While Shoaib Akhtar has had all the headlines after our opening One-Day International with Pakistan I have to say that I enjoyed watching Saqlain Mushtaq.

He is world-class and I rate him a better off-spinner than Sri Lankan Mutiah Muralitharan, mainly because of the dip in the air that he gets. As a fellow spinner he is great to watch.

We've only played four games against them in three years so we haven't seen a lot of them but Saqlain is pretty impressive.

It is going to be a pretty exciting series. They are pretty good players of spin so the challenge is there for me. From our perspective we have to get in there and compete and that means picking up our batting

The Sri Lankan series was obviously pretty disappointing for us.

For me it was nice to be back in the thick of things and it was good to be back in the team environment. We threw the game away in Wellington and it would have been nice to have seen how it would have gone in Hamilton before the light ran out.

We bowled reasonably well throughout but we didn't bat well enough as a team overall.

Christchurch was the best wicket we played on. The others were a little under-prepared which is interesting given they were the sort of wickets New Zealand used to do well on.

However, if we want to play with the best in the world, we have to do it on the best wickets and that is what we have been playing on in recent years.

In Auckland, I got caught in the trap of bowling for wickets rather than using the runs we had to tie the batsmen down and force the errors.

In Hamilton I felt I bowled well but with a bit of bad luck. Harry's [Chris Harris] bowling kept us in the game in Christchurch and James Franklin and Daryl Tuffey stepped up in this game with good performances.

When you think that our top four pace bowlers in the side, James and Daryl, Chris Martin and Jacob Oram have only 15 ODIs between them they have done really well.

You have to respect what they have done. They have been bowling to some of the best one-day batsmen in the world in Sanath Jayasuriya and Saeed Anwar, and if they can bowl well to them, they know they have done it against the best there is.

I am working to a bowling load and will continue that for the rest of the series with Pakistan. I am feeling good at the moment and there are still two weeks left before the Test series. I am a little bit stiff as I get back into the daily grind.

But, in Auckland against Pakistan on Sunday, I felt I could have had five for 20 and if we could have got Inzamam early it could have been a lot more interesting. In the end we needed 40 more runs. Obviously we got beaten but we did compete until Shoaib Akhtar did the damage.

© CricInfo