South Africa’s World Cup semi-final was being played at the same time the M&G was being printed, so Neil Manthorp looks at the tournament’s top three teams
It doesn’t matter that pressure in sport is a luxury, something that you are paid very well to experience and something to which sportsmen should be drawn, not abashed. Most sportsmen do, indeed, talk positively about responding to pressure but then, not many of the 44 players involved in the World Cup semi-finals had ever experienced such a feeling before.
Real pressure, of course, is being out of work with a hungry family to feed (or as an Australian colleague said this week, having your wife and your mistress pregnant at the same time) but that would have been no consolation to many players in the New Zealand, Pakistan, Australian and South African teams.
The tension in many of the South African players before Thursday’s semi-final match was as obvious as that in piano wire. As the team progressed through the qualifying rounds, and into the Super Sixes, they spoke often about “sticking to the same routine” and “preparing like any other match”, but that all changed after last Sunday’s defeat by Australia.
Squad manager Goolam Raja, who wears his heart on his sleeve if a single player scores naught, let alone if the team loses, looked woefully mournful for days after the game, and in attempting to shield and shelter his “children”, he threw a media security blanket over them. “No one-on-one interviews from now on,” Raja told the media, who hitherto had been able to organise television, radio and newspaper interviews with individual players through him.
It was a commendable move, designed to allow the team as much time as possible to focus on the upcoming job. But like the decision to play the same XI throughout the tournament, it could backfire. Just as the Jacques Kallis injury left the team without a match-ready replacement, the sudden change in approach to touring life flew in the face of the earlier determination to keep preparations the same throughout the tournament.
Speaking to journalists can be a catharsis for sportsmen “under pressure”. Just maybe they were feeling a little pent-up before Thursday’s match. There was certainly a danger that they were being distracted by their efforts not to be distracted by things that had not distracted them before.
The first to “benefit” from Raja’s security blanket was Herschelle Gibbs, who was told immediately after Sunday’s match that he must not give any interviews following his appalling gaffe in the field. Sadly, Raja would have had more luck attempting to divert a herd of stampeding wildebeest, so while the South African media dutifully stood aside, Sky TV gobbled up the young opener early the next morning and uncovered the amusing “it was the pain spray” reason for dropping the dolly catch that cost the match.
Subsequently compelled to allow Gibbs to speak to the rest of the media in the afternoon, Raja took up a prominent position behind Gibbs and listened – ready to pounce – as the reason for the blooper was explained again. Quite what he would have done if Gibbs had put his foot in it, so to speak, with the TV cameras rolling, was hard to imagine.
“No, stop, he didn’t say that … I mean, he didn’t mean that … give me the film, please.”
It was probably best that Gibbs invented a reason for the mistake, and his team-mates should be unconditionally applauded for pretending to believe him.
The truth of what he did, and its possible consequences, is simply too appalling for him to comprehend at the moment. He threw the ball away before he had it under control, as clear a case of premature celebration as one could see on a sporting field. Nothing to do with spray or sore fingers. Bob Woolmer forgot to read the script, though. “I told him I still love him, but that if he did that again, I’d knock him from this side of the world to the next!”
Tension was not confined to the South African side, of course. But they probably had more of it than anyone else. New Zealand went into Wednesday’s semi-final against Pakistan in the knowledge that they had lived up to expectations – maybe even surpassed them – and that they were comfortably the least favoured of the four remaining teams.
The fact that the four best teams had reached the last four was universally accepted, and that also took the pressure off the Kiwis. They had already stuck up enough fingers at Wisden, whose editor described them as “characterless and bland” and said it would be a “shame if they won” in a charming assassination during the tournament.
Pakistan showed an ominous return to form against New Zealand on Wednesday and, oddly perhaps but certainly admirably, seemed to have organised their bout of collywobbles in the middle of the tournament rather than at the business end of it.
For Australia, the comeback from the near- dead position of no points in the Super Sixes had already turned the tide of public opinion in their country from disgust to admiration, and the knowledge that South Africa were battling to come to terms with Sunday’s loss served as even further reason to forget their own apprehension and concentrate on their opponents’ worries.
Steve Waugh refused to be drawn into the old “chokers” debate before Sunday’s match, but the temptation proved too much for him in the build-up to the semi-final.
“I believe we’ve got the mental bite on them at the moment,” he told Australian journalists before the match. For the benefit of those not fluent in Psychstralian, he went on to recall South Africa’s habit of thrashing Australia in games that “didn’t matter” before losing all the ones that did.
“He must say things like that, that’s good,” said Woolmer before the match, with a sense of bravado that really was very convincing.
The truth about the consequences of Thursday’s match were about as hard for Hansie Cronje to accept beforehand as Gibbs’ error is to him. Whatever the real truth, the perception that South Africa “choke” in the big matches against Australia will become fact if Australia are playing in Sunday’s final. But if Cronje leads his team out at Lord’s on Sunday, he can banish that perception forever and ram the evidence down Steve Waugh’s throat, whenever he wants to, for the rest of his life. What a prospect that would be, and what motivation.
If Steve Waugh has got his way by the time you read this, however, then the team will return home to South Africa in the knowledge that they never, ever put one over Australia when it really mattered.
Personally, I don’t believe they have ever choked against Australia. For a variety of reasons they have rarely, if ever, done themselves justice, but my opinion counts for less than my cat Jon’s. History will judge them.
What a cruel job sport is; but what a glorious one. For the sake of wearing egg on my face, I predict that Steve Waugh will be wearing egg on his for those choker comments. And Cronje will be able to help him swallow it.