Andy Capostagno Cricket
The South African selectors must be breathing a sigh of relief. First Adam Bacher stuck his hand up and said, “Pick me”, by scoring a century and two 50s in successive SuperSport Series matches, then both Gary Kirsten and Mark Boucher made the three figure mark and finally Shaun Pollock got 30 overs under his belt and stroked quite the most majestic 92 that it has been my privilege to watch for many a year. With the squad for the first Test due to be announced on Sunday, such feats are calculated to ease the knotty problems of selection.
Assuming Daryll Cullinan’s hamstring strain comes right, the batting now picks itself; Kirsten, Bacher, Jacques Kallis, Cullinan, Hansie Cronje and Jonty Rhodes. Boucher will keep wicket and the new ball will be shared by Pollock and Allan Donald, leaving only two places to be debated, three if we assume a squad of 12, four if the selectors follow recent practice of naming 13 in an attempt to cover every option.
Given the all round strength of the above named nine, the requirement for the starting 11 is a seamer and a spinner. If the United Cricket Board (UCB) is consistent in its aim of building the game in all of South Africa’s communities, those two places must go to Makhaya Ntini and Paul Adams.
Ntini is at the head of what, at the moment, is a very short queue. If Lance Klusener were fit his extra batting ability would get him in ahead of Ntini, and before the series is at an end there will come a time when Cronje will be in need of a bullet biter such as the Natalian.
Steve Elworthy also bats well and the extra carry which the Wanderers pitch allows pace bowlers will suit him a lot better than the pitches he encountered in England. Greg Smith, Elworthy’s colleague at Northerns, and Meyrick Pringle, the Windies tormentor in the 1992 World Cup, have both been mentioned in dispatches as possible seam alternatives, but on the basis that none of the above have done anything earth shattering this year, Ntini’s place should be secure.
There will be more impassioned debate about the spinner’s berth. Adams has run the gamut from “the new Shane Warne” to “over the hill” in three short years. It is not that he is too old, but that his limited box of tricks has been exposed to the harsh glare of international cricket.
The time has gone when he got people out because they were expecting the ball to turn the other way. Coaches have worked out that he is little more than a slow left armer who turns and bounces the ball rather more than a finger spinner. Having been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to master the Chinaman (the one that turns in to the right hander) Adams has fallen prey to good players who keep him out and then punish the bad ball.
But who to pick in his stead? Pat Symcox would be most people’s choice because he has attitude and because he can bat, as 50 off 22 balls against the Windies in Kimberley proved. He also scored a century the last time South Africa played a Test at the Wanderers. If not Symcox then the Gauteng pair of Clive Eksteen and Derek Crookes must be in the frame.
But all three are finger spinners, unlikely to do what Adams can do on a stinking hot afternoon, with the pitch as flat as Kate Moss’s chest and Brian Lara 92 not out; in other words get his captain a wicket with a full toss.
There are, of course, those who will refuse to believe that the selection of Adams and Ntini can be anything other than an exercise in political correctness. Included among their number, no doubt, would be Ashwin Desai, a columnist for a Durban newspaper who, two weeks ago, managed to get the following diatribe published: “When Curtly Ambrose limbers up in the opening test match, he must carry in his fist a ball congealed with the blood of millions of fellow blacks made the victim of white racism.
“When he stares down at Hansie Cronje, he must stare down at someone whose gene pool runs all the way back to the Boers who tore this land apart and whose simultaneous present aspirations to be an English gentleman symbolises the stench of class superiority that still pervades this country I hope the West Indian team picks up the cudgels one more time to smash apart the enduring bastion of race and class privilege that is cricket.”
There are many responses one could give to such an outpouring of bile, but perhaps it is best to quote a man who achieved a certain amount of fame in the Boer War and could quite easily be held up as the prime example of everything that “an English gentleman symbolises”.
“I should have conceived it impossible to state the opposite to the truth with greater precision” (Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1944).
Desai, incidentally, was the KwaZulu-Natal Cricket Board representative at the recent Transformation Forum held by the UCB in Johannesburg. He is also employed by a Natal University as a lecturer in political science. Now there’s a contradiction in terms if ever I heard one.