“I hope Twenty20 will only be part of the landscape and not the future of the game. I personally love the more traditional forms of the game that are Test cricket and one-day cricket” - Daniel Vettori, World Twenty20 tournament, September 2007

So, put yourself in Daniel Vettori's shoes this morning. How are you feeling? A touch nervous, surely, with the Test not far away. A little apprehensive, perhaps, given the callow nature of your top six. Unprepared, too, I should imagine because the injury to your spinning finger has necessitated a spell on the sidelines and has meant that you have not completed a match on tour so far. Mind you, if you had been on the plane with the rest of your team, you might have got a few more overs under your belt. Funny how things work out, eh?

It has been a low-key start to the tour. To say that your team have flown under the radar would be to exaggerate the interest. Well, you will be used to that, I suppose; you have always revelled in your underdog status. Not that the lack of interest has been a bad thing. It has meant precious little comment on your decision to play for Delhi Daredevils in the Indian Premier League instead of braving the first two chilly weeks of May in England.

Not only you, of course, but your vice-captain, too, and three other senior players. About half your Test team, in other words. A little odd, that. How do the rest of your boys feel? Jealousy is never a good thing in a team sport. Still, it is good to know that you are more enthusiastic about Twenty20 now than you were during its inaugural World Cup.

Can you imagine the hoo-ha if the England captain had not arrived with his team. Five-and-a-half years ago, you may remember, Nasser Hussain was criticised for not travelling on the same plane with his team to Australia. But he went early so that his child would be born in Australia and by doing so made sure that he did not miss any cricket. Other than that, it is hard to recall any other recent examples of a captain travelling separately from his team. The end of amateurism was supposed to put a stop to all that. Maybe you would like to walk out on to the ground this morning from a different entrance, too.

Now I know that John Bracewell pretty much runs the show off the field, but you will have wanted to give the boys a final few words before today's game. What did you say, I wonder. You are too bright and too articulate to talk in the usual cricketing clichés, but even so it is not as though you could have said, “We're all in this together, boys” with a straight face.

At some point over the past couple of days, you will have wanted to look your team-mates in the eye and tell them what you expect. Did you secretly feel embarrassed? For while that authority and respect springs from many sources - ability as a player, tactical nous, wise judgment, honesty - it also often comes from the fact that a captain should not ask his players to do anything that he is not prepared to do. Such as turn up on time.

You will know - as your predecessor, Stephen Fleming, did - how important the captain is to the team. You will be their first public face this morning when you come out for the toss all neat and tidy in your blazer (as long as you do not forget it, as you did last winter on two occasions). It will be you, not “Bracers”, who makes decisions on the field, according to the pattern of the game and the mood of your bowlers. It will be you who must rally the team if things start to go wrong. The bond between the captain and his players is at the heart of every good or bad team.

Obviously, the opening two weeks of the tour did not strike you as very important. Other leaders of the past would not agree. Ian Chappell, the former Australia captain, thought the early weeks of a tour a crucial time, particularly if you had a bunch of young, inexperienced players. It is a time to bond (sorry about the cliché) and to develop friendships and understandings; a time when, as captain, you find out how certain players tick.

Chappell used to say that his door was always open if any player needed to get anything off his chest. Now I know the miracle of Skype means that you can have a face-to-face chat with a player from thousands of miles away, but I am not sure that this was the type of pastoral care that Chappell was talking about.

Those advantages that accrue from being together from the start are hard to quantify. But there would have been obvious practical advantages, too, for you and the other four. Is Kyle Mills happy with the Duke ball after only one outing on tour? Has Ross Taylor (26 runs from four first-class knocks) come to terms with English conditions?

I wanted, if I may, to draw your attention to something else you said. Reflecting on your decision to miss the first two weeks, you said: “I'm not really worried about how it looks. I'm worried about how it affects the team and the dynamic. I know it'll be a huge opportunity for some young guys to be assimilated into a New Zealand side. We go away on most tours and don't have any warm-up games. I don't think we can say that we all need to turn up on the same day because that's the way it's supposed to be, because we don't do it on any other tour.”

Sorry to be awkward, but your team played warm-up matches on virtually every tour you have been on. In South Africa, last time, for example, you won your first warm-up match, lost the second before getting pulverised in the first Test. After that defeat, Justin Vaughan, your boss and the chief executive of New Zealand Cricket, said that “a lack of cricket left us cruelly exposed”. Given that you are ranked No7 in the world and are notoriously poor travellers, don't you think that you might have wanted as much preparation as possible?

Obviously, your decision to miss the start of the tour in favour of a format of the game for which you previously did not show much enthusiasm reflects the changing nature of the cricketing landscape. Not long ago an England tour would have been the summit of a New Zealand cricketer's ambition. Not any more, it seems. You had Vaughan over a barrel, didn't you? You left the decision to him, but really you knew that pragmatism dictated that he could not prevent you from going. He knows, as you do, that it is the only way of preventing more players joining the IPL and being lost to New Zealand for good.

The captaincy of your country is like a nice cake, don't you think? There are the trimmings and the icing on top - the fat contracts, the acclaim, the public profile - but there is a lot of effort that is needed to make it work. While everyone else can just turn up and enjoy the finished product, the chef is responsible for making it edible. Responsibility. It is a key word, wouldn't you say? All that extra time in the kitchen that no one else sees.

Like most people in the game, I am delighted that cricketers are finally getting well paid. But invalidating contracts and ignoring agreements are among the less edifying sights of this rupee-fuelled frenzy. You did not have to accept the captaincy of your country, just as New Zealand did not have to accept to play four warm-up matches. But to accept and then turn up with just over half a team is downright rude. Clearly, in this new world, old-fashioned manners count for little.