Neil Manthorp Cricket
It has been a silly week on tour. For four years people have complained about the inability of various hosts around the world to organise a sensible itinerary. India, Pakistan, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and even Australia, who isolated the third and final test by sticking the World Series into the middle of the plan, have taken some flack.
Not England, though, surely. The final Texaco Trophy game was played on Sunday, not that South Africa will have noticed, having all but failed to turn up.
The team were required to play another one-day game against the English Minor Counties. A bit like Brazil being required to have a friendly kick-about with the Staffordshire Sunday Ramblers the day after winning the World Cup. Such was the importance of the match that even Jonty Rhodes didn’t play . excuse the sarcasm.
Unlike the England side, which is the subject of rampant conjecture, South Africa not only has the backbone of the Test side established but the head and tail, too ahead of the first Test against England at Birmingham’s Edgbaston ground beginning next Thursday.
Nine places are set in stone for the opener. The spares are at number six and the “extra” bowler. Rhodes and Brian McMillan have been placed in direct, full-contact competition during the four-day match against Gloucestershire starting in Bristol.
The bowling place would appear to be a battle between Lance Klusener and Makhaya Ntini (Mornantau Hayward really is here to gain experience, not to compete for a place – not yet, anyway).
Later in the year, the possibility of two spinners playing becomes a reality, but not at Edgbaston which boasts a green, lively wicket. “We will definitely have a result,” says Bob Woolmer, who knows the ground as well as anyone. “And if it doesn’t rain it might well end before the fifth day,” he says.
There is another option, though, and not many have spotted it. McMillan is keener, sharper and more competitive – with bat and ball – than many of his team mates have ever seen him before. This is not an implied criticism. Whatever went before, the big man had his reasons for sometimes appearing to lack enthusiasm or vigour.
But he has been given a new, late and unexpected lease of life and, now that he has to fight for a place, maybe even prove himself all over again, he has risen to the challenge with vim. And he is even doing so with a smile on his face as broad as his own shoulders. The national selectors are very keen to have him in the team.
Yet only those with first-hand, prolonged experience of the “Rhodes- factor” can know how much difference he makes to the other 10 men on the field, and in the dressing room. Those men, of course, are the players and the coach. They would love to have Jonty in the team.
Rhodes has played 31 Tests scoring one century and seven 50s. His average is a damning 29,61.
South Africa however, great believers in the value of experience, might line up with a man at number eight who has scored three Test centuries and averages nearly 40. McMillan has discovered a new enthusiasm. Maybe, perhaps, he can still be used as a third or fourth “frontline” seamer. Maybe the notion that he was brought here as a specialist batsman and slip fielder, and occasional bowler, has turned into a useful – though unintentional – smokescreen.
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