There is no actual award but there are two obvious candidates for the honour of most-improved South African cricketer of the season — Neil McKenzie and Makhaya Ntini.
Nicky Boje is excluded from consideration because his remarkable run of form started a little short of a year ago in India, so it really seems a straight choice between McKenzie and Ntini. The former is now permanently ensconced at number five following the retirement of Jonty Rhodes from Test cricket and, with no disrespect to Rhodes, the batting is probably a shade more solid now that McKenzie has settled in.
He scored two Test centuries this summer, to go with a one-day hundred in East London, and both innings were played with South Africa wobbling at about 200/7. The best of McKenzie is almost certainly still to come.
He has already demonstrated the technique and temperament to succeed at the highest level and with experience will come greater confidence and the freedom to express himself. You could argue, mind, that anyone prepared to thump the first ball after lunch for six is hardly short of self-belief.
Ntini, meanwhile, has bowled wonderfully this summer, combining stamina with aggression. In a sense, he has been at his best on dead pitches where others have all but given up the ghost. Ntini, however, has continued to charge in and as long as he stays blessedly free of the injuries that are a fast bowler’s lot, he will be a captain’s dream.
These two, then, have made huge strides this summer, establishing themselves as integral parts of a unit. They might well have exceeded their own expectations as the season wore on and they have done themselves and their country proud. At the same time, come to think of it, there is one other contender — Shaun Pollock, not as bowler or batsmen, but as captain. South Africa steamrollered both sets of opponents this season with Pollock’s instinctive and assured captaincy a key element in the success.
He is a far more natural cricketer than his predecessors, with a lighter touch and an inherited feel for the game. More crucially, though, Pollock held the side together in the wake of Hansiegate at a time when the side might easily have splintered into a number of frightened factions bickering with each other.
At the end of this season, how-ever, South Africa had won four of six Test matches (with the weather interfering with the other two games) and beaten New Zealand 5-0 and Sri Lanka 5-1 in one-day series. New Zealand, it is worth remembering, arrived in South Africa as newly crowned ICC KnockOut 2000 champions, while in November The Cricketer Magazine had Sri Lanka placed second to South Africa in its one-day rankings.
This last point is made because of an article written last weekend by Ashwin Desai, a guest columnist for Durban’s The Independent on Saturday, a paperremarkable largely because it forgot to cover a recent Test match. Desai takes a dip at Pollock’s captaincy, claiming that he’s a poor leader on the grounds that, like Sarah Ferguson, he has red hair. At least that is what I think he’s trying to say, but his argument is so poorly made and badly written that it’s hard to tell for sure.
Desai clearly fancies himself a slayer of sacred cows, but his previous scribblings about cricket indicate an almost complete ignorance of the game. Usually you’d simply ignore him, but there’s an interesting twist here. Desai serves on the United Cricket Board’s transformation monitoring committee.
Apart from allowing him to strut self-importantly around the president’s box at Kingsmead, this position allows him to veto representative teams that contain too many whites or too few coloureds or whatever. Presumably his inclusion on the committee was based on the grounds that it was better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.
Whatever the case, it’s a rum do when a member of a UCB committee publicly sticks it to the national captain. Perhaps one of the first tasks awaiting new UCB chief executive Gerald Majola is to persuade those who administer the game, as opposed to those who play it, that, appearances to the contrary, they’re all on the same side.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa
