Wellington: Former New Zealand captain Martin Crowe branded the national side underperformers after they crashed out of the World Cup in Kingston on Tuesday.

Crowe, one of New Zealand’s most successful batsmen, said he agreed with Stephen Fleming’s decision to step down as one-day captain, and said coach John Bracewell should follow suit after the 81-run semi-final loss to Sri Lanka.

“You need to move on to fresh ideas because the game is moving on very quickly,” Crowe said.

Even though New Zealand reached the play-offs — as did the side Crowe led to the 1992 World Cup — there was a vast difference between the performance of the two sides.

Crowe’s side were knocked out by Pakistan in a game, which went to the wire, while the class of 2007 were soundly beaten.

“I didn’t feel there were a lot of players in form,” Crowe said. “Coming off that Australian debacle (a record 215-run loss last week), I felt we were going to have to be very lucky.”

Crowe said he was disappointed that the New Zealand players didn’t seem to be hard-hit by the nature of that defeat, as they all spoke of how it hadn’t knocked their confidence.

“They fall into doing the same PR speak and putting a positive spin on things,” he said. “But the Australian game was diabolical and that was such a crucial match.” He believed the build up to the Australia clash was where New Zealand’s campaign began to unravel, with bowling spearhead Shane Bond missing the game because he fell sick the night before.

“What are you doing, eating a dodgy fish curry that’s going to take you out of the game the next day?” he said.

“They needed Bond there, they needed Jacob Oram there. I don’t care about (Oram’s) bruised heel — when you’ve got seven or eight days to play, you get out there and play what are going to be the three most important games of your career.

“They didn’t front up, they backed out and they just said ‘we had our eye on the Sri Lankan game’.

“Well they didn’t have their eye on that because as we’ve seen today, they just didn’t perform as well as this well-groomed Sri Lankan side.”