CRICKET
Peter Robinson
If you hadn’t heard of the Summer Spice Series, fear not: you’re about to hear an awful lot about it over the next few weeks. This is the name dreamed up mainly to cover India’s travels around South Africa for the next two months but which also encompasses Kenya’s visit to this country.
The idea is is to simplify things for an audience that, research apparently shows, has become confused by the bombardment of different types of branding constantly thrown at it. So, under the Summer Spice Series banner we will have, firstly, the Standard Bank one-day series, which starts at the Wanderers on Friday night when South Africa meet India to launch a triangular tournament, which also includes Kenya. This will be followed by the Castle Lager/MTN Summer Spice Test series.
Does that make it simpler? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. But then again, ever since Hansiegate South African cricket has been peering anxiously at its support base. The United Cricket Board (UCB) denies that it’s attempting the hard sell, but we’re not looking at subtlety here and, allowing that cricket has become a business in which one of the primary aims is to connect a product with a market, perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for subtlety.
All things considered, it has not been a week during which the UCB has flaunted its more sensitive side. Take the matter of the announcement of the South African squad for the first two one-day games, for instance. The plan initially was to name the squad on Tuesday morning, the players having flown back from Harare on Monday.
But at some point, midway through the dinner to launch the 2001 edition of the ever-excellent Mutual and Federal SA Cricket Annual in Sandton on Monday evening, someone thought, what the hell, let’s name it now with all these people sitting about.
This decision had two effects. The first was to drive a host of cricket writers away from their kingklip to phone their sports desks and hastily cobble together some kind of story. Of course, giving newspaper hacks indigestion is probably not of enormous concern to the UCB.
The second effect, however, should worry the UCB. Fourteen players came back from Zimbabwe, but only 12 were named at the dinner, the unlucky two being Boeta Dippenaar and Justin Ontong. So there everyone was at an evening staged to celebrate South African cricket and the five Cricketers of the Year in particular with two of them having to deal with the empty feeling of being dropped.
It was insensitive and unnecessary and while both Dippenaar and Ontong are certain to be back in the frame before this summer is up, they both have probably had better nights out.
Of course, some people love public humiliation. BBC Prime has been screening a fascinating quiz show recently, The Weakest Link, which the UCB could pick up a few tips from. Hosted by the Quizmistress from Hell, the idea is that after each round the contestants vote one of their number off the show. He or she is dismissed by Ms Nasty with the type of contempt peculiar to a particular type of Englishwoman.
Perhaps the UCB could borrow her and televise team announcements: “Allan Donald? Too old. On your bike.”
With all this going on, it will come as something of a relief to get to the Wanderers to watch what South African cricket does best actually play the game. It’s no disrespect to Kenya, the third point of the triangle, to assume that they probably won’t win a game, but the clashes between South Africa and India could be riveting.
Especially if the South Africans can reproduce the type of cricket they played in Zimbabwe. It was startling stuff and it came about, in large measure, because of the form displayed by Herschelle Gibbs. Gary Kirsten, Jacques Kallis and Neil McKenzie all batted superbly at times, but when Gibbs was in full cry he made everyone else look ordinary.
Gibbs has quite clearly been given license to chase the bowling in the first 15 overs and he’s been devastating. He spent the winter sitting at the knee of the wise old Springbok rugby captain Morne du Plessis “life skills training”, I think it was called and on the evidence of Gibbs’s current form, perhaps Morne should have a natter with the rest of the batsmen.
During the past 18 months or so, Gibbs has been in the news mainly for his forgetfulness and recreational activities, but the pity of all this adverse publicity is that it has shrouded one of the truly great talents of the modern game.
There are three player in the current South African side capable of tearing an attack to pieces when the force is with them, but Lance Klusener and Shaun Pollock do it down the order. Gibbs does it against the new ball.
He has two considerable assets: quite extraordinary hand-eye coordination and a mind usually uncluttered by self-doubt. Usually, but not invariably. Anyone who watched Gibbs make his jittery comeback at Newlands in the New Year after his six-month ban will be aware that he’s perhaps not quite the airhead he likes to portray the bloke who’s never read a book and is proud of it.
His natural habitat is on the sports field, however, and you can pick your sport. And when he’s going, he really goes. Gibbs has an exceptional array of strokes and the confidence to play all of them. The good news for South Africa is that the more often he plays like this, the more likely it is to rub off on a team which, every now and again, gives the impression that it’s thinking more about its averages than in getting a result. We could have a succession of cracking one-dayers ahead of us.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa