It might be of small comfort to Graeme Smith and Neil McKenzie, but in different parts of the world this week Steve Waugh and VVS Laxman also learned that their participation in next month’s cricket World Cup would be restricted to watching proceedings on television.
Their omissions from the Australian and Indian squads respectively came as no surprise. For Waugh the writing has been on the wall since Australia’s tour to South Africa last summer and although he has done his damndest in recent weeks to persuade the Australian selectors of his all-round claims, all of this was to no avail.
Indeed, Waugh may well be wearing Australian colours for the last time this weekend in the fifth and final Ashes Test in his home town of Sydney. If he steps into retirement now (and for those who write scripts, the end of this Test match would be the perfect moment, particularly if Australia complete a 5-0 series whitewash), he will go as one of the most remarkable, durable and shrewdest players ever to have graced the game.
Be assured, not only South Africans will heave sighs of relief at the sight of Australian teams sans Waugh (although it has to be said that he did seem to reserve many of his great moments especially for South Africa).
Like Waugh, Smith and McKenzie are playing Test cricket this weekend but theirs, perhaps, is the less enviable assignment. Around them in the Newlands dressing room many of their team-mates will be already looking ahead to next month and March. Yes, the official line is that there is still a Test match to play, but, occasional hints to the contrary aside, players are only human. One or two of them, notably Boeta Dippenaar, Nicky Boje and Gary Kirsten, might have spent the week before Christmas wondering just what the selectors had in mind and they will have been mightily relieved to hear their names read out last Sunday.
So Smith and McKenzie now have to go through the Test saying the right things and putting on the right faces while their insides have been all but ripped from their bodies. It is a desperately difficult situation for both players and you can only hope that their disappointment leaves no long-term damage.
You only have to look back a year for evidence of the wounds that can be inflicted by unsympathetic selections. Neither Jacques Rudolph nor Justin Ontong have fully recovered from the Sydney Test last new year and while Rudolph has shown signs that his confidence is returning,
Ontong has dropped almost completely off the screen.
The irony of leaving Smith and McKenzie out of the World Cup, of course, is that they were two of too few South African batsmen to stand up to Australia last summer. Against the best team in the world, they played with courage and some purpose. Less than a year later, however, they cannot find a place for themselves in South Africa’s one-day 15.
So you have to ask: has something gone wrong with their games, or have they been clearly informed and do they fully understand what is required in the one-day team? Sometimes this summer neither of them has seemed entirely clear of what role he is expected to play.
In the case of McKenzie, he has never seemed to have had the full backing of the selectors, neither the current crop nor Rushdi Magiet’s previous panel. In one particularly ridiculous instance, he was dropped from the South African squad at the end of a one-day tournament in Nairobi after never having set foot on the field. Presumably he had a bad net somewhere along the way.
Like one or two others before him, McKenzie is sometimes seen as not being serious enough for international cricket. It is difficult to say whether having a glamorous girlfriend helps or hinders his cause, but this liaison regularly thrust into the public consciousness as if simply the fact of it should somehow be held against him.
But by leaving out McKenzie (and Smith, for that matter) South Africa may have denied themselves a quality that is crucial to success: the type of perspective that can be provided by sheer good nature. As much as South Africans hate to admit this, some of the best-prepared teams put in the field over the past decade have choked on the big occasion when opponents, most notably Australia, have played the vital points with more conviction.
This is not to say that South Africa won’t win the cup without McKenzie and Smith (you wouldn’t argue that Australia can’t win the World Cup without Steve Waugh), but the
importance of having a settled, relaxed and good-humoured dressing room should never be underestimated.
In the meantime, all you can hope for the two is that they have good enough Tests at Newlands to convince both themselves and the selectors that they still have significant futures ahead of them. For both players, this Test might represent the watershed moment in their careers.