Everyone and his Aunt Nellie has a theory as to why South Africa offered their flabby underbelly to India in Sri Lanka last week. National coach Eric Simons may have come as close as any when he pondered whether the capitulation could be put down to factors ”other than cricketing reasons”.
Which is not to suggest that the South Africans tanked it. Even so, as any number of sub-continental players, administrators and journalists have noted, if India or Pakistan had folded up so meekly, match-fixing investigator Lord Condon and his super sleuths would have been sniffing around their dressing rooms before the post-match rituals had been completed.
In simple terms, South Africa choked horribly. The players tend to sulk whenever this label is thrown at them, but in this instance, unfortunately, there is no hiding from it.
More to the point, though, is to discover exactly what has happened to the white-knuckled bravado that Kepler Wessels brought to the side in the early post-readmission years.
Most signs point to Edgbaston in 1999 as the moment when the stomach began to be torn out of the South African team. Less than a year later, Hansie Cronje confessed to his involvement with the darker side of the game and it might be fair to say that these two separate, but related, episodes left a far deeper scar on the team than is readily appreciated.
In particular, the circumstances of Cronje’s fall from grace and the tragedy of his subsequent death in June this year seem now to weigh more heavily than ever on Shaun Pollock and his team-mates.
Cronje, of course, was a huge influence on many of the current side. Jonty Rhodes and Allan Donald were his contemporaries while Pollock, Jacques Kallis, Mark Boucher, Lance Klusener and Herschelle Gibbs all emerged during his captaincy. It is understandable that they should have been bewildered by the match-fixing scandal and, on a personal level, devastated by his death.
But the question that needs to be asked is how much influence does the memory of Cronje have on the team collectively? And the answer seems to be too much for their own good. Almost, it appears, as a habit now this match or that innings is dedicated to the former captain, to the point where it has become unclear for whom or for what purpose the side is playing.
Pollock’s qualities of leadership have been tried and found wanting over the past year. But if he allows his own authority to be undermined out of respect for a dead friend, he takes upon himself a far weightier burden than is bearable.
At best Cronje’s legacy is ambivalent. Like most, he was a person of mixed impulses and actions and, sadly, his darkest secrets were exposed to the harshest of spotlights.
The South African players are entitled to mourn him privately. But if South Africa is to make any impression on next year’s World Cup, they have to understand that they play for their country, for their thousands, if not millions, of supporters, but most of all for themselves. They have to leave Cronje behind.
Otherwise, ironically, they may end up dedicating weakness and failure to the memory of a man they obviously still hold in the utmost regard.