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Lessons learned: Stuart Broad is the real deal, Panesar back to his best

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Andrew Hughes looks back at England's tour of New Zealand and tells us what we've learnt from it: Sidebottom is crucial, Ambrose exciting and Stuart Broad an essential part of the jigsaw

Winning, just winning, can be good for the soul. As the England players ambled around the Napier pitch, beaming and laughing, they even had time to stop and join in a few rowdy choruses from the Barmy Army songbook. Gone were the haunted looks and hunched shoulders of Hamilton. They'd won a Test series on foreign soil for the first time in three years and had done it from behind. They were supposed to have beaten New Zealand and they had done. Relief sighed into the Napier sky almost as freely as the champagne.

So where does this mini-triumph, this expected but satisfying victory leave us? I think we've learned a lot about certain players and one or two things about how good this England team is.

For a start, there are signs that Peter Moores' methods are bearing fruit. He is big on getting players to take individual responsibility, on encouraging them to talk freely and to think for themselves, not something that was countenanced under the Rhodesian Sergeant Major. Though it is still early days, some players are rising to the challenge. A number of them took the initiative at key moments in the series, starting with Tim Ambrose's buccaneering century at Wellington, which changed the course of the match. Later efforts from Sidebottom, Pietersen, Strauss, Bell and Panesar were similarly crucial. These are encouraging signs of a willingness to stand up and be counted when the game is in the balance.

We learned too that Stuart Broad's time has come. Lanky, tireless, with a dash of his father's aggression, it seems that the lacerations inflicted by Yuvraj in the Twenty20 World Championships have only toughened his character. Imagine the reaction from Steve Harmison had he gone for six sixes in an over. He would probably have retired on the spot. Broad's pace and bounce and his stamina on the last day at Napier demonstrate that there is no longer any need to hope for an increasingly unlikely Harmison revival.

We were reminded that batsmen should look to their strengths in times of doubt. Andrew Strauss's game was built on the drive and cut, with perhaps the odd pull shot thrown in late in the innings. By playing outside his comfort zone in recent months, he'd thrown his wicket away too many times and lost his place. In returning to the simple strengths that had garnered him ten tons in his first thirty Tests, he once again looked like a compact and hard to budge opener and his 177 at Napier was a well-deserved rehabilitation. Given Michael Vaughan's stated preference for batting at three, it is possible that Strauss's triumphal Test homecoming in mid May will be as Alastair Cook's opening partner.

We learnt a little more too about the character of Monty Panesar. Though his fielding seemed to have regressed, that can be tolerated. He seemed more relaxed on this tour than in Sri Lanka, more in control of his emotions and his technique and he saved his best performance for when it was needed most at Napier, bowling with patience and guile to pick up six wickets and secure the series. With the colossus that is Ryan Sidebottom and the emergence of Stuart Broad, we have three quarters of a very promising bowling attack.

But to keep things in perspective, we also learnt that this is as we'd suspected, one of the feeblest New Zealand Test teams in living memory. Their batting, Fleming apart, was desperately thin and when Daniel Vettori was scanning the Napier field for bowling options, he must have felt like old Mother Hubbard. The satisfaction of England's comeback win must be tempered by the realisation that they should not have been behind in the first place.

The good news is that we get to play them again in six weeks time. Without their one genuinely world class batsman and with half the squad, Vettori included, arriving in reluctant instalments via the Indian Premier League, their pockets stuffed with Indian currency, another series victory is in the offing. Later this summer though, the South Africans will arrive. That's when we'll learn just how good this England team is.

• Cricket
• England Cricket