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Roger Twose, at the age of 31, has reached a third high point in his cricketing career as New Zealand prepare for their World Cup semi-final against Pakistan at Old Trafford today.

He always said that a man born in a car - his mother was surprised by his appearance on the way to hospital in Torquay - was destined to be someone a bit different, and New Zealand can be grateful this Englishman decided to follow his instincts and seek his fortune away from his home country.

Now, with Twose established in the team after a rocky initial ride, New Zealand are one match from their first final, and Lord's is a venue that helped shape Twose's future during an extraordinary four years as one of Warwickshire's driving forces.

An ebullient, emotional and modest man, he shook hands with failure at Warwickshire on occasions, as he did when trying to establish himself in his adopted country, but he has proved sensible enough to enjoy his successes. His Test start with New Zealand was rickety, with rain and circumstances conspiring to make him wait, as an opening batsman, for 10 days of cricket before he faced his first ball.

He was dropped for a year after a grim series in the West Indies and was not even listed among the World Cup training squad last year. Little could he have imagined that he and his team-mates would be ``going berserk'' with joy at qualifying for the semi-finals, thanks to a Twose-inspired win over India at Trent Bridge last Saturday.

He said: ``We've got to the semi-finals, and I don't want to rest on my laurels. I'm sure the whole team believe we can go all the way now.''

He contributed his share of the overwhelming self-belief that swept Warwickshire to their treble-winning summer in 1994. Twose once referred to his team-mate Brian Lara pointedly as the second best left-hander in the world. It was a wry joke on a West Indian who had recently taken 375 off England in a Test match and would go on to make 501 in a county match. But Lara has never reached a World Cup final, and perhaps Twose will.

Twose had a very good year in county cricket in 1992 and a very bad one the following season, passing fifty once in 35 innings in all cricket. But it was 1993 that did much to mould his character, especially the day he went to the crease with one ball remaining and with Warwickshire needing two runs to beat Sussex in the NatWest Trophy final at Lord's. In the light of his sequence of failures, he succeeded when he could have cracked under the strain.

At the time, scoring those two runs at the right time was the height of his fame, but it proved to be just the start. A few years ago he said: ``Every time I see that ball on television I get a pulsating heart, and yet at the time I knew what I had to do - just watch the ball and hit the ball. I sometimes wonder how I would have been accepted if I hadn't hit it. One of my philosophies is focus. My focus was on the ball and nothing else at Lord's that day.''

His hunger for cricket was inspired by his uncle, Roger Tolchard, an England player, and his development as a schoolboy cricketer at King's Taunton followed a typical pattern: MCC groundstaff at Lord's, minor counties for Devon, a Warwickshire contract and winters abroad, most notably in Wellington, where he decided to settle three years ago.

Last December an injury to Nathan Astle prompted Twose's recall to the New Zealand side and he has never looked back.