Cricket: Time marching on as Hesson ponders future

With New Zealand on the cusp of another semifinal at an international one-day cricket tournament, coach and chief selector Mike Hesson must ask himself a major question when the Champions Trophy ends.

Can he guide the same group of players (or close to it) to the 2015 World Cup at home, or will he need to nurture a new generation of Young Guns?

There is no simple answer and he can't phone a friend, ask the audience or go 50-50. In a perfect world, Hesson would opt for the status quo but, being a meticulous planner rather than rash gambler, he will want insurance, especially seeing success (i.e. World Cup semifinals and preferably better) is pivotal to his legacy as coach.

New Zealand is the oldest side at the Champions Trophy. Eight of the 15 players are 30-somethings, which may offer an insight as to why the country's 50-over side is perceived as far more threatening than their test counterparts.

In the ODI squad Daniel Vettori, Kyle Mills and Grant Elliott are 34, Luke Ronchi, James Franklin and Nathan McCullum are 32 and Ian Butler and captain Brendon McCullum are 31. Look into a 2015 crystal ball and there are queues at the physiotherapist's table.

Compare that to the test squad where just four players - Brendon McCullum, Peter Fulton, Bruce Martin and Mark Gillespie - are over 30.

Yet the experience in the ODI squad appears to have indirectly shaped the ODI series victories away against South Africa and England. Success in the Champions Trophy is also a possibility. Players like Mills, Elliott and the McCullum brothers have more often played cameo roles securing key victories compared to the star performances of Kane Williamson, Mitchell McClenaghan, Tim Southee, Ross Taylor and Martin Guptill. With most of the Kiwi 30-somethings balancing sporting careers, young families and mortgages, they offer life experience and mature grounding to a team.

Vettori remains the real conundrum as a bona fide match-winner. The way he set up a player of Sri Lankan Mahela Jayawardene's quality for dismissal with his fourth ball after a 26-month hiatus from ODIs was a revelation.

He then bowled his 10 overs for 23 against a cautious Australia. However, a lot of resource has gone into maintaining his fitness. Is he a realistic chance of sustaining that for 20 months? It's a question which could go some way to defining New Zealand's World Cup campaign.

Looking at the issue through Hesson's eyes, it is a stretch to say he's completely enamoured of the quality of replacements rolling through. Batsmen like Colin Munro and the Cachopa brothers, all-rounders Corey Anderson and Jimmy Neesham, pace bowlers Matt Henry and Jacob Duffy and spinners Nick Beard and Ish Sodhi were names regularly wafted about summer barbecue selection debates. But each player is a work-in-progress rather than a dead cert for a sustained international career like Williamson, Southee and Taylor before them.

Hesson's got to hope the NZC high performance department, led by director of cricket John Buchanan, can pipe through at least a couple of reliable names for the 2015 ODI team sheet. That remains another major question to be answered.