Of all the jarringly mix-and-match bilateral series staged around the cricketing world the recently-concluded Twenty20 series between West Indies and New Zealand in Florida stands out as the most striking oddity of the last few weeks. Yes: Florida. Land of pastel-shorted golfing pensioners. Land of the beach-front retirement village. Land of, let's face it, pretty much anything but cricket.

This was of course a revenue-raking exercise for both nations, if not now then in the hope of some nebulous future cash-in. Perhaps for the West Indies it might even prove a convenient rallying post in the short term. In Florida with the bat they looked like World Twenty20 contenders, and in the subsequent home ODI series there has been quiet satisfaction at the spectacle of Chris Gayle and Marlon Samuels in tandem in the middle for first time in a long while. But then, the mildest sniff of a West Indies revival is always keenly seized upon, an instant spur to the nostalgia ducts, the adrenal pull of West Indies cricket that still throbs away after all these years of quiet disintegration.

In the midst of which, who spares a thought for New Zealand? In a way there is a peculiar synchronicity between these two declining cricketing middleweights. Where West Indies have long been everybody's second team, New Zealand are everybody's patsies: the uncool West Indies, the distinctly non-calypso island nation inspiring not so much mythologising indulgence as a fond indifference. No Fire in Wellington hagiography has yet to emerge, no shared nostalgia for the glorious 1980s: my Wright, my Edgar, my Ewen Chatfield.

New Zealand's decline is not a fashionable decline. Is it, in fact, even a decline? From the outside it is possible to judge only on results, by which measure New Zealand have been Test match ghosts for the past four years, playing 30 matches and winning just two against nations that aren't either Bangladesh or Zimbabwe. Since the turn of the decade they have played 46 ODIs and won just seven times against the major nations.

Emergency measures are apparent everywhere, from the appointment of the current 21-year-old captain, the admirable and talented Kane Williamson, to the bizarre management duo of John Buchanan and national selection manager Kim Littlejohn, an Australian drafted in from the white hot world of (I'm not making this up) lawn bowls.

So an inexorable drift has continued. Players are siphoned off either permanently or temporarily by county cricket and the IPL. As Gideon Haigh wrote last year in the Australian, "historically a country with a knack of punching above its weight, is locked into a cycle of short Test series against similarly modest opponents and a destructive domestic infatuation with T20 – a cycle of decline steadily corkscrewing it into the ground."

Which sounds pretty conclusive from here. What seems certain is that for now an essential toughness has evaporated. Back in the day New Zealand were, for several years a more fearsome opponent than Australia. When Graham Gooch took 11 – yes! 11! - runs off a single Test Match over from Richard Hadlee in 1986 it was on the six o'clock news on the BBC. And while New Zealand's best players have often had something a little feisty and unfenced about them - Martin Crowe, Chris Cairns, Craig McMillan and John Bracewell all had their moments – the starkness of career path available seems perhaps to have had a disciplining effect, wringing the most out of successive generations of players.

Besieged by competing short-term opportunities it is little wonder the hugely talented, but hugely troubled Jesse Ryder, in particular, appears constantly on the verge of some act of statement-making career-indulgence. Money ruins everything and, as they are in the West Indies, the current heroes of New Zealand cricket seem not just well-rewarded, but buffeted and stretched by the lure of Twenty20 cricket.

That a strong New Zealand is good for cricket is self-evident. A strong anyone is good for cricket. But there is an unexplored sadness about New Zealand's fading away. Overshadowed by the charisma of the West Indies, their stable-mate in peripheral decline, they are perhaps the least widely mourned casualty of cricket's chaotic fiscal rearrangement. Those closer to the action may yet have encouraging news, and certainly talented young players still appear. But from the outside this looks like an alarming recession of influence. This writer, as they might say in The Sunshine State, is missing them already.

Wednesday 18 July, 5pm update

• India have named Yuvraj Singh in their provisional 30-man squad for the ICC World Twenty20 in Sri Lanka this September. The 30-year-old's inclusion comes after he underwent treatment for a rare form of cancer. He last played for his country in a Test against West Indies last November and has since been receiving chemotherapy in America after a germ cell cancer was detected near his lungs.