Pat McDermott Cricket
The nagging thought about the Pakistan team at present embroiled in the second Test against South Africa at Kingsmead is whether their captain Rashid Latif really wants to play or not.
Again on the sidelines, as he was during the controversy-racked and rain-sodden abortive opening encounter in the three-Test series at the Wanderers, Latif booked his second successive chair on the changeroom balcony by trying to emulate the heroics of Bafana Bafana in an impromtu kick-around.
These at least were self-inflicted wounds, unlike the damage done to pace bowler Muhammad Akram and off-spinner Saqlain Mushtaq in the much-publicised beating they took in an attack in Sandton that the near non-existent Pakistani management have still to successfully explain.
In the continued absence of Wasim Akram, his lesser-known namesake has had to carry a goodly share of the new-ball bowling with Waqar Younis, and the kicking he got – variously described in an atmosphere of rumour and innuendo as a mugging or a duffing up by the bouncers in an adult nightclub – has lingered through the rain- marred first Test and into the beginning of the second.
Latif at least has the comfortable knowledge that if he is to while away the long hours of play in a five-day Test from the terraces, he has an able back-up in Moin Khan, the wicketkeeper picked to tour as a batsman, and in the captaincy of Saeed Anwar on the field as a more than able deputy.
It has, even before any semblance of a result appears to emerge from the series, been a strange tour indeed, troubled from the start by internal politics and match- fixing allegations in Pakistan before the start, transported out of the sporting arena by the injuries to the playing pair and variously floodlit and blacked out.
The controversial decision to use the lights during passages of bad light at the Wanderers would have been the talking point of the tour from a playing perspective, had not off-field matters held steadfastly to the headlines.
It was an experiment which the players roundly castigated. But they did so from the point of view that, rather than making seeing the ball easier, it made things worse. What was not mentioned was that the use of floodlights – at a costly R100 000 a pop for a flick of the big switch that turns them on – runs totally contrary to the ethos of the game at Test level.
This is not to suggest that traditionalism be entrenched as such a stultifying blindfold that it leads to the unbending type of attitude prevalent at Lord’s where the pink gin mentality of the MCC members has again prevailed and none but Her Maj the Queen is allowed to sully the portals of the pavilion. That is akin to a return to Flat Earthism.
Things do change. They must if the human race is to progress and prosper. Cricket, so much a microcosm of life in many ways, is equally bound to shake off yesterday’s shackles.
The advent of the electronic third umpire has shown that, even if the Australians are loath to employ the technology that Ali Bacher has so joyfully embraced in this country, it has brought something to the game that both enhances it and dovetails neatly with the television era we live in.
But floodlights in Test matches? Bad light has both hindered and helped sides in the past and surely the elements are as much a part of the game as is the fact that a 12th man can do nothing about the result if he is called in for an injured team-mate during play other than return the ball from his fielding position.
Bad light is one of those rubs of the cricketing green that sides have always lived with. And, horror of horrors, until the game is played on astroturf under overhead illumination in covered arenas, it should continue to be thus.
Of more immediate consequence to the cricket public during this Test – at least those who live perched on the flanks of the Indian Ocean – is the television blackout imposed over the weekend for Durban viewers.
This is a distinctly Australian media magnate approach to the ongoing problem of putting bums in seats for the full five days. It is a wielding of the big stick which flies in the face of promises made to the South African public that every ball of every international in this country would be broadcast live.
It also fails to address one of the biggest problems in South African sport so graphically raised by the poor crowds at the Wanderers: the problem of sports promoters talking to one another about the scheduling of major events.
From the Friday to the Monday of the Johannesburg Test there were two very strong mitigating factors for the failure of the sports public to swarm down Corlett Drive.
The first was the very real threat of rain and the chaotic traffic congestion that accompanies a major game on the link between Rosebank and Atholl even when the weather is sunny. There is little the organisers can do about the clouds other than examine past rainfall figures.
But surely there must have been some thought given to the fact that the Alfred Dunhill PGAfeauturing Ernie Els, Nick Price and a somewhat reluctant Greg Norman was taking place little more than the length of a golf course away at Houghton?
Both classify as major events. Both collided in both timing – the golf due to a fifth day being added on for rain – and in location. You would have had to have blacked out both to improve attendances. The overwhelming compulsion to attend neither live but sit at home and channel-hop was surely a logical reason for the empty seats in the Wanderers stands.
Still, the blackout this weekend does have one effect. Latif will have to come to the ground to see how his side is doing.