Cricket: New master, new destiny -Interview; Stephen Fleming

No more the silence of lambs. The Kiwis are shedding their meek reputation.

YOU CAN tell how much it hurt England to lose to New Zealand at Lord's last weekend from the column inches given to sledging in the days that followed. Not that it is bothering the Kiwis. "From our point of view we're often looked upon as being meek and quite mild," Stephen Fleming, their impressive young captain, said. "So sometimes we've said, `Let's stand up to these guys, let's be a little bit verbal, to show them, yes, we are in their face'."

Such attitude is certainly not the English perception of New Zealand cricketers. Smiling lambs to the slaughter is more what people have in mind, sheep being another of those misconceptions people have of New Zealand. But times have been changing. When I came to Britain 30 years ago, it was still talked of as "going home". For young New Zealanders these days, Britain is simply another staging-post on the "OE" - the overseas experience. Family connections are still here, and the reciprocal ties remain, but when Britain chose to enter the European Community, New Zealand had to forge its own destiny. It had to do some standing up and New Zealand's 26-year-old captain is a product of that new generation. England made them, but by circumstance rather than design.

Fleming comes with qualities that will carry him well beyond the field of play. Steve Rixon, the Australian coach who has brought on these young Kiwis, believes "he's always been a strong human being internally". He has authority and commands respect. His naturally gracious demeanour makes men in England's cricket establishment wistful that their own players can't be more like this tall, mature New Zealander.

Rixon was a year into his job as New Zealand's coach when Fleming was appointed in 1997 to replace his Canterbury team-mate, Lee Germon, as national captain. He had already stood in as captain in the last Test against Mike Atherton's touring England team, becoming, at 23, New Zealand's youngest captain, and when Germon was sacked before that same season's visit by Sri Lanka, Rixon had no doubt who should replace him.

"Steve was well underdone when he first took over but he was by far the best choice as far as the future goes. So I specifically spent a lot of that second year as coach helping him come through the captaincy area. He'd been pulled out of an area of greyness and thrown into a senior position. But you know he's a guy who's going to back his own judgement.

"He carries himself extremely well. You see a guy who keeps good strong emotions in his face throughout the game and looks like he's in full control out there. He's perceived as a guy who's very cool on the ground and he understands the team requirement versus the individual requirement, blending those together very well. We're seeing what I believe will be the best captain New Zealand has ever had. But," Rixon added, reining in his soothsaying, "there's still work to be done there."

Captaincy has been as much a side of Fleming's game as his elegant left- handed batting, going back to his days in under-age representative cricket. "I was usually picked two or three years before my age, so I'd play a few years and usually in the last year I'd be captain," Fleming said. He began playing cricket at seven, "cricket in the summer, rugby in the winter, the New Zealand way", and his progress through the age-group ranks demonstrates the value of recognising young potential early on.

Fleming played first-class cricket for Canterbury at 17, soon after leaving Cashmere High School in Christchurch, contributed some important innings in New Zealand's 2-0 "Test" victory over John Crawley's England Under- 19 side in 1990-91 and captained his country to a 1-0 series win against Australia Under-19 two seasons later. The following summer, 1993-94, he made "another decisive step towards a Test career", as Wisden's correspondent put it, with an unbeaten hundred for New Zealand Emerging Players against a Pakistan attack headlined by Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram. That Test career set sail a month later, several days short of his 21st birthday, with innings of 16 and 92 against India at Hamilton.

When he came to England in 1994 with the New Zealanders, it was quickly apparent that Fleming shared more than his stylish left-handed batting and a birthday, 1 April, with David Gower. He, too, pulled the short ball to great effect, but if he was largely an on-side player then, his range has broadened since. Early last year I watched him take an unbeaten hundred off Australia under the MCG floodlights and it was obvious he was now a more all-round player.

As Rixon said: "He's very tall on the ball. His hitting down the ground on the on and off drives is very elegant. Like most left-handers, they always look a little better than the right-handers when they're in full stride. He hasn't put the performance on the board yet on this tour but we've still got two Tests to get that amended." England will not need warning.

Fleming is the first to admit that he prefers to be among the runs. "When I'm batting well I find I'm a better captain because I assess the game a little better. I do a lot of planning. I try to be a step ahead of everybody. The toughest times are obviously when your own batting's not going well, but what I've learnt is that the two skills work very well together.

"You can't get gloomy if your batting's not going well because you've got too much to concentrate on. Captaincy gives a purpose to what you're doing, and it's a pretty big purpose. What I look for is to keep an even attitude on the field so that the players always know what they're going to get. And if the times are bad they always know they can come to me and discuss something. The worst thing is an emotional captain, both on and off the field, and that's certainly one thing I've tried not to be."

Not that he's against emotion. "One thing I don't want to take away is the emotion of the game. With the match referees now, everything you do is monitored, and it's quite scary to think that the game could be cloned in such a way that there's no emotion shown."

So what about these charges of sledging?

"As captain, if I think one of my players is personally abusing an opposition player, then it will certainly stop. What can be misconstrued, and I think in the last Test some of it was, is the by-play, or foreplay if you like, when a bowler is trying hard to take a wicket and it's seen as being a personal attack on the batsman. Chris Cairns and Graham Thorpe, for example. All people saw on television was Chris Cairns talking to Graham Thorpe on the way through, but Thorpe had a bit to say as well and I think that's fine. There are a lot of funny things being said out there, but it can be blown way out of perspective.

"The difference is whether it's gamesmanship or personal abuse, and if it's personal abuse we don't want any part of it. We're conscious that we can be role models to young children and we need to project the right kind of image. But you have to weigh that up with the value of what you're doing at the time.

"You're looking at every avenue to take 20 wickets. There were some incidents last Sunday when we got close to winning that perhaps were marginal, and that was dealt with at the time. We got quite anxious when we were held up for a little bit but this time, unlike in the First Test, we went back to doing the simple things and doing them right.

"As a country we haven't got used to winning a lot of Test matches. We've got in positions where we can win Tests, or we're on top, and we back off. We're a little bit shy of pushing that next step. But that will come with experience."

You get the feeling, talking to Stephen Fleming, that the experience will come fast. He could have another 10 years at the top and has the ambition and the character to see New Zealand cricket scale greater heights than ever before. After that it might be time to cross-credit some of those university points he's been storing up. Any career in mind? "Nothing yet," he answers with the kind of easy smile that Englishmen prefer to see on New Zealand faces.

"I'd just like to do some more study."

Much more Mr Nice Guy.