Central Districts' promotion of young fast-medium bowlers this year has won a big vote of approval from the chairman of New Zealand's selection panel Sir Richard Hadlee.

Players like the now injured Lance Hamilton and Michael Mason were regarded as key players by CD before the season started, but they have both been knocked out of the scene at an inconvenient time.

Normally, for a team like CD that could have meant kissing the rest of the season goodbye.

Not this season however.

The emergence of players like Andrew Schwass, Ewen Thompson and Brent Hefford, not to forget the developing medium pace bowling of skipper Jacob Oram, has given CD an edge sufficiently good enough for it to make the finals of the Shell Cup.

Whether that continues beyond tomorrow's second in the best of three finals remains to be seen but even if it doesn't the emergence of the CD trio has been one of the most significant aspects of the Shell Cup this year.

"It is interesting that after we, as a national panel, have looked at giving younger bowlers a chance, some of the provinces have had youth policies of their own.

"The CD attack is very inexperienced but they have been given the opportunity and have taken it.

"Schwass has had an outstanding Shell Cup while Thompson has bowled impressively.

"When you are a selector, whether provincial or national, and you take a punt on a player and you see them excel, you get a buzz. You want them to kick on," he said.

Hadlee has had reservations about how the Shell Cup has gone this year. Four centuries were not enough and he would like to have seen more.

Brad Doody had one of the higher averages in the competition until recently but it wasn't at the sort of level the selectors would like to see of the leading batsmen in the country.

The CLEAR Black Caps players had not had a lot of opportunity to make an impact but their presence gave the competition credibility.

But he would have liked to have seen more scores around the 250-280 mark so that batsmen were getting higher scores and bowlers were having to work harder.

Whether that was attributable to the pitches not being as good as in the past he was uncertain. "To get a big score you need one batsman to get a high score, then three or four players getting good supporting scores and there haven't been many of those," he said.

"There have not been as many hundreds as we would have liked to have seen. There's been one five-wicket bag and six or seven four-wicket bags," he said.

Hadlee felt the break since the Zimbabwe series had been good for the New Zealanders and was looking forward to the series with Sri Lanka starting in Napier on Wednesday.

© CricInfo