Kane the Great - sporting class personified

Amid the clamour of high-profile sporting performance, in a time when media ensures those who may come from anywhere in the world in a multitude of sports grace our lives on the basis of the supreme execution of their skills, it is satisfying to be able to share when one of our own scales the heights.

Call it the 'Hillary-Tensing Complex', achieving the most incredible heights and allowing reflected glory for all due to the proximity of their daily lives.

Kane Williamson is the latest of this era to walk such sanctified real estate – a cricketing king whose common touch allows New Zealanders, at least, to bask in his accumulated skills.

He is the player of a lifetime, just like rugby's Richie McCaw and Dan Carter. Their difference was that they played together to create the greatest of an already great All Blacks legacy.

For those who have been around a little longer, their class followed the sportspeople of a lifetime achievements of Peter Snell, Richard Hadlee, Peter Blake, Yvette Williams, Valerie Adams, Lisa Carrington, John Walker, Hamish Bond and Eric Murray.

All have carried their class across the mountaintops of the sporting world.

In a sport where New Zealand has less consistency than many might like, Williamson has demonstrated how much individual skill can still impact a team sport.

Thirty-two Test centuries would have been undreamed of by a New Zealand individual even 10 years ago. The demands of modern international cricket reflect that he has scored only 42 centuries in Test and first-class play.

But his appetite for Test cricket is undoubted as he is within two Tests of achieving another century, 100 Tests. His Test average of 55.90 is roughly eight per cent higher than his first-class average of 51.63.

Quality players tend to end up with the captaincy of New Zealand sides, and even in that capacity, Williamson lent his class to the leadership.

How deserving it was for his style of captaincy that he should lead New Zealand to the inaugural ICC World Test championship – an achievement undreamed of by those New Zealand international players who provided the foundation of the game through years of humiliation and struggle until the golden age of the 1980s.

His grace under the intense disappointment of the 2019 World Cup final loss to England demonstrated the Spirit of Cricket as Sir Colin Cowdrey would have intended. Yet, he would have been fully entitled to have exploded at some of the injustices of that game.

And of the many achievements he will eventually be able to reflect upon in his career, the demonstration of his class in seeing New Zealand home with an unbeaten century in the fourth innings of a Test, thus avoiding the indignity of a loss to a cricket nation that belittled the game itself, will rank high.

Plenty of New Zealand teams would have capitulated in the chase of a target like that in Hamilton. But Williamson's effort ensured such an outstanding trophy as the Tangiwai Shield, a prize of unforgettable significance to New Zealanders, would rest first in New Zealand Cricket's trophy cabinet.

Class truly is permanent, and Kane Williamson's contribution to the game will not be confined to his career statistics. He is a talisman of his sporting generation and fit to rank as the finest player New Zealand has produced.