After Shaun Pollock and Craig McMillan had had their little spat in Bloemfontein in November, the word from the New Zealand camp was that what had really got up Pollock’s nose was McMillan calling him “Richie Cunningham”.
Remember Richie Cunningham? He was the red-headed, freckle-faced foil played by Ron Howard, now a successful director to Henry Winkler’s Fonz in the 1970s sitcom Happy Days. As insults go, it’s faintly disparaging, but fairly accurate for all that.
Of course, whether McMillan really dubbed Pollock “Richie” might never be known. What goes on on the field, stays mostly on the field. But if he did, it’s surprising that Pollock took the bait. You wouldn’t have thought he was old enough to remember Happy Days. Perhaps he did, though, and that’s the thing about Pollock: he sometimes seems younger than his 27 years.
In part it’s a physical thing. He still gangles along loose-limbed like a teenager startled by a growth spurt. He was a little fella as a schoolboy, only shooting up in his teens, and sometimes his body suggests it still hasn’t quite got used to his height.
All of this is deceptive, though, as is a run-up that is determined rather than smooth. But when he hits the crease, he does just about everything right. His arm is high, close to his right ear, he’s close to the stumps and probably only Glenn McGrath bowls as consistently straight.
Pollock’s not lightning fast, but he’s sharp enough to keep the batsman concentrating and he usually has a little in reserve. He can get it up around a batsman’s ears if there’s a bit of ping in the pitch and the young Pollock had his team-mates totting up the number of opposition batsmen he’d knocked over.
That was the young Shaun Pollock, though. The older Shaun Pollock is captain of South Africa and doing a far better job of it than many people, including this writer, thought he could.
In the first place, Pollock just seemed as if he still had some maturing to do. Secondly, it’s pretty much cast in stone that bowlers don’t make good captains. If you’re putting in 20 or so overs a day, it’s not that easy to step backward to make calm and rational assessments.
Pollock, though, has managed remarkably well, and this is a judgement based on his first and last Tests as captain (remember, too, that he hadn’t captained a first-class team until he took over the Test side). In Galle in July, South Africa, to put it kindly, were ragged, directionless, clueless as Sri Lanka savaged them in the first Test.
Barely six months down the line, Pollock’s South Africans are confident, cheerful and, at times, ruthless. They can play thrilling cricket on the right surfaces and they’ve proved they can win on dead pitches.
Pollock (and Graham Ford) have to take a lot of credit for this (and they have been helped by more consistent selection). He is an instinctive cricketer and captain, much more so than his predecessor, and may yet be prone to making the odd howler.
But the foot-stamping petulance that surfaced in Sri Lanka has all but vanished, replaced by a competitive edge that neither New Zealand nor Sri Lanka have been able to blunt.
His team look happy, they’re playing well and they’re winning and you don’t arrive at this without a captain who is both liked and respected. You can argue that he might have made more of the rain-ruined Wanderers Test, but even Stephen Fleming allowed that there was still some of Hansie Cronje’s match-fixing baggage floating about. Shaun Pollock’s doing a really, really good job for South Africa. Happy Days? Absolutely.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa