Littlejohn looks to coaches for help

Kim Littlejohn is confident his key advisors - the major association coaches - will be objective enough to make New Zealand's new selection system work. Littlejohn began his new role as national selection manager this week, having relocated from Melbourne, where he was the high-performance manager with Bowls Australia.

His appointment was part of a radical new direction for New Zealand under the director of cricket John Buchanan, who wanted to professionalise the selection process. Under the new system, Littlejohn and the head coach John Wright will form a two-man selection panel, with Wright to have the casting vote when choosing the final XI for a match.

Littlejohn will be limited in the amount of cricket he will be able to watch live but a key part of the system involves him taking feedback from the six major association coaches. And while the more players a provincial side delivers to the Black Caps, the better that coach will look, Littlejohn dismissed any concern they would simply push their own men.

"I'm very confident [it will work]," Littlejohn said. "In some cases you'd obviously expect the major association coaches to put forward their players but I think there are some checks and balances in the system, where it's not just one coach's view, we're looking at the views of six coaches on a particular player. That will make sure we get a good open and honest opinion on any particular player that we might be looking at."

Buchanan said by streamlining the selection process, there should be greater communication and feedback, which sometimes wasn't the case with traditional selection panels. The changes have also continued his approach of placing more accountability on coaches - hence Wright taking such an important role in choosing the team and the provincial coaches being included.

"From a selection point of view, three or four or sometimes five selectors are involved in and around a cricket team and I think that provides many a time miscommunication and poor feedback to players and coaches," Buchanan said. "The key people who understand where individual cricket athletes are at are our coaches, so they become pretty integral."

All the same, Littlejohn said he would be aiming to watch "a reasonable amount" of domestic cricket this summer. He spent his first few days on the job at New Zealand's training camp in Christchurch, which helped him familiarise himself with the squad.

"It's given me the opportunity to get to know the players and put faces to names," he said. "My understanding of the players is a little limited in the sense that it's just been what I've been able to watch from Australia on television and read in the press, but I've done a lot of research over the last few weeks to get up to speed."