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If Daniel Vettori were English he
would probably be in the process of being
mollycoddled through a series of England A tours
while his game was being allowed to 'develop' in that
dreariest of learning places, the county championship. Instead the 20-year-old son of an Italian immigrant to New Zealand will this week embark on his twenty-third Test match - and last of the current series against England - already established as one of the world's foremost purveyors of orthodox left-arm spin.
To be fair to the England selectors,
even they might have recognised
that
Vettori was an exceptional talent and hurried
him into the Test side, as their
New
Zealand counterparts did, only a
few
days after his eighteenth birthday in February 1997.
To be realistic, though, they
probably
wouldn't for England cricket
selectors
have in recent years shown themselves to have
all the risk-taking derring-do of a
Mothers Union cakes committee (let
us
hope this very morning the revamped selection
panel render this assessment a
gross
calumny).
No one was more surprised than
Vettori
himself when the selectors first
elevated him to the Test side for the second
match of the 1997 home series
against
England. 'It came out of the blue,'
he
says. 'I'd only played two first-class matches and
New Zealand had just saved the
first
Test in Auckland [after it famously
dawned on Danny "the Duck" Morrison just why he
carried a piece of wood out to the
wicket]. I knew the selectors had
been
to the matches I'd been playing in, so obviously they'd
been watching someone, but there
was no
way I thought they'd come to watch
me.'
Vettori is a diverting sight on the
field, and not just because of the
easy
grace of his bowling. In appearance, he is the very
opposite of the stereotypical New Zealand sporting behemoth.
Instead he is loose limbed, slightly shambling and with the
etiolated hue of a student who has spent rather too much time in
his bedsit writing doomed scripts for radio comedy shows. His
unruly blond curls and elliptical, thin-rimmed specs enhance the
impression that he has been transplanted from a university
campus, which, in a sense, he has, his international cricketing
career having thwarted his plans to study for a degree in
pharmacy after he did well in the sciences at school.
He would still, I suspect, slip
quite
contentedly into an undergraduate's
lifestyle if for some reason his cricketing career
were prematurely ended. Talking to
him
last week during the one-day match
against Middlesex at Southgate, he spoke a
touch enviously of his older
brother's
student existence at Waikato
University. Nor has he acquired an undue sense of his
importance, as some have, as a
result
of becoming a Test cricketer. As we
chatted, he politely excused himself to change
out of his shorts as New Zealand
wickets started to fall, but
happily
returned to continue the interview right up until the last
moment before he was required at
the
crease.
Vettori's paternal grandparents
emigrated from Trentino, near
Milan, to
Auckland 50 years ago with an eight-year-old son who
would marry a local girl before moving to nearby Hamilton where
they raised their three children, two sons and a daughter. The
middle child, Daniel Luca Vettori, was keen and adept at sport
from an early age and at St Paul's Collegiate school, where he
went at 13, he played for all five years in the 1st XI. 'I got into the
team as was a medium-pacer,' he says. 'I'd mucked about
bowling spin, though, and because one of my best mates was a
spinner who wanted to bowl medium-pace we agreed to swap.
The school pitch was a bit of a dustbowl so it worked out pretty
well.'
It worked out so well that at 17
Vettori was in the New Zealand
under-19
team that toured England, taking 12 wickets at 24 runs each
in
the youth Test series, five times dismissing David Sales and
Owais Shah, two of our young batting hopefuls who must
have viewed Vettori's subsequent elevation with envy and
longing.
The following January, still not
quite
18, Vettori made his first-class
debut,
playing for Northern Districts against Mike
Atherton's England touring side in his home town of Hamilton.
His initial contribution to the match was a dishevelled entry,
nothing tucked in, after two wickets had fallen to successive
Darren Gough balls to reduce Northern Districts to 54 for eight.
Although Gough's hat-trick ball to Vettori went down the
leg-side, the locals were dismissed for 69 and lost the match
heavily. Vettori, though, emerged unscathed. Most memorably,
the classical high loop of his left-arm finger spin, crucially
carrying the ball well above the eye line, undid Nasser Hussain -
'The ball dropped on him a little and he nicked it to first slip,'
recalls Vettori - as he returned figures of 20-8-30-1. Next,
against Central Districts, his analysis was 68.4-25-142-8 and -
with just nine first-class wickets to his name - he was
summoned to Wellington for the second Test against England.
Vettori was on the losing side, but
again nourished his promising
reputation. 'I remember my first over - to Alec Stewart,
who cut me for three. It was the
over
before lunch and I didn't come on
again
until an hour into the afternoon session when I
bowled a long spell to Hussain and Thorpe. The next morning I
managed to get my first Test wicket.' This time Hussain,
regarded as one of the better Englishmen against spin,
misjudged the line, cutting at a ball that was too straight, and
was caught at first slip.
Vettori ended the series at the top
of
the New Zealand bowling averages -
seven wickets at 29.71 each - and, more improbably,
as their leading batsman having
made 59
runs for only once out (and that
was
run out). He has continued to repay the faith the
selectors put in him at such a young age, passing 50 wickets in
his fourteenth Test, when he was still only 19.
He particularly treasures the six
wickets in an innings he took
against
Sri Lanka in Colombo in June last year, proving his
effectiveness against probably the
world's finest players of flighted
bowling.
Individually, though, Vettori rates
the
Indians Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul
Dravid as the hardest batsmen to bowl to: 'Tendulkar
because he's so destructive and you never know what he's going
to do next. He'll whack balls that you don't think should be
whacked, while Dravid just sits there and plays the right shot to
every ball.'
To improve his chances against
players
such as these, Vettori is
constantly
attempting to cultivate and extend the scope of his
bowling. 'I think I can become a
more
consistent bowler in terms of
length
and line, which sometimes lets me down. Also I am
working on spinning the ball more
and
introducing the chinaman [the
left-armer's wrist spinner], although I haven't got the
confidence to bowl them yet outside
the
nets. The one chinaman I've bowled
on
the tour so far, against Hampshire, got
whacked for four.'
He works hard on his batting, which
has
become a real asset to the Test
side
(he recently made his first first-class hundred
against Leicestershire). 'I've been working on the mental side of
it, not giving my wicket away so that I can be there to bat with
guys a long time.'
Oh that young English players could
do
with their games at international
level
what Vettori has done with his. First, though,
they
have to be picked.
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