Allan Donald, South Africa’s most potent weapon to clinch the test series against England, opens up with a bout of self-criticism
CRICKET: Paul Martin
IN his appearance, delivery and demeanour Allan Donald is closer to the smoothness and sophistication of Jeff Thompson rather than to the anger and aggression of Dennis Lillee.
Yet South Africa’s trump card in wrapping up the series has an apparently surprising self-criticism of his past bowling performances for his country: too aggressive at times.
“I go through spells where I feel so pumped up and so aggressive that I lose control,” Donald discoursed from a white bench last week while watching his team-mates in action, his right foot outstretched and wrapped in bandages. “I can be bowling a good spell, then there’s an overflow of adrenalin, I get too pumped up … and three for 40 ends up as three for 80.”
Another disturbing part of his current game, he says, is occassionally getting into the wrong frame of mind … as happened on the first two days of the second test at Headingley, when England amassed 477 for nine, and Donald took one for 135, rivalling his worst test bowling performances of one for 108 and none for 111, both against Australia.
“In the second test first innings I was walking around thinking: I’ve let myself and my team down. I felt flat. From the very first ball I knew I wasn’t feeling good, not high at all. But eventually I got into the right mood late on the first day. I just couldn’t understand why, when a second test is actually more important than the first one, I just couldn’t recapture my form.”
Instead of this mea culpa, Donald could simply have blamed it all on his nastily infected toe (now happily assuming near-normal proportions and colour), which caused him so much pain that he could not bowl in the second innings at Headingley.
But the man is too honest with himself. “No,” he insists, “It was my job to bowl well, and I just had to keep going. It wasn’t too bad. Anyway, the toe was okay during play. It didn’t bother me.”
Slipping from his Olympian peak into the valley of mere mortals is just not acceptable to Donald. The acceptable norm for the perfectionist lies much closer to five for 55 and seven for 84, his match and series-winning spells in the third test against India at Port Elizabeth in 1992.
He’s working on his perceived flaws, of course, the key being to keep his focus on the enemy’s removal through both subtelty and battery. Unlike Dennis Lillee or Fred Trueman, though, the South African speed merchant does not need to psyche himself up into a frenzy of passion. “As I run in, I don’t hate the batsman,” says Donald. “I just have to desire to get him out.”
Away from the cricket field, Donald assumes a somewhat different personality, as his wife Tina points out. “I think he’s too laid back. Nothing bothers him — except slow drivers. He won’t brood too much about cricket — but boy, he takes it out on me if he plays badly at golf!”
In fact, Donald is more likely to regail friends and acquaintances with his golfing triumphs than his cricketing successes. Outside the home he and Tina, a secretarial temp, relax (and never talk cricket) by frequenting the British pubs he loves so much.
Though Tina was only dimly aware of cricket before they met, she assumes the role of critic-in-chief. “She is the motivator. When you do badly or you’re off form you need someone to go nag,” Donald declares. “Sometimes the coach is boring. The wife comforts me, but just as often she says: you’re pathetic, you bowled shocking. That’s the motivation I sometimes need!”
He knows that without cricket his life would have been maddeningly dull. “I could never have coped with a nine to five job. I’m a very, very restless person, and sitting still in an office would kill me.”
Cricket makes Donald a good enough living to afford a very pleasant house in Birmingham, England, where he and Tina live during the South African off-season, and where he intends to spend the rest of his days after cricket retirement, seven years hence, at around 34 years of age. Yet he is far from happy with the rewards top cricketers earn. “Sometimes you wonder what the bloody hell you’re doing playing cricket for a living. Footballers get paid so much more than we do,” he begins. “I watch the guys at my father-in-law’s favourite club Aston Villa and I admire them — especially for the size of their cheques!
“Cricketers are under-rewarded for what we do. If there was a soccer-style transfer market we’d get much more. And if we could get as much money as rugby players in South Africa do, we’d be very happy. When Pieter Muller went to Natal, you know why.” Then the realistic side of the man emerges. “I suppose the reason is you just don’t get the size of crowd to a cricket test as you do for 90 minutes of football.”
Though he may grouse, money is not his prime concern. His team’s performance on the field is what counts. and here again he is not totally satisfied. “Yes we’ve beaten Sri Lanka and India. but the real test is to beat the West Indies, Australia and England. We haven’t done that — yet.
“I think we need to win a series convincingly to prove our prowess. We don’t have consistency. We are tentative at times, we don’t follow through with a second and third win when we have one under our belt.”
He is not the sort to knock his team-mates, whose attitude to the game he admires as much as cricketers and cricket-watchers worldwide. “The strength of our team is that everyone wants to win it badly — perhaps more than the English do. But we’ve lacked the experience of how to turn the screws.”
His own match-winning ability is in hot demand on the county circuit, so much so that Worcestershire have an embarrassment of riches in Donald and a certain Brian Lara. Next season Donald will automatically be the county’s one permitted foreign player while Lara is occupied with the West Indian tour of england. It’s the season folowing that will produce the dilemma.
By then Lara may have become homesick, while donald is already at home. “I love the English traditions, and, yes, the pubs too,” he explains. “I feel more at home here very often more than South Africa, even though I grew up in an Afrikaans household.”
In many ways it was a major achievement that Donald developed his bowling skills so successfully; his mainly Afrikaans-medium technical high school lacked the facilities available down the road at Grey college in Bloemfontein. His father Stuart, despite the name, was a dyed-in-the-wool Afrikaner who rose to Post office senior inspector, while his mother Francine worked exclusively with white children at a hospital creche.
“Like me, they’re very relieved at how the changeover in South Africa has gone,” says Donald. “I was very fearful that there’d be a civil war. What’s happened is a real miracle.”
There is a genuine spark in the eye and a speeding up of his speech when donald talks about the future face of cricket. “The best times I’ve had in the Free State are coaching and helping the black kids. the yongsters who work on the scoreboard come steaming in to bowl. They are being me or Ambrose, or batting as Lara.
“They play with a passion. When I coach white youngsters I can often sense I’m wasting my time. The black kids really listen, and they use their natural ball skills.”
“One day,” he predicts, “you’ll see a completely black side.” No doubt with at least one Alan Donald clone, in style and speed if not in colour.