CRICKET: Barney Spender
MAYBE it was the belated arrival of the sun. Maybe it was just that the cobwebs were well and truly shaken off. Maybe it was simply that the getting-to- know-you process was over. Whatever the formula, the South African A cricket tour to England took a noticeable turn last week as everyone stepped up a gear and began to play some really top quality cricket. And, let it be said, some fairly ruthless cricket as well.
Coach Duncan Fletcher points to the game against the MCC as the moment when things changed. For the first two games, against Yorkshire and Derbyshire, they had rather gone through the motions, still acquainting themselves with the local conditions and keeping well zipped up inside the thermal tracksuits.
Two comfortable draws were followed by a too brief encounter with the Tobagan fast bowler Nigel Francis, who bowled quite beautifully to pick up four wickets as the South Africans were tumbled for 204 and forced to follow on.
For the first time, backs were to the wall and the response was excellent: 490-4 with a big hundred from Herschelle Gibbs, another for John Commins and contributions from everyone else.
“You could tell in the dressing-room after that game that something had changed,” says Fletcher. “There was something different in the guys’ eyes, as if the phoney war was over and the tour had suddenly started for real.”
The upsurge in confidence has raised performances to the level where the A team had a cushy one-day win over the Welsh part-timers and then walloped Glamorgan by an innings inside two days.
The batsmen were scoring runs with confidence and the bowlers, perhaps spurred by Francis’s example of how to hurry batsmen on sluggish pitches, began to find their length.
They would probably have beaten Somerset as well had the bowling not been so shorn by the injuries to Roger Telemachus, Jacques Kallis and Greg Smith.
The injury to Smith brought the delightful vision of fitness expert Paddy Upton fielding in the covers. And he certainly let no one down, producing one magnificent diving stop at extra cover to cut off a certain boundary. Paddy does a good job as the jelly-baby man, but it is easy to forget, until he reminds you, that he was a first-class cricketer himself and even scored a hundred on his Western Province debut.
The key element in this upswing has been the focus of the team. The ruthlessness. The counties are still putting out weakened sides in order to rest their stars and, man for man, they are not in the same class as the South Africans. The A team is now waking up to this and determined to show an indifferent public what it can do.
Quite rightly, Commins had no qualms about making Glamorgan follow on. Similarly, after gambling by putting Somerset in first on a belter and bowling them out for 301, he released Crookes as a genuine all-rounder which he isn’t. He is a batsman who can bowl perfectly respectable, but not top-drawer, off- spin. It is as a batsman that he should be judged. But, is Crookes a genuine international class batsman or is he just a slogger who gets lucky?
That, of course, cannot truly be answered until he is given a chance to play at Test level, although few captains would object to having a batsman in their team who is as lucky as often as he is.
The other man to catch the eye, and one for whom a long Test cricket career is waiting around the corner, is Lance Klusener. A genuine all-rounder, he has only had a couple of knocks on tour, one of which was an accomplished 46 not out against Yorkshire. But his bowling has been superb.
He strained every sinew to flog some life out of the dead pitches at Headingley and Chesterfield, and then collected 7-81 in Cardiff where he worked well in tandem with Jacques Kallis. His finest performance, though, came at Taunton. On another good pitch, although blessed with some bounce, he saw Telemachus, Kallis and then Smith depart leaving him with the joint roles of strike bowler and donkey worker.
His response was a supreme effort of 54,5 overs in burning sunshine. In the first innings he catalysed a Somerset slide as he took 5-25 in 10 overs, this after he had already bent his back for 17 fruitless overs. In the second innings he sent down another 27 overs and finished the match with 7-169.
The boy has talent and he also has heart. But then, on performances on tour so far, he is not alone in that department.
ENDS