Paul Lewis: Silence often best answer

NZ batting coach Mark Greatbatch. Photo / Photosport.

Sometimes the best thing to do is to shut up. While it is admirable that people like Heath Mills and Mark Greatbatch front the media as much as they do, sometimes the discipline of silence is preferable.

Greatbatch, bless him, told us this week that the Black Caps lacked mental hardness. Noooo. Get away.

All that well-intentioned statement did was to underline the fact that the man who bears most of the brunt of the label of 'coach' in Daniel Vettori's unpopular cricket structure had come to the same conclusion as the rest of New Zealand - only about a month later. He looked out of touch. Just like the team.

Mills, the head of cricket's players' association, defended his charges against a groundswell of public feeling that they are paid too much and are not competing well enough because they are in no danger of losing their income. He went on radio in an ill-advised attempt to show that, while the players were a 'stakeholder' in New Zealand Cricket, the tail wasn't wagging the dog.

But, once you sorted through all the management jargon and buzzwords that proliferate in New Zealand sport these days, it just looked as though the players were alarmed that they were being fingered for the structural and admin issues surrounding the Black Caps, as well as loss of form - and got their mouthpiece on the job.

Mills also made it seem as though coach-in-waiting John Wright would be welcomed by the Black Caps. The real meaning was that he would be welcomed only on their terms.

This merely reinforced the perception that surrounds this team - that the players are running the show; the exact opposite of what Mills was trying to address in speaking out.

Mills did make the reasonable point that the players can drop down the ladder of payments with poor performance. The top 20 players are contracted to NZ Cricket, the top bloke earning $177,000 and the bottom three $72,000 a year. But New Zealand has a thin pool of cricketers. NZC keeps telling us the best players are in the team. So relativity on a table of payments is really only a minor point when it's pretty difficult to get yourself off the gravy train. Many in New Zealand would be perfectly happy with an income of $72k per annum for playing cricket, ta very much.

Mills might just have missed the overwhelming public perception that the cricketers have begun to play at a level far below that of their remuneration. The most oft-heard criticism is that, in business, performances like those of the Black Caps' would be rewarded with an open door and a shove through it.

A misfiring employee of Fonterra, for example, may not be told: "Well, we're not happy with you but we are just going to drop you down the table of payments a little." More likely, they will be marched to the door of a milk tanker, told to get in and dropped off on the Desert Road with a pottle of yoghurt, some milk powder and a wee letter which begins 'To Whom It May Concern' ...

In October 2009, a team led by Vettori (and supposedly devoid of any meaningful input from then coach Andy Moles) swept almost all before it; losing to Australia in the final of the Champions Trophy. It was essentially the same side as today; the forerunner to Vettori's assumption of the greatest amount of power vested in a New Zealand player.

He was captain, selector and widely regarded as 'coach' before Greatbatch arrived - in what now seems largely a PR tactic designed to give the impression that someone other than Vettori was driving the bus, clipping the tickets, pushing the button for passengers to alight and interviewing the engineers who'd recondition the buses in the garage.

Two weeks after that Champions Trophy final, Moles was gone. Since then, New Zealand have gone from those feisty competitors to that anaemic, lost bunch in Bangladesh and India. For the first time, fans were forced to an unpalatable conclusion: We looked incompetent.

So if the team of October 2009 is pretty much the same as that of 2010, what's caused the rot?

It goes far deeper than this column can hope to traverse in the space available here - to matters like the inability to produce many up-and-coming stars and that we are not as strong a cricketing nation as once we were.

But a contributing factor is surely that some New Zealand cricketers, when all their income is added up, reputedly earn more than All Blacks.

Ironically, the new world order which has dished up a competence-sinking calendar of lesser events to New Zealand cricket has also produced more wealth.

NZC has had to look after its players to ensure they do not escape to the greater riches on offer in Twenty20; even as they play lesser matches and as the players' subconscious maybe drifts to thoughts of greater rewards.

So the players are in a powerful position: sellers who know that the buyer (NZC) sorely wants what they have and that there are few alternatives.

Whatever the cause, the Vettori structure has led the game in this country to a much lower point than ever did the much-derided Moles. John Bracewell now looks like the Messiah.

Read what estimable cricket commentator Jonathon Millmow, of the Dominion Post, had to say about the Moles days back in October 2009: "Bad habits have also been allowed to go unpunished and Vettori has been forced to take up the slack. Vettori is not Superman. Next he'll be driving the team bus."

Well, Vettori is driving the bus - down what seems to be a never-ending tunnel where the light turns out to be a crack in the walls. Vettori is indeed not Superman. Player power has turned into player puzzlement. They look mystified about what is wrong.

The only way back is to re-engage with what made us strong in previous years: a structure headed by a coach whose word, if not law, is still the last say; someone who can make objective judgements and marshal the qualities New Zealand has previously harnessed to touch the sky ... occasionally.

Mills might be better off publicly lobbying for NZ Cricket to do that; or another solution - rather than defending their earning power or supposed lack of influence.

Or he could employ silence.