‘Hope to turn on the heat’

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At just 22, Kane Williamson might still be learning to cope with pressures of playing at the highest level. And perhaps his smiling, boyish face may only serve to pass him off as a small fish in a sea of monsters.

But the right-handed batsman, who already has 14 Tests and 29 one-dayers under his belt, and who recently became New Zealand’s ODI captain, is surely not a pushover. Ask the Ahmedabad crowd. It was at the Sardar Patel Stadium that Williamson hit a much-appreciated 139 in the drawn first Test against the hosts in 2010, thereby becoming only the eighth New Zealander to score a century on Test debut.
So how does he train his mind before taking on the big sharks of the game? For Williamson, the solution is rather too simple. “Being young or senior is not really a big thing. It’s the performance on the pitch that matters. If you put runs on the board or have wickets under your belt... that’s all that matters,” he said.
It is this youthful exuberance that Williamson hopes will influence his team, devoid of the veteran Daniel Vettori, when they take on India in the first Test at the Rajiv Gandhi International Cricket Stadium here on Thursday.
“Sure we miss a few senior figures. We have a lot of youngsters among us. But we are ready to fight it out,” Williamson said, who rephrases the term ‘inexperience’, put forward by a reporter, to ‘youthfulness’.
Touted to be the ‘next big thing’ in Kiwi cricket, Williamson may not have enjoyed a good start to his captaincy in the ODIs, losing four out of five matches in West Indies — where the “conditions are pretty similar to the sub-continent.” But ask him what New Zealand need to do beat India in their own backyard, and Williamson has yet another ‘simple’ solution. “To do well in sub-continent, you need to score 500-plus runs.”
“The last time we played here (in 2010), we scored near 500 in the first two Tests and we fared pretty well,” he said referring to the drawn Tests in the 2010 series. “So we need to score big. That is the key.”
So what changes when Williamson plays under Ross Taylor, the Test captain? Once again, a very simple answer. “When you are batting, it doesn’t matter who the captain is. On the pitch, it is your decisions and your shot-making that matters,” he says.
Well, one just hope his ‘cool’ nature will remain this way when he takes to the pitch in Hyderabad, unusually hot for this time of the year.