Peter Williams: Time for NZC to make the Wright move

The New Zealand cricket team retrieved some ground but still made complete goats of themselves with that first up result in Abu Dhabi.

The players led the charge to get rid of the coach and then copped one of their worst losses of recent times.

Andy Moles wouldn't have made any difference had he been there but that's not the point.

Hasn't the time come when this power of the players was reined in by their employers, or at least harnessed until there was some semblance of consistency about the team's results?

The way the show is being run at the moment, Daniel Vettori is, by some distance, the most powerful man in New Zealand cricket.

I've followed the game and its history in this country most of my life and I doubt there's ever been a time since the New Zealand Cricket Council was formed in December 1894 when a player held as much influence on the field, at head office and around the board table.

Vettori is undoubtedly the best player in the country and in a team that can only be regarded as dreadful under-performers, he wields huge influence simply by virtue of his on-field deeds.

Even some of the great New Zealand players and personalities of generations past - like Tom Lowry, captain for the first two tours of England, and manager too for the second in 1931, or John R Reid, captain, star all-rounder, national selector, and de facto coach from 1958 to 1965 - never seemed to pull as many strings as Vettori does today.

Ironically New Zealand's best teams - those with Richard Hadlee and Martin Crowe at their peak between 1985 and 1990 - had so many good players that no individual was able to dictate issues like Vettori can today.

But if that era of two decades ago set the benchmark for New Zealand cricket (and, frankly, I challenge anyone to find a better time for the game here), then doesn't it make sense that some of the expertise from those players is instilled into today's underwhelming generation?

Yet Vettori is reportedly against the appointment of John Wright as the team's coach. Here's a man with 35 years of successful professional cricket as a player and coach at the highest of levels, yet because the captain and a few senior players seem to think he isn't "organised" enough, he wouldn't be the right man for the job.

Now Wright was known as 'Shake' in his playing days. That's because he never packed his cricket bag neatly and had to shake the contents onto the dressing room floor in order to find things.

He never seemed to be best friends with a hairbrush or razor on game day either, but so what?

When he walked on the park there was no fiercer, prouder, or more determined competitor.

He was also organised enough as a coach to inspire India to a famous come-from-behind series win over Australia in 2001.

Watching numerous capitulations by the New Zealand batting line-up, in all forms of the game in recent years, don't you just wish that some of what John Wright had as a player could be instilled in the current team?

I'm not holding my breath though. New Zealand Cricket passed on Wright for the coach's job in 1999 because he was regarded as "indecisive and unspecific" and there was concern he wouldn't be able to apply his cricketing and people skills in the team environment over a period of time to enhance performance. Results elsewhere suggest that was twaddle.