Peter Robinson cricket
New Zealand’s 2000 tour of South Africa ended not with a bang nor a whimper, but with the slurp of the Supersopper. The fact that Wanderers groundsman Chris Scott and his staff won the man of the match award says a fair bit about the drawn third Test.
Yet even this gesture begged a question among some of the tourists: Scott had done a remarkable job during the five days allocated to the match, but why had no hessian matting been placed under the covers the night before the game was due to start? The absence of the hessian led to a paintstripper being employed to dry out rising moisture that had sweated through to the surface overnight.
For all this, the tour was an undoubted success for the home team. South Africa won five out of six one-day internationals and two of the three Test matches. The only times South Africa didn’t win, in Potchefstroom and at the Wanderers, was when it rained.
You can’t argue with results like this and there was much for Shaun Pollock and his team to be pleased about: the batting of Jacques Kallis throughout, Neil McKenzie in Port Elizabeth and Nicky Boje in the one-day games; the bowling of Makhaya Ntini and further proof, if any were needed, of South Africa’s all-round depth.
At the same time, though, it was a tour that never caught fire. To a substantial degree the reason for this was New Zealand’s crippling injury list. This is not to gainsay the home team. No side, after all, can do more than beat the opposition with whom they are presented, but it might explain why the first half of the international summer has felt so flat.
It was a flatness most evident during the Tests, the first two of which were played on pitches designed to last five days. Another question: what is so terribly wrong with playing Test cricket on pitches that don’t last five days? What’s so wrong with batsmen having to adapt their techniques, powers of concentration and courage to pitches that have started to crumble after the first three days?
Which brings us to another point: the sustainability of Test cricket, or at least the version of it played in this series. In Port Eliza-beth the South African batsmen allowed Nathan Astle to bowl 36 overs for 46 runs in their first innings. At the Wanderers on Tuesday, in an innings that amounted to 261/3, Astle was at it again, bowling 26 overs for 31. If this sort of stuff slow-medium, short of a length catches on and no one finds a way to counter it, then God help us all. You won’t be able to give away Test match tickets.
For all their success this summer, there’s a hint of insecurity about the South African team, a sense that they’re not quite sure how good they really are. Here’s the rub, though. Professional cricket is, at root, an entertainment industry. There’s no intrinsic worth in being good at cricket (or writing about it, for that matter). Cricketers don’t save lives or grow food or look after the aged. But if they’re good at what they do, and they manage to entertain, they give pleasure. If they don’t entertain, then people simply won’t pay to watch them.
This seems already to be the case in the stands, and if people stop going to watch cricketers in the flesh, then television might start wondering if people are interested in the product. And if TV takes its bucket of money and spends it on something else, then the healthy salaries and the endorsements and the flash cars and five star hotels will be a thing of the past.
Perhaps the Sri Lankans will prove to be a more entertaining side. The one-day series starts in Port Elizabeth on Friday and moves on to East London on Sunday before breaking for two Test matches over the festive season.
Hopefully there will be more adventure with the Sri Lankans about, but hopefully we won’t depend on the Sri Lankans for the adventure. I know this will be an irritating comparison, but I can’t help wondering what the Australians would have done had they arrived at the Wanderers on Tuesday in the situation that South Africa found themselves in.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa