Rational people, on becoming national selectors, immediately start walking about on their knuckles while they forage for succulent roots. Their days are spent grooming the stars of the future for ticks, and eating bananas. This, at least, is the firm belief of hosts of unappreciated armchair selectors.
But even their fiercest critics must admit that sometimes, between chest-thumpings, they get it right: Lance Klusener, put out to the pastures from whence he came, will once again represent South Africa — the Rest of it — in a match against de facto national team Western Province, a pleasing reprieve from the headlong dash into the future so many selectors seem obsessed by. Zulu, it seems, is back.
One should, however, be wary of organising pension plans on the back of a Best of the Rest selection. Just ask Martin van Jaarsveld and the other classy also-rans who make up the numbers: before his short-lived international selection, the Northerns star had faced more international bowling — South African — than many Test stars.
Nevertheless, a cap is better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick, which is what Klusener and the United Cricket Board seemed to be offering one another for the past six months.
Five wickets a match in the SuperSport Series have helped Klusener’s cause. Chief selector Omar Henry was moved to say that he was bowling ‘like the Zulu of oldâ€, which could mean either that he’s found his outswinger or that he’s banging it in a yard too short. But either way, it seems memories of short run-ups and lively off-spin are being erased by the season’s bounty.
Of course, selectors need evidence to back up their decisions, and pencilling in the leading wicket-taker in the country is more a closing argument than an opening gambit. But despite once having a bowling strike-rate comparable to Waqar Younis, Klusener is simply not — and never will be — a serious bowling option, in that he will never win a Test with the ball.
To be fair, Henry doesn’t seem to be thinking about 30-over spells and eight-wicket hauls: all the talk of Klusener’s rehabilitation has centred on his return to the limited-overs game. But still the selectors and critics are missing the point.
On paper South Africa does not need Klusener as a one-day allrounder. It can’t honestly want him as a strike bowler in either Test or one-day games. So perhaps, instead of brandishing bowling averages and sound bytes about him and Graeme Smith burying what was allegedly a hatchet (although, given the interpretive abilities of the press, it might just as easily have been a chainsaw or a toothpick), one should be clear about why Klusener is needed.
We need him for most of the reasons we almost lost him; because he is impossible to pigeon-hole, irascible and desperately shy. In short, we need him because he is unpredictably unpredictable. Rather tote a loose cannon in the middle-order than four BB-guns all neatly bolted down.
His ability to win games from nowhere has seemed in recent times outweighed by his straight-jacketed floundering against quality spin. After all, consistency is sacrosanct in cricket, and a man who plunges from the sublime to the ridiculous and back in the space of five overs is regarded with the utmost suspicion. This is why, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh apart, South Africa plays the most boring brand of cricket in the world.
Klusener has done all the hard work of creating a reputation. Now whether he makes an edgy five or an incendiary 50, his mere presence creates doubt in the opposition, something South Africans have rarely been able to do and seem unlikely to manage in a future featuring the straight bats of Boeta Dippenaar, Neil McKenzie and Jacques Rudolph.
Even Herschelle Gibbs, who scores far more heavily than Klusener with a greater variety of shots, is at best predictably unpredictable. When Gibbs is removed cheaply, the opposition relaxes and gets back to business. When Klusener goes early, there is a pervading sense of doubt: What did we do? What now? Does he matter? Did we overestimate him? What about next time?
But perhaps most important of all, we need a player who plays the game. He doesn’t think it, or talk it, or perform it, or enact it. He might be encouraged to practise it a little more, particularly against spin, but men who play the game as he does are rare and should not be allowed to fall under the wheels of safe, corporate sameness. Textbook cricket is essential, but not everyone has to be on the same page.
The legacy of Adam Gilchrist’s attitude will be uncovered in a decade as little Australians go after everything in their half of the pitch. Will little South Africans still be playing it straight?