Neil Manthorp Cricket
The first Texaco Trophy one-day international was played on Thursday. The squad now travels in their luxury coach (with microwave, kettle, fridge and toilet) to Old Trafford, Manchester, and Headingley, Leeds, for the second and third matches on Saturday and Sunday.
Although the smart money is on South Africa to win, it is an unavoidable reality that Hansie Cronje and Bob Woolmer’s (predictable) assertions that England are a strong and talented one-day squad are true.
They do deserve respect, especially at home. And especially at the beginning of the season when they are fresh and have not been grinding through a silly, crowded domestic season. Alistair Brown once scored a double century in the domestic Sunday League (40 overs). That is scary. Captain Adam Holliake, Matthew Fleming, Mark Ealham, Chris Lewis and the spinners, Robert Croft and Ashley Giles, are perfectly suited to limited-overs cricket. They can bowl straight and hit straighter. But man-for-man, South Africa are better. Quite a bit better.
And the one thing South Africa can always rely on is the impact,
and influence, of Jonty Rhodes.
Over the years his team mates have become used to “Jonty mania”, especially on the subcontinent where he is a demigod folk hero. English fans reckon they have a couple of pretty useful fielders of their own. But they had forgotten how good Rhodes is. Gasps of astonishment have come faster here than almost anywhere else.
If South Africa wins the first one-day international, Rhodes surely will have played a significant part. That’s something worth betting on.
The rarest phenomenon in sport is for one of its participants to be recognised, during his or her playing career, as one of the greats.
Rarer still for them to be acknowledged as a ground-breaker, someone who changed the rules, set new standards and made others re-examine their long-held views and approaches to competition.
Having said all that, none of the men who form the engine-room of South Africa’s one-day team are yet recognised as such.
But let’s look at Rhodes. Batting as low as he does, every aspect of his career batting record is outstanding. In 131 matches he has scored 3E173 runs at an average of 33.40 and a strike rate of 76.88 runs per 100 balls. His highest score is 121.
Those figures would command an automatic place in any nation’s one- day line-up . and we haven’t even considered the real reason that he is an automatic choice for South Africa.
Many close observers of the international game believe that Rhodes will be spoken of by the next generation, and the generation after that, in the same reverential tones that Colin Bland is spoken about today.
Four years ago, on a stinking hot day in the Brabourne stadium in Bombay, South Africa played the West Indies in the Hero Cup.
It was so hot that Daryll Cullinan was forced to retire with heat exhaustion and dehydration when he had made 70. Rhodes entered the record books for a different reason. He held five catches.
In 1 324 one-day games since this form of the competition began, that has only ever been done once.
There are two important things to note. Firstly, Rhodes has the ninth best “strike rate” in terms of catches held per match. And secondly, far more significantly, he is the only non- specialist slip fielder on the entire list.
The point is debatable of course, everything is in cricket, but as far as statistics are concerned this presents a reasonable case to propose that Rhodes is the best outfielder that one-day cricket has ever seen.
Sadly, there appears to be no way of recording, without committing a month of one’s life to research, how many run-outs the little man has been responsible for.
In 131 games, the number, according to a survey of senior team- mates, seems to rest between 30 and 35. Rhodes himself is less specific. “A couple,” he ventured.
NEWS