Peter Robinson cricket
With the best will in the world, this has not been a particularly outstanding week for the administration of South African cricket. Only by the grace of God did the Standard Bank Cup semifinals manage to resolve themselves in time for Wednesday’s final and while Ray Jennings eventually backed down ahead of a disciplinary hearing, the affair provided an almost textbook case of how to make a mountain out of a molehill. Even though the Natal Dolphins and the Eastern Province Jumbos eventually managed to complete their semifinal on the field at Kingsmead on Monday, the tie came within a few overs and an inch or so of rain of turning into a serious and acutely embarrassing bureaucratic blunder. The teams played out the first two legs of their semifinal in Port Elizabeth and Durban as per schedule before turning up at Kingsmead on Sunday for the third leg decider and it rained. This should not have been too much of a problem with Monday set aside for a reserve day, but with the KwaZulu-Natal weather bureau issuing flood warnings officials, players, umpires and journalists started turning to the competition’s regulations for guidance on how to resolve the tie if the reserve day, in turn, was washed out. And this is where it started getting complicated. Despite the fact that an almost identical set of circumstances had arisen a year previously, when Gauteng and EP struggled through a rain-affected semifinal, no guidelines had been laid down on the procedure to follow if the tie could not be resolved on the field. As it happened, Natal managed to win another rain-shortened game with the aid of the Duckworth-Lewis system on Monday, but you could hardly credit this to the efficiency or foresight of the United Cricket Board. To make matters worse, when the players and officials of Natal and EP were starting to wonder not only where the final might take place but also when, Brian Basson, the board’s director of playing affairs and the man charged with sorting these things out, had his phone on voice-mail. When a clear and firm hand was required, the UCB could not provide one. But in the Jennings case when a light, informal touch was needed, the heavy artillery of a disciplinary committee was hauled out.
No matter that Jennings has shuffled his feet and apologised, the issue should never have been whether Jennings put a price on Allan Donald’s or anyone else’s head. The fact is that the laws of cricket specifically allow fast, short-pitched bowling, the purpose of which, and let’s not be coy about this, is to intimidate and unsettle batsmen by the threat or reality of physical injury. That’s what fast bowlers get paid to do. If batsmen are going to hang about out there, they are going to get it up their noses. Donald knows this as well as anyone. In 1996 in Rawalpindi, the hapless Sultan Zirwani, captain of the United Arab Emirates, wandered out, in a world cup match, to face one of the world’s deadliest fast bowlers wearing a sun hat. Donald’s response was to stick one in short that struck the Sultan on his temple. Very few people, outside the Sultan’s immediate family, had any sympathy for him and there was negligible criticism of Donald. He was, after all, only doing what he was paid to do. Equally, it is difficult to think of a softer target than the Sultan, who was so far out of his depth it was laughable.
However indignant Donald may have been when he heard, or was told, that there was a price on his head, he should have been counselled to take it up with Jennings or Andre Nel or whoever on an informal basis. Free State should have been persuaded not to make an official complaint. This should all have been sorted by the people concerned, with the help of an intermediary if necessary, over a drink or on the telephone or, if it came to that, by getting it all off their chest with a shouting match. Even though the disciplinary committee was scrapped in the end, a sneaking suspicion has been left that if anyone else Nel, say had been on the receiving end of the short ball rather than one of South African cricket’s most treasured icons the matter would never have gone as far as it did. Even though he appears to be satisfied with Jennings’ backdown, the real loser in all this has been Donald, a great fast bowler now in the autumn of his career. His protestations were interpreted as whingeing and there remains a substantial school of thought that holds that if he’s prepared to dish it out, he ought to be able to take it without complaining. If the affair achieved anything, it was to raise questions about Donald’s ability to carry on. Several former cricketers who, for obvious reasons, don’t want to be named believe they have detected in Donald the signs of a man who has gone on a season too long. This is not to say the national selectors are mistaken in taking Donald to the West Indies. His record demands that he at least be given the chance to disprove the doubters. But more and more people are talking about how much he has left in him. And they weren’t before he ducked into a short one from Andre Nel. Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa