Believers in omens must have been certain last week that cricket’s fates were plotting some epochal upheaval in the game. Matthew Hayden, once dumped out of international cricket for an uncontrollable urge to push hard-handed at the bowling, pushed very hard-handed at a lot of bowling until he discovered five little runs never before seen by human eyes, lying in a heap at long-on at the Waca.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a bolt from the blue sent West Indian seamer Mervyn Dillon and a teammate to hospital, the lightning strike coming out of the clearest of Jamaican skies. And in India, choked with gods, cricketing and otherwise, the most unusual of all took place as Sachin Tendulkar failed to reach double figures in both innings of a Test.
The International Cricket Council has a host of officials in its service but has not yet gone so far as to appoint a court astrologer, and so it remains to be seen whether this trinity of signs and wonders heralds the birth of a new Bradman, born to a carpenter and a young mother in Bethlehem in the Free State.
A mite unlikely, some might argue, suggesting with realistic resignation that the Don’s reincarnation is likely to emerge yet again in Australia; but certainly one would be forgiven for looking with renewed interest at the second Test between Australia and Zimbabwe and harbouring supernatural notions of a Zimbabwe win by an innings and plenty.
Back in the dull here and now, South Africa’s hearty resurgence in Pakistan — made more admirable in light of the suspension of Graeme Smith and Andrew Hall — was pedestrian by comparison.
Not so the ban handed Hall after his misdemeanour in the second One-dayer. If something good can be taken out of the red-carding of a South African international, it is the firmness with which the authorities acted and the resolute manner in which they denied his appeal.
If this is the start of a new brand of law enforcement in the game, particularly where foul language is concerned, we wish Clive Lloyd and like-minded Eliot Nesses well, and can only hope that a new-found consistency in these decisions can prevail.
Before last week an educated guess would have offered a script something like this: the South Africans, buoyed by their unlikely triumph, go eagerly into their first Test at Lahore reinforced by the arrival of Gary Kirsten, and out-bat the brittle (and Inzamam-less) Pakistani top six, winning by four or five wickets halfway through the last day.
True, international lore has it that tourists struggle in Test series in Pakistan, but then lore also insisted that the West Indies produced viciously quick pitches and that India are invincible at home, both proved untrue by South African tours of recent times.
Certainly the loss of Inzamam-ul-Haq through injury is a major blow to Pakistani hopes, especially given his newfound hunger for runs, an appetite that has left little space for his more familiar tastes: he is sporting a frame that, in bad light and with some hyperbole, could be called trim. It would have been no secret among South Africa’s tireless but limited bowlers that his last Test innings at Lahore resulted in the big man flogging a triple hundred off New Zealand.
But Inzamam was not the only star of that match, and the other star will be all too present in the first Test. Shoaib Akhtar, relaxed and fit, is capable of repeating the dose he gave New Zealand, a performance that finally announced his arrival as a genuinely classy fast bowler: blasting away six Kiwis for 11 runs, Shoaib was instrumental in dismantling the tourists to 73 all out in their first innings.
Questions of pitch preparation are almost irrelevant to the Pakistani spearhead: all he needs to be effective is a set of stumps 22 yards away. On a lively pitch he is unplayable unless rattled, and on a flat top he simply resets his sights and the toe-crushers fly thick and fast.
If Saqlain Mushtaq recovers from a stomach strain quickly enough and is selected, he could find gun-shy South African batsmen trying to tuck into his offspinners, with potentially lucrative results for the wily tweaker.
So what did last week’s portents mean? Will Shoaib take 10 wickets in an innings? Or will an entirely new chapter be added to the script in the South African act, Jacques Kallis taking 15 wickets in the match and scoring a double hundred? Far-fetched, perhaps, but that lightning in Jamaica didn’t come from nowhere—