Never has a post-match post-mortem been as shockingly frank as that offered by Graeme ‘Biff” Smith after South Africa’s cricketers leapt lemming-like into flaccid ignominy at Lord’s on Saturday. Pursing what would have been his lips if he had any, Smith confessed that ‘the guys all gave 100%”.
As seasoned Telegraph scribes stared at a point in space and tried not to blanche, a stunned public was left confused and disoriented, trying vainly to make sense of this flagrant dereliction of duty.
Percentile points do not lie. According to most captains and coaches (and the retrenched motiv-ational speakers who write their scripts), a player is giving about 105% just by walking on to the field.
This is technically true — the average footballer uses 102% of his higher brain functions just to remain standing upright, although if he wishes to tell his teammates from the opposition, he must push through to the heady heights of around 107%. Maestros like Beckham need only about 75% to run and kick at the same time, but that’s why they earn the big bucks.
When one considers that our Olympic bid team gave 110% and that the captain of the Titanic was 150% sure that his ship was 105% unsinkable, Smith’s revelation that his lads just scraped three figures is nothing short of disgusting.
And before they offer a namby-pamby 110% in the forthcoming Test series against England, they would do well to look at their rugby counterparts.
Faced with a Wallaby team champing at the bit to give anything up into the mid-130s, the Springboks’ philosophy abandoned crude one-upmanship and entered the realms of poetry. In the build-up to Saturday’s romp at Newlands, Rudolph the red-faced coach vowed that in order to be 100% victorious, his boys needed to be OK with being 100% dead. This sort of attitude put Japan on the map in the early 1940s, but it seemed a little extreme for an afternoon’s entertainment.
And besides, asked the more jaded among us, how does one tell a dead Springbok backline from a live one?
If the team was willing to die, then at least one of its fans was willing to kill. Having recently written a piece in a rugby magazine encouraging outright surrender as an alternative to being seriously hurt by the Wallabies and the All Blacks, I received an e-mail from an employee of South Africa’s still-unchallenged telephone company.
With a patriotic fervour that far outweighed his ability to spell, he expressed some shame at having to share the vaderland with defeatist reprobate columnists of my ilk. However, his closing salutation was worthy of mention. ‘Please eat poison!” he urged, a thought that must have occurred to every customer of his telephone company who has ever been put on hold by their ‘help” line.
Since no parcels of two-minute noodles, Fritos and sardines have arrived in the post, one must assume he was too cheap to put his money where his flapping mouth is.
Luckily, this telecommuting scribe and his team were saved from impending death by Brent Russell, who gave 240% and reinforced the impression that he learned his inimitable running style by watching National Geographic films of marmosets scurrying after lizards.
None of which solves the problem of the cricketers. Mike Haysman, who is Australian but was captured at birth and fed with a puppet that accustomed him to South Africans, reckons Makhaya Ntini can improve another 10% if he learns to bowl a slower ball.
This isn’t as comforting as it sounds: to get that slower ball right, Ntini will have to throttle back to about 90% capacity, meaning that the improvement will take him right back up to the pitiful three-figures mark.
‘Biff”, it seems, is not yet ready to demand the ultimate sacrifice from his boys. The post-thrashing huddle at Lord’s was apparently a chance to tell them to ‘remember the pain” of defeat.
However, such is the nature of huddles that it seems unlikely anyone registered anything other than the noxious fumes from 22 exposed armpits.
There’s more than one way to lay one’s life on the altar of sport—