Otago's Plunket Shield campaign has made for some rather painful memories this summer.
The normally reliable top order has been head-in-hands horrible. Patience has been in short supply, resolve rare and runs hard to come by.
Just last week Otago was rolled for 63 - a feat it has managed twice this season. Last month it lost eight wickets for 26 runs in one tumultuous hour in Queenstown and some of the province's most prolific batsmen have been profoundly out of sorts.
It has been a memorable campaign for all the wrong reasons - a point coach Vaughn Johnson freely acknowledged.
"It is obviously a concern to everyone but you can approach it two or three different ways," he said.
"You can keep going on about the negatives all the time: like how we are not fronting up, how we are mentally soft or not coping under pressure.
"All those things are true. But with Hamish Rutherford, Michael Bracewell, Darren Broom, Sam Wells and James Neesham, we have a lot of guys who are all in their 20s and they are not going to learn the game and all the skills which are required overnight. But they are the future of Otago cricket. The one positive thing going for us is that we have some youth."
How bad has it been?
Otago has scored 300 or more in just two of its 15 innings, with a top score of 308 for five. It has been dismissed for fewer than 100 runs on two occasions and also posted measly scores of 115, 155 and 170. No-one had scored a century until Craig Cumming reached 129 in Queenstown in round six of the competition and Otago has the dreadful record of one win, five losses and two draws from eight games.
Cumming has been the best of the batsmen, with 512 runs at an average 36.57 which, compared with his Otago career average of 43.40, is below par.
He has been a prolific run-scorer for Otago and was expected to dominate along with Neil Broom (315 at 24.23) and Aaron Redmond (157 at 14.27), both of who are terribly out of form.
Redmond endured such a prolonged form slump he was removed as captain of the one-day and four-day team and dropped in all three formats.
His replacement, Hamish Rutherford, has been one of bright spots this season. He scored back-to-back centuries against Northern Districts earlier this month.
Wells (358 at 29.83) has scored four 50s but has not been able to convert of some promising starts, and Michael Bracewell (283 at 28.30) has too often sold his wicket cheaply.
But despite the struggles, Johnson is reluctant to make too many changes for the remaining two games.
"We've spoken long and hard about it and, in terms of selection, we've decided we're better off keeping some of these young men.
"As a coach, you've got to keep looking for the positives. You can't keep kicking them all the time, because it stops being effective after a while. You need to support these guys and get them to learn a bit about cricket.
" I've been really surprised by the lack of cricket knowledge some of them have. Simple things: like when you are under pressure we seem to try and release the pressure by hitting a boundary instead of gutsing it out."
"But I believe the best strategy is to stick with what we've got at the moment and try and teach them what they need to know.
"There is a lot of youth in the side which we have to build around in the future."
