For three days before the first Test in Auckland the England team will have studied a damp, grassy surface with their eagle, anticipating eyes, thinking that the winning of the toss might well mean the winning of the game.
Around the square and into the outfield the grass was lush and full of moisture and the pitch itself, severely shaven by yesterday's first morning, had a hint of the putty texture into which a Greig or Boycott key would have encouraged just a little sink.
The air, too, was damp in that muggy, tropical way and the surprise overnight rain meant that moisture, condensed and exaggerated by the huge concrete stands, was all about Eden Park.
The England team have played well in New Zealand, exploiting these English-type conditions with decent seam and swing bowling and intelligent strong-willed batting.
Confidence, so clearly lacking in Zimbabwe, has come from two wins in uncomplicated cricket that the players have understood, for they were reared on this straightforward diet of seam-up which agrees with their limitations.
For 24 hours before the game Michael Atherton knew that he had to bowl if he won the toss, aware that his team willed it and that New Zealand feared a resurgent, on-song Gough or a rested Cork in full voice.
He also knew that New Zealand thought well of Phil Tufnell because he had bowled them out over here in 1992 and was at it again, against a ``Select XI'' 10 days ago. In short, Atherton knew his bowlers held the aces, which has not often been the case, so he might as well let them get on with it.
But, as if it were a mosquito buzzing about his brain during the small hours, an old captain's tale will have niggled at Atherton, the one which insists that nine out of 10 times you bat first and on the tenth, you think about it and then bat first.
He will also have been aware that preconception of a pitch is a dangerous attitude and will have known what his management and the team's elders thought. To a man they thought bowl first and pick your extra seamer so Robert Croft, England's best bowler in Zimbabwe, was left to chew his cud. After all, thought everyone who was anyone, win the toss and probably win the game.
Not so. Poor Atherton, now that we know him well, let us forgive him his resistance to compromise, applaud his resolution and admire his determination that England should be proud. He is only a captain given an ordinary and inconsistent team who let him down again.
His bowlers, trying so desperately hard to prove to the prying television and the unsympathetic newspapers, let alone the gloating cricketing globe, that what went wrong in Zimbabwe was nothing more than a blip on the monitor of progress, made a Horlicks of their advantage. They sprayed the new ball all over the place, giving it as little chance to hit its target as the pellets from a novice's shotgun.
ALL the morning, while wicketkeeper Alec Stewart sprung left and right to save byes, Atherton stood with his arms folded and his emotion hidden, chewing on gum much as Mark Taylor, Australia's captain, would have done given the same predicament, does in fact for most of the time.
Atherton knows he is watched, knows that he cannot, in public, betray his dressing room so he has studied Taylor, a captain with whom the press have empathy, and taken refuge by adopting his composed, unrevealing stance.
Like Taylor, too, Atherton, at the moment, is short of runs and though his own subjective eye insists there is no link between his team's shortcomings and his own barren year, the more objective eye knows that to constantly be on the receiving end and to answer for the shortcomings of others must nibble at patience, upset balance and disturb play.
If anyone deserves to give a little back to the opposition it is Michael Atherton, not because he is an immediately endearing or charming leader but because he is an enduring and committed one who has now endured and committed quite enough.
For most of the first day he must have taken comfort in the knowledge that he is no longer obliged to do this fraught job, that he has given it most of his best shots and that his destiny is still his own.