Getting too comfortable with losing

Before we get too far into this great Summer of 07–08 I want to express some con­cern at how easy young Vettori seems to be tak­ing defeat. He’s tak­ing it gra­ciously, mag­nan­im­ously and gen­er­ously to be sure. But he doesn’t look like he hates los­ing, like it eats away at him, cor­rod­ing his very soul.

In this he reminds me of anoth­er young cap­tain who was sup­posedly “the chosen one”, annoin­ted and appoin­ted with the full sup­port of the great minds at HQ. Taine Randell, we were told, had cap­tained every New Zealand age group rep­res­ent­at­ive rugby side and was pos­it­ively destined to be All Black cap­tain. And so he became.

And with a win-draw-loss record of 12−1−9 we got pretty used to see­ing Taine giv­ing “full cred­it” to the oppos­i­tion and after a while it looked like it didn’t even hurt.

Dan Vettori’s win-loss record in inter­na­tion­als before tak­ing over the job per­man­ently from Stephen Fleming was a very cred­it­able 8 from 11. Since the Twenty20 World Cup, it has been P9 W2 L7.

Tomorrow we take on Australia again, this time in Sydney. And let’s hear no more about Tait’s sus­pect action. Of course, he chucks- but if we are going to worry about him then we should take a look at Kyle Mills and that is a bit too close to home.