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Sidebottom: Looked a class apart

England got there in the end and it was fitting that Ryan Sidebottom, England's man of the series by some distance, should end New Zealand's resistance shortly after lunch on the last day to win by 121 runs.

Sidebottom, who took 7-47 in the first innings, has looked a class apart throughout the tour, rarely bowling a bad ball and always asking taxing questions of a batsman's technique. His rise from the wilderness to his country's spearhead in just ten months has been meteoric and should serve as a massive incentive for other county stalwarts.

Michael Vaughan, Peter Moores and the selectors deserve massive credit for acting swiftly after Hamilton to freshen up the bowling attack while simultaneously staying patient with the batsmen. I feel incredibly sorry for Owais Shah, who has not had a single opportunity all winter to show what he can do, but you can take nothing away from Andrew Strauss, after his international career-saving 177 in Napier.

A failure for Strauss would almost certainly have seen an extended stay in county cricket but he demonstrated his mettle just at the right time. People will point out that he was batting on a very flat pitch against an ordinary attack but as a batsman you can only score runs against what's in front of you and he's done enough to earn the right to play against New Zealand in the summer.

As for the other batsmen: Kevin Pietersen showed his class in Napier and is set for a big summer; the opening partnership of Vaughan and Alastair Cook, which showed good signs in Sri Lanka was disappointing but I like the right/ left combination and would leave well alone; Paul Collingwood looks like he belongs and is a fine team player but number six is not the spot to be batting with another Andrew Flintoff recovery around the corner. And here's my massive call of the week:

Ian Bell will be one of the three best batsmen in the world by 2011.

I'm not going to seek to justify the call particularly as it's based more on instinct than anything else. Suffice to say that I like the way he has seemed more prepared to play his shots this winter. He's got out a few times trying to hit spinners over the top but the intent and the desire to expand his game in a quest to be the best is laudable.

The bowling attack needs Flintoff back to give it the perfect balance but the axing of Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard has seen the emergence of Stuart Broad as more than just a great prospect. He might look 10 years old but everything he does demonstrates maturity and energy and he is a more than useful number eight batsman, too. Depth in a batting order is crucial: it would have been a very different series without the batting efforts of Broad and Tim Ambrose.

The jury is still out on the enigma that is James Anderson. There is no question that he's one of the best around when the ball is swinging and he's a great guy with a big heart. When atmospheric conditions are not in his favour, however, he comes on to the bat for the best in the world to murder. Matthew Hoggard used all his nous on the subcontinent to develop different deliveries to give his bowling variation. Anderson needs to do the same.

Panesar and Sidebottom are the class acts in the bowling department and if both can stay fit the rest of the attack can be built around them. A pace attack of Sidebottom, Broad, Flintoff and a fully fit and firing Harmison is a unit to rival the one that brought home the Ashes in 2005 but England are a long way from playing that standard of cricket and the two big men have a lot of work to do with Harmison in particular needing to silence his critics with performances rather than words.

New Zealand and England will do battle again in the early part of the summer but without Stephen Fleming it's hard to see the black caps making any sort of impression. Next time round England shouldn't just win - they should win well.