Talk of healing is premature. There is still so much blood sloshing around that it’s impossible to see the size of the wound, let alone ascertain how best to deal with it. Anyone who has ever had experience of shock or trauma victims will have recognised some of the signs in Hansie Cronje’s team on Thursday night.
By Friday morning very little had changed, except the reason for the red eyes. Cronje didn’t want to talk about the previous day, not because he was “in denial”, but because the consequences of the day were beginning to sink in. Those who did talk said much the same thing.
What could they say? Shaun Pollock could not believe it and was gutted – it was just a horrible, horrible way to go out of the competition, he said. Steve Elworthy was “hurting in every part of his body”, and Gary Kirsten was urging everyone not to apportion blame. “It certainly wasn’t Lance’s fault, he did unbelievably to get us into that situation in the first place,” Kirsten said.
As the team coach pulled away from the hotel, Cronje’s head lay against the window and he waved tentatively, even smiled at the television camera outside. Herschelle Gibbs pulled a silly face and stuck his tongue out in the back window as the driver headed towards London. As pathetic and inappropriate as it may sound, the notion of group therapy was hard to ignore. It probably wouldn’t sink in all the way until they were alone.
Klusener agreed with the thoughts of Boris Becker more than a decade ago, and with Italian golfer Costantino Rocca five or six years later, who dealt with sporting disaster in similar ways. Becker, defending champion, was knocked out of Wimbledon in the first round. “I lost a tennis match, no one died,” he told mourning journalists. Rocca, who missed a six-footer that cost Europe the Ryder Cup, told the throng who had gathered to claim his head: “I miss putt, I no shoot no one …”
“I always identified with those comments, way before this happened. I make a great living out of cricket, and I’m helluva grateful for that, but you know, it is a game – and I really didn’t kill anyone! Sport is supposed to have its moments of drama, the highs and lows, that’s what is supposed to happen. I’m not happy that it happened to me, but it did. It just did,” he says with a look that betrays a lot more hurt than his words reveal. “A lot of games are won in hindsight,” Klusener said with a thin grin.
“It’ll take years for some guys to get over it,” said Graham Ford at closing time on the evening of the semi-final. “But for most of them, there will be no getting over it. It’ll be there for the rest of their lives.” But hang on, aren’t we getting a bit heavy here? What about the Klusener theory of relative values?
The point is, although cricket is “just” a game, there are several men who have spent the most serious years of their lives (so far) dedicated to it. Ever since they lost to the West Indies in the quarter-final of 1996, Bob Woolmer and Cronje promised each other that they would make amends this time. Literally, not figuratively, this tournament has been in their minds during each of the 76 one-day internationals they played before this World Cup began.
Like a 19th-century engineer charged with building a railway across an unexplored continent, they laid down tracks across every imaginable obstacle. Pakistan and their reverse-swing were crushed, the West Indies bulldozed, England burnt away and India dynamited aside. But every time they built a bridge across the ravine that was Australia, the rains would sweep it away.
Stronger and stronger the bridge was built, but the railway line was never, ever finished. They never reached the other side. If they are true to their words to stop before 2003, Cronje and his senior lieutenants will have much to be proud of, but will also know, for the rest of their lives, that they never finished the job. As good as they were, they just weren’t quite good enough. And if you think that’s a harsh judgment, then you are a very good judge.
Rodney Marsh, the great Aussie gloveman, said the closest analogy he could make was with Greg Norman: “Greg is the highest money winner ever and spent longer at number one than anyone else, but he has never won a major in America. Ernie Els has never been number one but he already has two US Opens. No doubt Greg would swap a couple of million dollars for a US Open and I’m sure Cronje would do the same, metaphorically.”
Marsh, incredibly (for an Australian), offered massive sympathy to Cronje’s players: “I feel truly sorry for them. They are the best one-day side in the world. They have won 75% of their games with Cronje as captain, but for some reason, they slip up when it comes to the big matches.”
Ian Chappell, as overexposed as he might be, remains a brilliant thinker and innovator. He is as hard as, well, as hard as Steve Waugh, actually, but he is also fair. “South Africa win more games than anyone else, which means they get to more finals than anyone else. If you get to more finals than anyone else then you’re going to lose more.”
Of the emotive label – “chokers” – given to South Africa, Chappell avoids the temptation to confirm it’s viability and says only: “It’s a word that should never have been used.”
One man who has used that word more than anyone else is News International journalist Robert Cradock, who supplies at least seven national Aussie newspapers with their cricket copy. “I know it’s an emotive word and maybe it’s not really fair. I just think South Africa have an enormous problem with Australia. It doesn’t happen against anyone else, so I suppose they shouldn’t be `labelled’ as chokers, but in every single big game against Australia they have choked; they have. The evidence is there.”
Cradock, apparently, does not believe for one moment that the “choke” happened at the end of the semi-final: “No way. It was in the middle of the innings; they froze. Kirsten choked and then nobody could move and they all choked … what was Cullinan doing? Klusener actually `unchoked’ them with his brilliance, but there’s no way he can be blamed for the run-out. Things were happening at a million miles an hour. You think Reiffel didn’t choke at the end there, or Fleming?”
The most vivid example of the relentlessness of a cricketing nightmare that I have experienced came while on tour in New Zealand just before the World Cup. The man concerned was Martin Crowe, who once scored 299 in a test match before lobbing the feeblest of catches to cover. At the time it would have made him just the 10th triple centurion in tests. “It’s OK now,” he told me with a smile. “I only think about it, say, every 15 minutes these days.”
Crowe used to wake up in the night yelling, playing the shot over and over again and screaming for the fielder to drop it. Crowe shuddered when I asked him what repercussions there might be from “the” run-out: “I can’t bear to think. Whatever I felt, this is times eleven. Actually, it’s times a hundred-and-eleven, considering what was at stake.”
There are two ways to (sort of) make up for the disappointment. First, become a fatalist. Mark Nicholas, writing in the Daily Telegraph, said: “For some infuriatingly unfathomable reason, South Africa were just not meant to win this time. They were appallingly luckless and could not have done any more. Perhaps there was a higher authority guiding Australia.” Steve Waugh even admitted before the final: “We couldn’t believe we came out of the semi-final alive. We knew we were destined to achieve …”
The second, preferable way to recover would be for the same players to stay on and win the tournament at home in 2003. Allan Donald, the oldest of the “big five”, even hinted at the possibility three days after the loss. “Maybe, who knows? Maybe I’ll just be playing one-dayers at that stage. I’m not definitely saying no at this stage.”
Donald certainly was “definitely saying no” a couple of years ago, and right up until this World Cup started. Cullinan, Kirsten, Rhodes and Cronje have all said “definitely no” at various times. It is interesting to note, however, that Kirsten, Rhodes and Cronje will all be younger at the start of the 2003 World Cup than Steve Waugh was at the start of this one. Cullinan will be a year older and Donald two.
By then the scar of this tournament will have faded into something with enough character to form an ugly, cowboy-style badge of honour; hopefully. But when Shaun Pollock leads the side, with Kallis, Benkenstein, Boje, Boucher, Klusener and Gibbs at the peak of their games, it would be fantastic to call upon a fearless “old- timer” to add wit and knowledge to the campaign.
Before then, however, there is an unimaginable amount of work to be done within the ranks of the game in South Africa, and government, rather than form or will power, will determine whether Cronje and his seniors continue. If they are not wanted, or appreciated, then they will go. And reflect on brilliant careers, with many highs. And one bridge they could never cross.