Dylan Cleaver: Fleming turns adversity into weapon to keep Aussies at bay

If you say something often enough and loud enough you can twist a truth into a myth. So it often seems to be the case with Stephen Fleming and captaincy. A small raise of the eyebrow from first slip and he's likened to Montgomery at El Alamein. A shift of a man from five metres in front of square to just behind sees him compared to grand masters like Bobby Fischer.

But yesterday Fleming lived up to the hyperbole.

Forget about the result. Forget about his batting. Instead, marvel at the way he managed to strangle Australia from 140-1 after 30 overs to 236-7 when 280 looked a minimum score.

In truth, Australia were lucky to get that but not a field set in the world can stop Andrew Symonds when he's on fire.

Everything was stacked against Fleming: he lost the toss; the pitch was flat (if a tad two-paced); his seamers couldn't break into the Australian middle order with the new ball; and the umpire refused to lift his finger. But Fleming came into his own.

He set imaginative fields, first to stem the flow of runs from Matthew Hayden and Ricky Ponting's bats, then to make it hard for new batsmen to pick up cheap runs at the beginning of their innings.

Then he called on his lesser bowling lights. Scott Styris was most effective, while getting three cheap overs out of Nathan Astle meant he had a bit of leeway at the death, where they have often been most vulnerable.

He bowled his bowlers in short spells. That meant the bowlers might have struggled to get rhythm but so too did the batsmen.

He let the impressive, and luckless, Dan Vettori have his head while he was bowling, before stepping in after his spell was finished when it looked as if the left-armer wanted to throttle Billy Bowden.

All in all, it was a supreme example of how you can retrieve a hopeless situation with brains, not brawn.

The Australian innings became like a step back to another one-day era.

A time where the so-called dibbly-dobblies strangled the life out of batting orders brought up on a diet of fast bowling or spin with nary in between. Styris with his off-cutters, spinners and seam-up sliders must look a juicy proposition from the dressing room, but altogether more difficult from 22 yards.

The one remaining concern would have to be the ineffectiveness of the new-ball attack, despite Kyle Mills picking up the wicket of Adam Gilchrist on a mistimed back-foot drive.

Daryl Tuffey does a brilliant Daniel Vettori impression: the tongue out, the twirling of the ball, the delivery and the little jump that inevitably follows.

What New Zealand needs to see now, more than ever, is Tuffey do an impersonation of himself - the Tuffey that used to almost guarantee his skipper early wickets. Fleming needs some penetration from his most penetrative seamer.

Without Shane Bond and Jacob Oram, New Zealand's new-ball attack looks thin. Without a fully firing Tuffey, it looks threadbare.