In-form opener Martin Guptill puts his contrasting start to the past two summers down to hard work and confidence.
Guptill top-scored with 79 off 56 balls as New Zealand cruised to a seven-wicket win over Sri Lanka with 29 overs to spare in Christchurch on Saturday in the first one-dayer of a five-match series.
He scored off the very first ball of the Black Caps' chase for 189 with a driven four through cover and amassed 13 boundaries, including four sixes.
His innings followed a century and a half-century in the Black Caps' 2-0 Test series over Sri Lanka earlier in December.
Last season, Guptill was light on runs early on, but built and went on to score a World Cup-record 237 not out against the West Indies in Wellington.
"I think you go through periods in your career where you're not so confident with how you're going and I think the start of last summer was one of those times," he said on Sunday.
"I've come through that and I've got a lot more confidence to be able to go out and start a little more positive from ball one."
So far in 2015, Guptill has hit four centuries and seven half-centuries and his aggregate of 1366 from 30 one-day-international innings is the highest of all batsmen for the calender year.
At Hagley Park, the 29-year-old right-hander overtook teammate Kane Williamson (1317), who sat out because of knee and finger injuries, and he has two more matches to improve on that tally.
"I think I've played the most games out of anyone in the world so I'd hope to be up at the top of the list," Guptill quipped.
"I've worked hard over the last 18 months and now it's all come together. I just hope to carry it on and keep scoring runs for New Zealand."
The work included fine-tuning his technique after the Test series in Australia in November, when he managed just 82 runs in six innings and had a high score of 23.
"I didn't have a great tour of Australia," he said.
"I came home and worked on a couple of small things over the period before the first Test [against Sri Lanka] and it worked in Dunedin."
He said it was "just a bit of drilling...to nail down little things".
The Black Caps and Sir Lanka return to Hagley Oval on Monday for game two of the series.
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