Cricket sage Hylton Ackerman has the knack of hitting more nails on the head than most, but there was an air of naïve redundancy in his on-air praise of Jacques Kallis this week. In almost subversive tones, as if postulating a notion that was revolutionary and risky,
Ackerman suggested that Kallis should be included in the pantheon of South African greats, alongside Roy McLean and Graeme Pollock. Well, duh.
Praising a player still far from retirement seems to be anathema in local sports journalism. Those who venture that we are watching something special are ridiculed as sycophants, and the dutiful drudgery of reportage perpetuates as cricket writing slowly winds down into a coma.
Luckily, everyone knows Kallis is great. The English and Australian media said it, so it must be true. Granted, blasé local fans say, we can’t quite remember a series that he tore the throat out of, but if he’s good enough for Bill Lawry and Geoffrey Boycott, he’s good enough for us.
But how good is Kallis? How does he hold up against iconic batsmen, figures whose scoring feats still resonate 20 or 40 or 60 years on?
Can he stand shoulder to shoulder with dapper Dennis Compton, the Brylcreemed James Bond of cricket lore?
How about Sir Frank Worrall, immortal in the West Indies and one of the Caribbean’s first batting geniuses? Neil Harvey, the prototype left-handed Australian nightmare? Or further back, Bill Ponsford, the bloke at the other end from Bradman, and matching him shot for shot? Can Kallis ever hope to be mentioned in such company?
One should hope so: he’s already made more Test runs than all of them, and at a better average.
But there’s a more immediate measure of what Kallis means to South Africa: it’s what he means to the world. The despair we suffered as Steve Waugh jogged out to the middle, as Rahul Dravid took guard, as Sachin Tendulkar got off the mark with a brisk single past point, that’s what India, Trinidad and England feel when Kallis defends his first ball off the middle of the bat. It’s pure hell, and we’re dishing it out.
His statistics didn’t come from nowhere: Kallis has been dishing it out for years now, but this season is the sort of thing you tell your grandkids about. Elegant to the point of decadence and brutal as Ghengis Khan with a migraine, Kallis has revealed a new side to his game (a side, Ackerman will tell you, that was always there) with his assault on the West Indies and the record books.
This unfurling of talent and intent happens once a decade. Brian Lara, picking bits of concrete out of the ball, should know. He did it 10 years ago.
‘I played each ball on its merits,†was the predictable and polite response to Kallis’s massacre of the tourists at Newlands. Yeah, right. You know, the way a ball just short of a length on middle-stump usually gets hooked into the back row of the Railways Stand—