Frank Keating Cricket
After their ultimately rootless and fidgety show in the West Indies, England’s batsmen this year could be forgiven a collective sigh of relief and a presumption that the home waters will be far less choppy.
If so, they have another think coming. Allan Donald is pawing the earth at the end of his run-up – and this time the great man can count on the support of a seasoned and sharply hostile pair of lieutenants in Shaun Pollock and Lance Klusener. The five Test series will surely turn on England’s ability to cope with South Africa’s new ball attack.
Donald is the athlete in the white war paint. He is 1,9m tall and lithe with whipcord-strong shoulders and long arms. Thirty-two this year, it is 11 years since he came from the Afrikaans heartland of Bloemfontein to play in Birmingham for Warwickshire.
The tag “White Lightning” was at once applied; it stuck.
Top of his game? Well, get out your calculators and listen to this . the general assumption from England’s Caribbean tour was that the only difference between the two sides was that “they” had Curtly and Courtney.
And so it probably was. In the series West Indies bowled 466 overs and took 52 wickets between them (Ambrose 30, Walsh 22) at a combined average of fractionally under 20. Terrific stuff. At the very same time, roughly between Christmas and Easter, Donald was bowling 253 Test overs in a trio of different rubbers, against possibly the world’s strongest sides (Australia, Sri Lanka and Pakistan). He took 42 wickets at an average of just 17.
In March, his 11th Test “five-for” took him past 200 Test wickets, a feat that no other South African bowler has even been close to achieving. In county cricket, his past two summers at Edgbaston have garnered 60 wickets at 15, and 89 at 16.
Donald has been very happy in England; he has a house in Birmingham and is married to Tina, a local girl. He came from there to meet his international confrres when they arrived at Heathrow – and the team joke is that he’d been sent in advance to “chat up” his friend, the Edgbaston groundsman Steve Rouse, and help organise his preparations for the first Test, which begins there on June 4. He laughs at that, beam on full power. But generally he is a shy man, and detached, but pleasantly so. He says the “simple, ordinary things” appeal to him, like a braaivleis with family and close friends.
Donald is fully aware that his time in English cricket has been a continual learning process. “The county experience has been a non-stop school, first length and line and how to adapt to all the varying surfaces of a summer. When I first arrived I was reasonably okay about slanting the ball in. Now I can swing it away. Then there’s reverse swing, and the use of a bouncer as a surprise.”
On the whole he is a “full-length” bowler, and all the more classically lethal as a wicket-taker for it.
More than once, his run-up, and hence his crucial rhythm and “melody”, has fallen to pieces, notably in the last World Cup when he began hosepiping wides all over the subcontinent.
“Bob [Woolmer, then Warwickshire’s coach and now South Africa’s] sorted me all out with his stopwatches and videos.” Donald was moving in at too eager a gallop, thus losing his creamy momentum of coiled, mainsprung menace. Apparently, the run-up time was reined back from 3,29 seconds to 4,11. In the past 18 months he has tight-pruned the run-up a further notch, “and made a tiny adjustment to my wrist at delivery”.
His suppleness is all – he can touch his toes with his forearms. If craftsmanship is that specialised absorption in high-class, bespoke work for its own sake then, as true-great fast bowlers go, he is the craftsman among them.
He has pared down the edges, but never lost the blinding pace. He does his assassin’s work expressionlessly, and with a tight tread in his conserving feline run-up.
He is a short-spell bowler who can come upon a leisurely afternoon’s cricket in the sun like a fulminating midsummer thunderstorm which snatches the breath away with its sudden violence and velocity.
Soon Donald will take his 1E000th first-class wicket since that day in Bloemfontein in 1986 when three former English cricketers, Roger Prideaux and the Warwickshire men, David Brown and Jack Bannister, were watching an isolated South Africa’s then best young fast bowler, Corrie van Zyl. “Hang on a min,” the three oldtimers chorused, “Who’s that skinny blond kid with all the raw potential at the other end?”
It was Donald, whose first first-class wicket was Jimmy Cook’s, and he was summoned to Birmingham in no time.
Among the Brummies, it doesn’t help your shyness if your first language is Afrikaans. At first, famously, Donald thought “optional” nets were compulsory and vice versa, so Edgbaston thought: “We’ve got a right one here.” As a bowler, they soon knew what they had when he took eight wickets in his first pre- season friendly match to demolish Leicestershire for 58.
When he passes his 1E000, which will he nominate as the best ball of all? He just smiles. No guile in it.
You offer the prompt: the 1996 Christmas Test versus India at Durban? After a poor South African first innings, Donald removed Vikram Rathore bringing out Sachin Tendulkar to put him in his place with two defiant cover drives for four.
The next ball, on a perfect length, draws the grand bat forward, then jags back dramatically to ping out the off stump. Tendulkar bowled Donald 15. The soft smile again: “You always get fired up that bit extra when you bowl to the greats, like Sachin or the Waughs, don’t you?” Or, it will go without saying, any Englishman.
Each succeeding English summer, and winter back home, the description was increasingly apt and now, at the very top of his game, he is Test cricket’s finest full-lick fast bowler since Dennis Lillee.
Figures one can take or leave, sure. But not when they are as adjectivally colourful as Donald’s this past couple of years. In his previous glut of international cricket, in 1996-97 for instance, Donald took 99 wickets: 41 in Tests at 19 apiece and 58 in one-day internationals at 17. In the last three years, his Test wicket bag of 120 at an average of 19.62 has him towering over his rivals (Wasim Akram 20.61; Ambrose 20.75; Glenn McGrath 20.77).