Whatmakes cricket so enduringly endearing is the fact it can baffle not only those who cast a casual glance in its direction but also those tragic anoraks who have been watching it all their lives.

A week ago, Scotland beat Ireland by 179 runs at the Blacktown Oval in Sydney. These cricketing neighbours have been measuring themselves against each other since the 1880s and such a result, albeit in a warm-up match for the World Cup, was hard to resist interpreting as a sign of change. Ireland have been putting Scotland to shame with their gallus performances on the world stage for nearly a decade. Perhaps this was finally to be the day when the men in tartan got a piece of the action.

When Scotland went out to bat against New Zealand in Dunedin in the small hours of this morning, it didn’t take long for that optimism to evaporate, and when four of the top five batsmen trudged off with scores that read like binary it felt especially dispiriting considering what the Irish had done barely 24 hours before.

Ireland had won their opening game, against West Indies, and done so with such conviction and steel and panache that even the most sneering commentators were ceding ground, allowing that it would have been an upset had it gone the other way.

Scotland lost their opening game and it would have been an upset, certainly, had it gone the other way. But after confounding our expectations once, they did it all over again in the space of the same, baffling one-day international. It was an extraordinary way to salvage morale and carry confidence into the next game, when the opposition will be England.

Scotland and England have never met in a global cricket competition and the fact the underdogs took seven Kiwi wickets will help them believe that this all-important encounter - the only one of their six games in Pool A that can really make the nation sit up and take notice of cricket this winter - is one that they can win.

It probably won’t happen. Too many of the players are new and naive in the ways of elite cricket and do not know the difference between a brave performance and a famous win. Their fragility has been exposed by New Zealand, and even when wickets were clattering in Dunedin there was the feeling that these were mere notes at the end of a familiar narrative. It’s hard to believe Corey Anderson would have given Iain Wardlaw all that catching practice at fine leg had New Zealand been judiciously chasing a target over 200, instead of trying to churn out 143 in time to squeeze in nine holes of golf.

Irish cricket fans still reflect on their first World Cup win as the most important and also the hardest one to secure. Had they not finished the job against Pakistan on St Patrick’s Day, 2007, they might well still be waiting, like their Celtic rivals, to break their duck.

Scotland didn’t nearly beat New Zealand in the lush and verdant surrounds of the Otago Highlands. It was not an accomplished performance, not one these talented players will feel proud of. Their hosts, in their haste, nearly gave it to them, and even in that moment Scotland stuttered in expressing their gratitude. Wardlaw eventually snared Anderson on the boundary but only after having spurned an earlier, easier opportunity, at which point New Zealand still needed 30 to win.

It was not to be, but what a curiosity of a game to reflect on. The two highest scorers were Matt Machan (56) and Richie Berrington (50), who rescued Scotland from absolute humiliation. Before the game only two Scots (Gavin Hamilton in 1999 and Colin Smith in 2007) had made World Cup half-centuries. Now there are four.

Wardlaw and Josh Davey took three wickets apiece, each having bowled some very poor fare that added to the sense that made life easy for the New Zealanders. Paradoxically, the easier the proposition became the more the locals seemed unsure of how to seal it. It evoked memories of some of the All Blacks’ great World Cup chokes. But the fact remains this morning that Scotland have still never beaten New Zealand at cricket or rugby, and they have still never beaten anyone at the Cricket World Cup. After nine outings their highest score remains a paltry 186.

Ireland, by contrast, have now upstaged four of the ten Test nations on the grandest stage, showing that they have no great difficulty in chasing down totals that are north of 300. That’s what makes it sting even more.