Cricket: IPL not a distraction, says Vettori

Black Caps skipper Daniel Vettori. Photo / Paul Taylor

New Zealand cricket captain Daniel Vettori insists the Indian Premier League Twenty20 auction held Saturday night (NZT) did not play on the minds of his team during the humiliating 10-wicket defeat to Pakistan inside three days in the first cricket test at Seddon Park.

Vettori was among those to go under the hammer in India on Saturday night, at the end of the second day of the test, with the Bangalore franchise picking him up for $NZ723,000.

Batsman Ross Taylor was bought by Rajasthan for $1.3 million, Brendon McCullum fetched $620,000 in being signed by new team Kochi, while two players not involved in the test, James Franklin and Nathan McCullum, were picked up by Mumbai and Pune, respectively, each for $131,000.

New Zealand team manager Dave Currie said on Saturday the team's focus was purely on the test, and Vettori reiterated that sentiment last night when quizzed at a post-match media conference, though their second innings batting performance in being bundled out for 110 on a good batting surface was hardly concrete proof of those claims.

"No, I don't think so," Vettori said when asked whether the auction had impacted on their performance.

"Obviously those things can be misconstrued. It is part of cricket and you have to deal with it, but if you use it as an excuse for your performance then that's not good enough.

"It shouldn't be a motivating factor for your performance, either, it's about test match cricket. That's why most of us play the game, to perform at test level."

Meanwhile, Vettori's health has improved and his blood tests have come back clear after he struggled with a mystery illness during Saturday's play.

"I feel a lot better," he said. "I need a couple of days rest but I'll be right for the (second test, at Wellington starting on Saturday).

"I think I may have caught something in the subcontinent but sometimes you don't even know what those things are. It was a 72-hour thing and I'm starting to feel a lot better now."

New national cricket coach John Wright realises the challenge he has taken on with the Black CAps is much greater than he anticipated and that he might have to resort to basics, teaching most of his batsmen how to craft long innings.

"It's going to take some time and we need to find batsmen that are prepared to be very patient and really want to stay at the crease," Wright told Radio Sport. "The talent's there but we've really got a bit of teaching to do.

"I think the reality is that if you look at learning to bat, particularly in a test match, we've probably been more exposed in other forms of the game.

"I know that we've got some really talented ball-strikers, they're good kids. That's part of the role of coaching to help them on their way.

"You've got to have that absolute desperation, particularly in five-day cricket, that you want to occupy the crease and you've got to learn to sell your wicket very dearly."

Another former New Zealand opener, Mark Richardson, said New Zealand had fielded its best team against Pakistan but players did not seem to understand the demands of test cricket.

Richardson, who counted the forward defensive as his best shot and was famous for playing long and often tedious innings, said the players had to "work out this game of test cricket."

"What I'm not seeing is a test match sort of process out of them," Richardson said.

"Not everyone to be successful at test match cricket needs to bat like me. It wouldn't work for a lot of people. A lot of the dismissals I saw yesterday were just bad strokes, bad thinking."

- NZPA/AP