Which performance is worse? Otago, a Super rugby base, losing most of its national provincial matches and sitting last of 14 teams, or the New Zealand cricket team crashing to a 4-0 defeat to supposed "minnow" Bangladesh? Both are ignominious.
Both illustrate how respected teams can fall. Both are so poor that some Otago sport supporters have resorted to making jests comparing the two debacles.
Otago tomorrow has the chance to defeat Manawatu and move to second bottom, a long, long way from the top seven and the top grade next year. The season, of course, could have been different with a little luck, and success in the early Ranfurly Shield challenge against Southland. But the performances went from mediocre to worse.
How humiliating to rugby followers, not just the team, to hear commentators talk of the five points that better teams expected to pick up from playing "cellar-dwellers" Otago. How unimaginable that Northland could defeat Otago reasonably comfortably and then say they played below their best.
Solving the woes of the senior Otago representative rugby team, facing problems that go back several years, is likely to take time and determination. The New Zealand cricket team, though, does not have time. It is off next month to India, a powerful XI hardened by victorious battles against Australia.
Then, in February and March next year, comes the World Cup across the Indian sub-continent. Unless New Zealand improves rapidly, our once respected one-day team will itself become an easy-beat cellar-dweller. New Zealand Cricket was correct to call a crisis meeting today. Something is not right in the team, and it needs to be sorted.
Perhaps it is fortunate that the series loss was a comprehensive 4-0 walloping. Because of legitimate excuses - two washed out warm-up games, an improved and rising opposition and slow low pitches - the loss of one or two games would have been disappointing, but would have not prompted soul-searching from within cricket and the barrage of criticism from the public.
An obscure one-day series in Bangladesh would have remained of relatively minor sporting interest, especially with the Commonwealth Games being held at the same time. But the cricketers, by their ineptitude, have managed to focus short-term attention on themselves.
All sorts of reasons are being put forward for the failures: captain Daniel Vettori has too many responsibilities, senior players have become too powerful and arrogant, Bangladesh has grown in stature and ability as Sri Lanka did in the 1990s, the pitches were dreadfully difficult, and so on. There is, indeed, something to many of these, and they should form part of today's discussions.
Fundamentally, however, the vital ingredient that so often rescued New Zealand cricket is missing. While this country has never had the player numbers - nor the environment - to regularly be at the forefront of world cricket, opponents nearly always knew we would fight with grit and guts.
Average players would perform above their ability and the best cricketers would make the most of their talents. We would not have contemplated a full series where quality players like Ross Taylor, Brendon McCullum and Jesse Ryder consistently failed. We would not have seen second-stringers failing to put runs on the board.
Vettori appropriately described the results as indefensible, particularly as this New Zealand team has a core as talented as most sides of the past 60 years. The players now have to look at themselves and their attitudes. They must prove that they are not a bunch of overpaid pretenders.
The team will always lack the depth for prima donnas or those not willing to display bloody-minded determination. If they fail in this, New Zealand Cricket's already fragile support base will drift away. Before long, they will be suffering as badly as Otago rugby is now.
