Cricket: Vettori - Breaking all the rules

Daniel Vettori. Photo / Getty Images

DANIEL VETTORI has swatted, nurdled and slugged his way to an extraordinary career with the bat using his much-vaunted hand-eye co-ordination and unorthodox technique.

He honed it batting at No 6 in the St Paul's Collegiate first XI in the mid-1990s. A love of baseball also figures prominently in its make-up.

Even in those school days, the 32-year-old was remembered as capable of slapping his first ball for four in tight situations.

He has since found a niche in the New Zealand middle to lower order. His test average of 30.64 over 107 tests belies the figure of 39.64 he has achieved in the 34 matches since becoming test captain in November 2007 against South Africa.

The captaincy may have passed to Ross Taylor but, in the first innings at Brisbane, Vettori trumped the top order (again) with 96 as he kept New Zealand in the contest against Australia.

As Vettori assumes his trademark upright stance with supple wrists tilting the bat toe slightly towards the stump cam, few players can claim to have given cricket's strokemaking manual more of a shake with such consistent results from unorthodox application. Here is a selection
of four Vettori specialties that have granted him his own batting genre.

- Andrew Alderson

The drive on slap

Useful against slow bowlers to bamboozle a conventional field. Vettori uses his feet to get to the pitch of the ball but just when it looks like he is about to thread it through extra cover, he rolls his wrists and slaps the ball to the leg side of the stumps and wide of a desperately diving (or vacant) mid-on. Guaranteed two and possibly four runs. It resembles a front foot pull shot tweaked 45 degrees.

The front of square swat
This shot's mirror image on a wagon wheel is probably the square drive between cover and point. As with the square drive, the ball is generally pitched up at about half volley length outside off stump. The difference is Vettori then swings in an arc through the legside. That sees the ball shoot in front of square leg but backward of mid-wicket. It is ingenious because if timed, it has too much pace for a leg side sweeper.

Shuffle, stand and swish

A variation of the classical square and late cuts, Vettori plays his adaptation in two ways. One is the upper cut ramp. He relies on his amazing hand-eye co-ordination to take his back foot into line with a ball outside off stump and pushes his bat upwards as the delivery passes outside off stump. Alternatively he hits down on the ball and it squirts through the slips. Both shots are played with hands close to the body.

Threading the eye of the needle

The bowlers never see this peach coming. They pitch short with a delivery that looks set to bounce well over middle stump if it doesn't hit the batsman. Vettori shifts across the face of the stumps after the
point of delivery and - using his best baseball bat swing and flexible wrists - paddles the ball behind square for at least a single. Unorthodox but effective . . . if you've got the eye and the mettle to execute it.