Here's a snapshot into the world of Andre Adams. Take it with a decent pinch of salt, however, as sledging stories are like Chinese whispers - embellished in the re-telling.

The scene is Eden Park's outer oval, a normally pleasant greensward except for this four-dayer, the strip in the middle is proving a little too green for Northern Districts.

The details are a little sketchy but the story goes largely like this: Northern had already failed in their first innings and start their second 117 runs behind.

They lose their first wicket with just nine on the board and schoolboy phenom Kane Williamson strides to the crease in his first-class debut.

Williamson had made just two in the first innings before falling leg before to Adams and in a game where the in-form seamer is jacking it around like Richard Hadlee, it seems crazy to let Williamson be hung out to dry at No 3 but that's a whole other story.

Anyway, before long Williamson finds himself facing up to Adams, still to get off the mark.

The first ball rears off a length and goes through to the keeper (Adams can be sneaky quick when he wants to be).

"What the hell are you doing out here? You're late for school," Adams says, with some words either carefully edited or deleted altogether.

Next ball is another short one that sits Williamson on his bum. More fatherly advice dressed up as invective follows from Adams.

Next ball is full, raps Williamson on the pads and he's gone, stone-cold motherless lbw.

Williamson trudges off, now realising what first-class cricket is all about.

Even if the story is only half true, it offers two useful lessons.

1) Williamson, who many rate as the brightest batting hope in the country, should be managed carefully, and;

2) Adams is the dominant force in first-class cricket at the moment and, with Shane Bond injured, the best seamer in the country, period.

Herein lies the problem.

Adams has already turned down the opportunity to play for New Zealand, rejecting Sir Richard Hadlee's offer to join the squad in South Africa for the one dayers and offering a few words of explanation that were not necessarily conciliatory either.