Warm handout for golf team

Aotea College golfers will have their game enhanced by the skins of a New Zealand pest.

Kapiti Coast businessman Greg Howard presented the school’s golf team with possum skin golf gloves on March 13.

Aotea, one of six teams in the region sponsored by Fila, which Mr Howard has a contract with. He secured the deal in 2011, with Fila affiliated with a number of top golfers.

He said obtaining the licensing agreement to market the gloves under Fila in the South Pacific was a huge boost for his Planet Green business and he hoped it would result in selling 300,000 gloves in the next three years. What a revelation Brendon McCullum has been as the New Zealand cricket captain this summer.

There’s been an urgency and vitality about his leadership that has been lacking for several years. His immediate predecessors, Daniel Vettori and Ross Taylor, were more inclined to let a game meander without forcing the issue.

McCullum is always trying to make something happen. He’s continually changing his field to unsettle the batsman, and has done well marshalling a workmanlike but not particularly threatening bowling attack.

It helps when the captain is one of the team’s best players, as is McCullum.

He took over the captaincy in South Africa, where in the test matches he scored 7, 51, 13, and 11. It doesn’t sound much, but McCullum’s courage and fight opening the batting against the formidable Steyn, Morkel and Philander sent an important message to his team.

That half- century, scored after 21⁄ hours of hard graft, was especially admirable.

He was hit repeatedly, but on a bowlerfriendly wicket showed tremendous application.

In the home series against England, he dropped to No 6 in the order and scored 74, 69, 38 and 67 not out. His strokeplay against tiring bowlers has often given the New Zealand innings a vital injection.

McCullum is also brilliant fieldsman. He could keep wickets, of course, but in the covers or in close is dynamic.

England skipper Alastair Cook arrived in New Zealand with a growing reputation as a captain, but McCullum has outshone him.

McCullum became the New Zealand captain in unhappy circumstances, elevated after Ross Taylor had been shafted and the New Zealand Cricket spin doctors had run a cover-up exercise. Having McCullum as captain wasn’t the problem, but the way it was done was shameful.

In his first test in charge, in Cape Town, McCullum batted first and watched helplessly as his team was bundled out for 45. He has turned things around since.

New Zealand won the one-day series in South Africa, impressive against the world’s top team.

England arrived here ranked No 2 in the world. The Twenty20 and one-day series went to a third match and in the tests, New Zealand have generally had the better of proceedings.

The livewire, feisty attitude of McCul- lum has had much to do with that.

Stephen Fleming stands out among New Zealand captains because of his careful planning and good strategies. But for innovation and ability to dominate a situation, only Tom Lowry in the 1930s and Geoff Howarth in the early 1980s get near to matching McCullum.

In passing, spare a thought for Taylor. He looks distinctly uncomfortable in the New Zealand team setup.

He is playing under a coach, Mike Hesson, who didn’t rate him and told him so, and with a back-up management group that chose to support – publicly at least – the murky story New Zealand Cricket was running about the change of captaincy.

Since he has returned to the New Zealand team, Taylor has made a one-day century, but has not been his normal, composed self in the tests.

I would not be surprised if he pulled out of the team to England in a few months’ time. His position is untenable really, more’s the pity.