Cricket: Scoring runs will fix Dan's batting puzzle

Daniel Vettori's batting can be a Rubik's cube. When his footwork and bat speed slide into place, he looks orderly and pleasant to observe, albeit unorthodox.

Push that technique out of alignment and he can look a shambles. Vettori is probably only a few random clicks away from solving the puzzle; looking good from all sides.

But he is only likely to solve the problem by spending hours working on it.

The Black Caps skipper has had a poor run of late, before yesterday's stouter effort. Fans could be forgiven for thinking there was more on his mind than the captaincy, the coaching structure and the general malaise that has engulfed New Zealand cricket. Vettori may have lost his batting touch for the moment but he hasn't lost his dry humour. When asked for a succinct summary of anything he had been working on to break the drought, he responded with: "Scoring runs".

Before yesterday he'd had seven test innings this season, scoring 94 runs at 13.42 with a top score of 41. Compare that to last season where he blazed away, seemingly at will, anchoring the Black Caps from number six several times. Back then he averaged 42.72 from 11 innings, making a hundred and two 50s. His career average ahead of the second Pakistan test had dipped below 30 for the first time in 13 months.

So what has gone wrong?

In his defence, he has lacked lower partners of genuine batting repute.

With Brendon McCullum now opening, Vettori has lost a valuable ally.

Last season the pair had three century partnerships. On two of those occasions, the team were five wickets down for substantially fewer than 200 runs. The pair helped each other graft and succeed.

Of the 18 partnerships Vettori was involved in last season, five were worth more than 50 runs. This season, with McCullum opening the batting, that figure is two 50 partnerships out of nine - one with McCullum during his Hyderabad double century. Last season Vettori's average partnership tally with team-mates was 51 runs; this season it is 22.

In recent seasons, he has been able to trust a finely-tuned pair of eyes behind the most famous spectacles in New Zealand sport. But that reliable, wristy and pragmatic technique has been subject to some wobbles of late.

Vettori has regularly misjudged the line, length and sometimes pace of deliveries, trying to win back his powers with the willow.

In the shorter forms he is often witnessed edging across in front of his stumps, looking for those magical flicks for easy runs on the leg side. That habit has translated into tests. Five of his last eight dismissals in one-dayers and three out of seven in tests have involved forcing balls in some way into the leg side.

The test evidence suggests he is shuffling across his stumps, too. Last season in tests he was out LBW once in 11 innings, this season it is four in seven, including the last three times at bat.

Vettori also struggles when squeezing cut shots behind square from balls that are too straight, or pitched on a good length. There is little room for error and the odds have defeated him recently.

As with most things in cricket, the solution is simple but difficult to achieve. He could look to play straighter ("in the V") early in the innings to lessen the margin for error by using the full face of the bat. Leave the back cuts, paddles, sweeps and pulls until he has 20 runs on the board. But that advice could apply to a few Black Caps ...

Such conservative tactics are all quite self-explanatory and, granted, it is different once you're facing 145km/h deliveries in the middle. But it seems to work for most of the best players in the world, barring perhaps Virender Sehwag.

The reality is that with a flaky top six, accentuated by the shambles at Hamilton, New Zealand needs the skipper to start underwriting their innings again at once.