“The thing about Andr Nel,” sighed a former national selector last summer as Australia pasted the South African bowling all over the Wanderers, “is that he looks like a fast bowler and behaves like a fast bowler, but he just isn’t very fast.”
Nel was at the centre of a minor rumpus last year when he flattened Allan Donald with a bouncer during a SuperSport Series match.
Nel was in the thick of it again last weekend, hitting Highveld Strikers batsman Enoch Nkwe with a throw ostensibly aimed at the stumps. The Strikers have been suitably outraged, muttering darkly about calling for a disciplinary inquiry, but Nkwe’s response was more immediate and more pointed: he went on to make a maiden first-class century.
Nel’s actions, no doubt, were born of frustration, but it may run a little deeper than simply a failure to take wickets on a particular day. He has never quite established himself at the highest level and to some extent, as noted by our former national selector, he has attempted to pass himself off as a fast bowler.
He is by no means the first bowler to seek to compensate for a lack of genuine pace with attitude. In recent times, the most notable example has been Merv Hughes, who managed to take more than 200 Test wickets without ever reaching very high speeds.
Hughes, it has to be said, started with the considerable advantage of appearing to have wandered into the Melbourne Cricket Ground straight from a bikers’ convention. He looked the part and played up to it. But, to be fair to him, he knew what he was up to and so did his captain Alan Border.
If you looked carefully past a moustache that at one stage threatened to take over the civilised world, you could almost always detect a twinkle in Merv’s eye. He is by no means a stupid man, nor someone unable to laugh at himself. And it was precisely because Hughes kept a sense of perspective that he proved so effective.
In the wake of Wednesday’s capitulation against India, some sort of perspective is required. There is no question that the South Africans choked in Colombo, losing a match that they had pretty much won for 90 overs.
There is, of course, no shame in losing, but it is the manner of defeat that has become a serious concern for South African cricket. Shaun Pollock has spoken of Wednesday’s performance being “not good enough” and of “going back to the drawing board”. The World Cup, though, is now only a few months off and the type of attitude required to win the tournament is not something that can be grown overnight.
What is needed in the short term is attitude and perspective and this is where the likes of Nel come in. There is nothing wrong with bowlers making life uncomfortable for batsmen. Our cricket desperately needs toughening up. But if Nel really wants to be accepted as one of the game’s hard men, he might find a better way of proving this than by bullying a kid in his first first-class game. In any case, the kid had the last laugh after all.
After being flown halfway across the world to play in Wednesday’s semifinal, left-arm spinner and all-rounder Robin Peterson has been left out of a 14-man South African squad to play Bangladesh in the first two one-day internationals in Potchefstroom and Benoni next week.
Jonty Rhodes, Alan Dawson and Nicky Boje have all been rested to allow them to recover from minor injuries with Martin van Jaarsveld, Errol Stewart and Mfuneko Ngam (subject to a fitness test) earning call-ups.
The latter three all performed with credit against Australia A this month, but it is the omission of the in-form Peterson that will raise eyebrows.