The skipper is charged with helping deliver New Zealand's first test win on Australian soil since Jeremy Coney's side defeated Australia by six wickets in Perth in December 1985.
Of course, Coney had at his disposal some of the best cricketers this nation has produced in Sir Richard Hadlee, Martin Crowe, Ian Smith, John Wright, John Bracewell and Ewen Chatfield.
Vettori, by stark contrast, has a team in transition - a side ravaged by the retirement of Chris Cairns, Stephen Fleming, Craig McMillan and Nathan Astle, and stripped of fast bowler Shane Bond, New Zealand's best strike bowler since Hadlee.
Bond is no longer eligible to play international cricket after accepting a lucrative contract to play for the rebel Indian Cricket League. Lou Vincent, Daryl Tuffey and Hamish Marshall also fall into that camp.
Plundered of so much talent it is a minor miracle New Zealand, with just six major associations, can still field a competitive team let alone win test matches.
But that is not an argument Vettori has bought into.
"I hate to use that term [transition] because it takes the pressure off winning. And I think it is important that that remains our main focus, rather than rebuilding.
"We know they're an extremely good side, particularly in their own conditions. It is probably going to be my toughest test as captain, and our toughest test as a group of quite inexperienced guys. How we come out of this will probably be a good indication of what sort of team we are."
Vettori did concede, however, the Black Caps had a less than ideal build-up. A tour of Bangladesh is hardly adequate when you are going into two tests against the Australians on their home patch.
But, that said, he felt it was important to take the positives out of the Bangladesh tour and make the most of the warm-up match against New South Wales to get in a "reasonable state".
The Black Caps showed some character in Bangladesh. The team was caught cold in the first one-dayer and suffered a morale-shattering defeat. But it rallied to win the series 2-1.
In the first test the Blacks Caps had dug themselves a deep hole, but with some Vettori heroics scored 317 in the fourth innings to secure victory.
Vettori took five for 59 and four for 74 with the ball and scored 55 not out in the first innings and 76 in the second. His contribution underlined his value to the side both as captain and as a player and it now seems just a matter of time before he joins Imran Khan, Ian Botham, Kapil Dev, Shaun Pollock, Shane Warne and Hadlee as the only cricketers who have scored at least 3000 runs and taken at least 300 wickets.
"It is something that is quite important to me. I've always been a statistically-minded player and to join a club of those sorts of players will probably be one of the best memories I take out of cricket. And if I can achieve that by the end of the season then I would have gone a long way towards helping the side win some games as well."
The Brisbane test starts on November 20.
