The reruns of the 1998 one-day series against the West Indies, broadcast as Centurion dripped, were a startling reminder of how South African cricketers used to look. Energetic and eager, the high-fives tinged with none of the blasé hipness of today’s squad, they seemed to be having fun.
Of course, Jonty Rhodes was at point, Hansie Cronje was Hansie Cronje, and Shaun Pollock was fast and nasty, but even against embarrassingly awful opposition they never seemed to cruise. What a difference five years and 127 one-day matches make…
The purists, often English septuagenarians, discount notions that modern players are overworked. They recount tales of doughty fast bowlers waking up at 2am to trudge 100 miles through sleet to bowl 40 overs unchanged at Wally Hammond before heading back to the coal mine. Yes, today’s youngsters play more international cricket, but surely you can’t compare that to a full Test and county career of the 1950s?
Fred Trueman, blunderbuss fast bowler and diplomatic incident waiting to happen, was one of those whose careers are cited as the epitome of cricketing elbow grease. In today’s parlance of six-ball overs, an average year in the 1950s saw him sling down around 950 overs, a monstrous effort given that bowling fast requires one to have a controlled sneezing fit and heart-attack simultaneously, with some back-spasms thrown for good measure.
Trueman’s efforts left West Indian master Michael Holding wheezing, Whispering Death managing around 683 overs a year without the added burden of years of county cricket. But Pollock, whose stamina we’ve admired but tacitly assumed (after all, these are professionals!), has managed 1 062 overs a year for more than a decade, without the benefit of being able to beat up the British Universities toffs once a year.
As the game’s history slowly gets shorter in the public mind (who scored the last one-day century for South Africa? When? Where?) the golden goose is losing its lustre as the players battle to keep up.
It is extraordinary to one-day specialists like Michael Bevan to be praised for their ‘professionalismâ€, as if it were a burden to go out and slog a ball around for two hours in front of cheering spectators; evidence that the game invented to be unpredictable has been forced to toe the line. The marketers have budgeted for uniform thrills, and that’s what we’ll get until we can’t be bothered to turn on the telly.
Three cheers, then, for the return of Lance Klusener, who sparks a game just swapping his gum from cheek to cheek. The prospect of him eager to reclaim the place he should never have lost, combined with in-form Brian Lara and Chris Gayle, have suddenly elevated the series from a predictable footnote to the tour to a contest worth paying money to see.
South Africa will win the series, and provincial coffers will be refilled (if current allegations against the Easterns are true, their coffers could do with new locks) and memorable moments are guaranteed. But unless the strategists take stock, those memories will become more fleeting every year.