forth that they would investigate it. No questions answered, no people fired, just a whole load of nothing. A couple of weeks later, they said that they were dropping the investigation of the "new information" and that the entire ordeal was settled. It all but revealed that the new information was nothing but a red herring to distract people away from their blatant and obvious lies.
So yeah, that's essentially what happened. Taylor and Ryder are expected back for the English tour in February, hopefully with a new coach in charge (but I'm not getting my hopes up).
I could also go into how little I like McCullum as a player, let alone as captain, but the fact that he refused batting advice from both Martin Crowe and John Wright, retorting that his "natural game" is better, should say enough. He's an idiot that thinks he's FAR better than he actually is.