Peter Robinson cricket
Is Allan Donald’s head worth R1 000? His wicket certainly is if you are to believe Ray Jennings, the Easterns coach who dumped all over his young fast bowler Andre Nel last weekend for bursting into tears when he felled Donald. Ultra-competitive and ever-abrasive, Jennings was far less concerned about the fuss caused by his alleged offer of R1 000 to pin Donald again than he was about teaching Nel a lesson. If Donald was indignant at having a price attached to his head, then you should have heard Jennings. “I was really pissed off,” said Jennings. “His hero ducks into a short one, so what does he do? He goes and sobs over him like a girl guide. I told him to pin him with the next ball and pin him again until he didn’t get up.” Jennings also had a fair bit to say, none of it complimentary, about Donald’s age and the amount of time the great fast bowler spends off the field these days. You can take this all with a pinch of salt, but the fact is, in a manner of speaking, Jennings has touched on a sore point: Donald spent far too much time this season being treated for a variety of ailments for anyone’s good. The truth of it is that he is getting on a bit and that South Africa can no longer take him for granted, neither in the long term nor, with the West Indies tour in mind, in the short term. Not everyone will find Jennings’s methods acceptable, but in one respect he might have done Nel a valuable service. South Africa hardly needs its budding young fast bowlers to weep inconsolably over their victims and Jennings is perfectly correct that the bouncer is an important weapon in any quick’s armoury and one of the skills of fast bowling is to find batsmen’s weaknesses and exploit them. Donald knows this as well as anyone. Indeed, on the first evening of the Easterns-Free State match he was on Mike Haysman’s Extra Cover programme discussing the fact that the fast bowlers’ union is no more. They give it to each other every bit as much as they do to the recognised batsmen, and the likelihood that they’re going to cop it back doesn’t seem to bother many of them.
In fact, one of the thoughts that struck me when Nel came over all emotional was that I hoped the pictures weren’t going to be screened in Australia. You can imagine Messrs Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson falling out of their chairs laughing at any fast bowler showing the slightest signs of remorse. Emotional toughness is going to be a crucial ingredient to South Africa’s success or otherwise in the West Indies, no matter how poorly the home team travel these days. It’s a long tour five Test matches and the mental resilience of the South Africans will be tested to the limit. And speaking of fast bowlers clocking other fast bowlers, South Africa would do well to remember how Australia claimed the world champions’ title back in 1995 when they won a four-Test series in the islands 2-1. Craig McDermott, Australia’s premier fast bowler at the time, had returned home with an ankle injury sustained in mysterious circumstances and Mark Taylor’s side was left with Paul Reiffel and a youthful Glenn McGrath to lead the attack. The Australians believed it was crucial to their cause not to allow the West Indian tail to hang around for any length of time. Someone had to get in among them, to stick it up their noses and McGrath stuck his hand up. He knew that, effectively, anything he dished out would come back at him four-fold but he made sure that whenever the Australians got a sniff of the West Indian tail the innings was wrapped up pretty quickly. South Africa need not expect lightning-fast pitches in the Caribbean, but effective fast bowling will be vital. The obvious first choices for South Africa are Donald, Shaun Pollock and Makhaya Ntini, but the backup will be vital. With Mfuneko Ngam out of the tour and the careers of David Terbrugge and Nantie Hayward having gone backward this summer, there might well be a place for someone like Nel in the touring party. Jennings says that Nel is one of the quickest and, despite his little outburst in Benoni, one of the meanest around. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he, but we shall see. Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa