Graeme Smith has already displayed admirable impatience with the insipidly modest nothing-speak expected from professional sportsmen, and if he continues to be outspoken South Africa will have produced a very fine captain indeed. However, he could have been whispering into a hurricane this week for all it helped him and his team.
In a column for the Cape Times, the South African captain used the kind of argument more at home in an appeals court than a tour preview. As candidly as always, Smith revealed that he and his team believe themselves well on the way to the gallows of corporate necessity.
‘All I ask,†wrote Smith, ‘is for everyone to remember we are just people, some with children, one with a pregnant wife and the rest hoping to start a family one day —†It was startling stuff, devoid of metaphor and macho hyperbole. Smith was literally asking — as politely as a proud young gentleman can — that the lives of the South African cricket team not be risked.
It was a shocking confession of weakness to an industry that will cancel a tour if sponsors cough, but will send an essentially Western team into a country at the epicentre of a fundamentalist onslaught against the West.
The headlines this week were not about the odds of the South Africans being the target of an attack, or even about the farce of having to play sport surrounded by commandos with machine-guns, but about Smith pointing out that he was afraid of bombs.
His statement was greeted with laughter by Pakistani journalists, more proof that Pakistan is a long way from being ready to host international visitors.
Smith’s shameful concern about the integrity of his body parts revealed that he has clearly not been briefed as to why the tour has taken place: somebody needs to take him aside and whisper in his ear.
The tour is not going ahead because the Proteas are keen to garner invaluable experience (a sweetener quickly added by Mark Boucher to a comment, made when he thought the tour was off, about the drudgery of touring Pakistan and alluding to his relief that the team would not have to undergo such an ordeal).
The tour is not going ahead because of the cracking great Pakistani lawsuit hanging over the head of the United Cricket Board. No, the tour is going ahead because it is The Right Thing To Do.
From the pious gravity of the press conference it became evident that the tour is being considered — or at least being sold as — a noble gesture, a selfless humanitarian crusade to put food on the tables of starving Pakistani cricket administrators and players. Cassim Docrat said that the South African presence was important for Pakistani cricket.
Others might argue that a functional Pakistani security structure or taking some action other than hand-wringing against religious fundamentalists might be more important for Pakistani cricket, but then South Africans have always badly over-
estimated the importance of sport.
If something awful does happen, Pakistan will be blamed and the UCB will express deep regrets. For what, exactly, we won’t know. Perhaps a loss of income.
But a positive outlook is needed, and Smith certainly has one, if only by necessity. All the same, one felt he was being unintentionally honest when he announced in the same column that the team’s motto for the tour is ‘No excusesâ€. Perhaps he felt that ‘Women and children first†was a bit wordy.
The Gaddafi stadium in Lahore has provided Pakistan with some good times of late, but if history and statistics mean anything, Smith’s team can discount the home side’s advantage, given their nine-run win against Pakistan in their only meeting at the high altitude venue.
In that encounter Gary Kirsten struck one of his inscrutably elegant half-centuries that only seem to crop up in Asia (is there something in the water that transforms him from metronome to maestro?) before Shaun Pollock — then halfway through a love affair with Pakistani pitches — knocked over the opposing top order for a handful of runs.
In or out of form, Pollock is too good a bowler not to coax some affection out of his old flames again, and his tight-fisted opening spell in Wednesday’s practice game in Lahore confirmed that six inches outside off-stump on a flat track in
Pakistan is just as confounding as six outside off on a Perth green top.
Kirsten, though, is less of a certainty. Left out of Wednesday’s team in favour of Jacques Rudolph, the left-hander is likely to be overlooked entirely for the one-day series.
Whether South Africa can afford to discard a vastly experienced number three who averages over 74 in one-day games in Pakistan is questionable. Explosions aren’t restricted to the real world: top orders are equally vulnerable, and one can only hope the great impermeable shield of Kirsten’s bat is not missed once the dust settles.