The ICCTrophy tournament in Kenya has brought the excitement back to cricket Peter Robinson Let’s make one thing clear right from the start: the quality of cricket played during the International Cricket Council (ICC) Knockout 2000 tournament in Nairobi has been excellent. And this is a direct result of the knockout format employed for the competition. If you lose you go home. No second chances, no reprieves: you’re on your bike. Limited-overs cricket came about in the first place as an antidote to the torpor that had fallen over the Test and first- class game, most noticeably during the 1960s. Cricket has always allowed for the draw as an honourable compromise, but 40 years or so ago the game appeared too often to simply go through the motions. The idea of a contest which took place in just one day and produced a winner and a loser (with a tie likely to produce an even more exciting conclusion) took hold. And yet even as cricket reinvented itself, it compromised its own invention by instituting one-day leagues and series and competitions which enabled teams to lose and come back to fight another day. There are numerous good reasons why cricket believes this approach to be viable, but the upshot of it all has been the proliferation of international competitions that have again thrown up any number of meaningless games. So South Africa lost again against whoever in the Big Bicycle Cup? Well, that’s OK, because they’re playing again next Tuesday and if they win that one, they’ll still be in with a chance of reaching the three-leg final. This approach has been entirely absent in Kenya. The prospect of instant elimination has given almost every match an edge that is all too often lacking. Of course, there have been mismatches – neither Kenya nor Bangladesh are yet at the stage where they can compete on even terms with the big guns, but that is not to say they won’t eventually get there. And it is not possible to legislate for those days when one side simply outplays its opponents. But what ICC Knockout 2000 has ensured is that those teams whose focus has been just a little blurry on the day have lost – Australia and Pakistan to name two of them. Which brings us to South Africa’s semifinal contest with India on Friday, on paper a clash to get the blood going. India were simply terrific in accounting for Australia while South Africa were so slick, so polished, so professional in brushing England aside. If the evidence of those two quarterfinal matches is a reliable guide, both teams are at, or at least very near, the top of their form. With a place in the final to gain and everything to lose, the game should be a cracker.
South Africa built Tuesday’s victory on a quite magnificent opening spell from Shaun Pollock and Roger Telemachus. England were strangled early on and they were never subsequently able to suck in enough air to revive. In all departments South Africa were superior, with the ball, in the field and at the crease. Boeta Dippenaar grabbed his chance to establish himself with both hands. He played wonderfully straight, grew in confidence and for the first time demonstrated at international level that he has the class to succeed. But India will be another matter altogether. The most revealing aspect of their defeat of Australia was the huge improvement to their fielding. They ran about, caught and threw with an enthusiasm and proficiency rarely, if ever, seen from an India team and in a style that would have impressed even the sternest of South African or Australian critics. When a team fields as well as this it usually means two things: in the first place that they have put a lot of work into their game, and secondly that they have started to believe in themselves. Overconfidence is not usually a vice associated with Indian teams even though they possess in Sachin Tendulkar the best batsman in the world and, in Saurav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, two more players of the highest quality. They have also unveiled in this tournament Suvraj Singh, as bright a prospect as has been seen for a while, and Zaheer Khan, a left-arm quick slippery enough and enthusiastic enough to give bite to their attack.
Under almost any circumstances this particular team would be a test for South Africa and it is a mystery why the United Cricket Board chose Wednesday to announce Hansie Cronje’s life ban. In the long term it is not clear what effect, if any, the ban will have on the work of the King commission, but in the short term the announcement can only serve to distract Pollock’s South Africans. Like it or not, Cronje was a significant influence, perhaps the most significant influence, on the international careers of most of the present team. As they trained on Thursday the minds of more than a few of the players will have been elsewhere. There may be legal reasons for the timing of the announcement, but you would have thought that, say, Monday next week, win or lose Friday’s game or the final, would have been a better date, at least in terms of its effect on the national team. Still, the ban does bring a kind of partial closure to the affair and victories on Friday and on Sunday would get the summer off to an especially bright start. Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa