Time to see what Polly’s made

For all Shaun Pollock’s pedigree as a cricketer — a pedigree that has provided him with an instinctive, effortless grasp of almost every aspect of the game — he has never quite settled the debate that sometimes asks whether he really is the best person to captain South Africa.

To a certain extent this is rooted in the confused, shocking circumstances in which he assumed the leadership. Although he had been Hansie Cronje’s vice-captain for two years, no one, least of all Pollock himself then, expected him to be thrust into the role in 2000. The long-term planning assumed that Cronje would lead the team at least until the ICC Cricket World Cup 2003, after which it would probably have been up to Cronje himself to decide when he wanted to step down.

Come this April, however, and Pollock will have captained South Africa for three years. And come this April, it hardly needs to be said, we’ll know whether Pollock has become South Africa’s first World Cup-winning captain.

When he took over the captaincy Pollock was 26. It’s fair to say that he was a young 26 at the time. During the 1998 tour of England, when Pollock was Cronje’s deputy, a South African journalist was asked whether he thought the fast bowler offered an immediate challenge to Cronje’s position. The writer scratched around for a moment before responding: ‘He’s helluva young, you know. He’s the type of guy who still giggles when someone farts in the dressing room.”

This may or may not be true, but it summed up Pollock’s perceived lack of gravitas at the time, a perception reinforced by his relaxed, loose-limbed amble. He looked, and often still does look, perfectly happy to have a bat and a bowl and let someone else worry about the details.

In some respects, this continues to be the case, but then again, naturally gifted players often possess this insouciance. In many instances it’s no more than a method of letting the opposition know that, really, you’ve got nothing that bothers me, mate.

Even though Pollock occasionally allows flashes of irritation and frustration to burst through, his body language tends to be the antithesis of his predecessors. You needed few qualifications to know when Kepler Wessels or Cronje were grumpy.

A more legitimate concern about Pollock’s captaincy is founded in the belief that, generally, it’s not a good idea to have bowlers captaining teams. The point here is that senior bowlers have enough to do as it as without having to worry about broader strategic matters. Conversely, bowler-captains are always in the best position to assess their own performances and the tendency is to either over-bowl or under-bowl themselves.

Captaincy has undoubtedly brought more out of Pollock as a batsman, but throughout the 2001/02 season, there was a noticeable lack of zip in his bowling. The control of line and length were there, but the penetration was lacking.

When Pollock first played international cricket against England in the 1995/96 season, he was known around the country as much for how many batsmen he’d hit as for the number of wickets he’d taken. For much of last season he posed almost no physical threat and although he argued that he’d never bowled at much above 125kph, he did so without terribly much conviction. With Allan Donald missing for much of the season and Makhaya Ntini bowling poorly at the start of the summer, South Africa’s seam attack started to look toothless, particularly in Australia and against the powerful Australian top order.

Something, however, seems to have come back this season. Perhaps it’s working with a new coach, perhaps the new panel of selectors have reminded him that he’s in the team in the first place as a strike bowler. Whatever the case, he’s looked far more like the young Shaun Pollock this summer than was the case last season.

And you can’t argue that Pollock has grown as a batsman while leading the side. He may still describe batting as a hobby, but the captaincy appears to have brought new self-belief to his batting. He says that he owes a lot to his second spell with Warwickshire when he was pushed up the order, but there also more than a suggestion that he’s most at home at the crease when he’s not following instructions and can trust to his own judgement.

Because this, possibly, is his greatest asset as a cricket captain: he has an entirely natural grasp of the game, more so, perhaps than either of his predecessors, Wessels and Cronje.

Experience taught Wessels to play the percentages and while Cronje was often hailed as an innovator, much of his thinking was done off the field and he did not always recognise the moment when it presented itself.

Pollock, by contrast, is an intuitive cricketer, but while he may see the moment, sometimes, as was the case in Australia, he has proved unable to respond to it. This led, in Australia, to charges that he lacked authority and that when faced with serious pressure, the South Africans lost their disciplines.

There may be some truth in this, but Pollock argues that both he and his team are learning and have learned from their experiences, both against Australia and in the past World Cup when they fell agonisingly short.

The question of his authority has come up in recent weeks with Jonty Rhodes and Allan Donald ‘dedicating” the World Cup to Cronje. Pollock claims to be unaffected by either the dedication or the public fuss about it, but he concedes that the issue has been discussed by the team’s management.

His line is that the whole affair is largely a storm in a media teacup (although Rhodes and Donald might have been just a little unwise to have made private sentiments public). And he doesn’t believe that the front page headlines have in any way undermined his own authority: ‘It’s fine by me if people want to dedicate the tournament to someone. Monde Zondeki’s dedicating it to Steve Tshwete. It’s the same thing.”

He also claims not to be fazed by the fact that no team has won the World Cup on home soil – ‘That’s one of those records that will be broken one day. Let’s hope it’s us who break it”; the pressure of playing in front of passionate home crowds – ‘Look how South Korea used their home support to their advantage at the soccer World Cup last year”; or having to wait for the tournament to start – ‘You enjoy all the build-up and the anticipation, but, yeah, it’ll be good to actually get on to the field”.

One question, however, will not be answered until the latter stages of this World Cup. And that is whether South Africa can match Australia when the chips are really down. As much as the South African team hate to admit it, whenever the two sides have gone toe-to-toe since readmission South Africa have tended to blink first.

If Pollock, and South Africa, can find a way past Australia this time around, they will have gone a long way towards winning the World Cup. And if Pollock can pull this one off, it will be a very long time before anyone is brave enough to question his credentials as captain.