When Graeme Smith was 13, South Africa lost six straight one-day games in Pakistan. It was a nightmarish triangular series, as Kepler Wessels and new coach Bob Woolmer tried alternately to nurse and bully their team through the valley of the shadow of Shane Warne and Mushtaq Ahmed.
Young Smith, clearly the sort of lad who slept with a cricket bat under his pillow, would have absorbed each loss as a personal slight while he battled to understand how a solid team could perform so miserably.
Nine years later he is one limited-overs loss away from equalling the longest losing streak in South African history, and his boyhood questions remain largely unanswered.
The only consolation is that the one-day series is over and the prospect of a morale-shattering berth alongside 1994’s ignominy is mercifully months away.
Smith and his coach, Eric Simons, made some dutiful noises about the series being ‘close†in places, the standard line about one-day cricket being a lottery.
But being pipped at the post by some exceptional big-hitting or rain is one thing. Wagging one’s tail, rolling over, playing dead and fetching New Zealand’s slippers is something entirely different.
And then, to crown a perfectly awful week for the Proteas, they were named as the ‘dirtiest†team in the world over the past two years.
Tallying up all the gold stars in its little black book, the International Cricket Council (ICC) declared South Africa to be badder than a junkyard dog, the prime mongrel being the yapping Andrew Hall.
The West Indies, on the other hand, came away with more gold stars than anyone else, including merit badges for fire-lighting, knot-tying and yachtsmanship. If only they could play cricket.Â
It was more than coincidental, in light of the ICC’s findings, that Smith and Jacques Kallis were involved in what was clearly bitter and exceptionally ugly sledging this week. Whether the obscenity is a symptom of an over-long season or frustration at having no match-winning bowlers is debatable, but what is clear is that Smith has wandered into a trap set by the magnificently cunning Stephen Fleming.
Fleming knows that a wound-up Smith is a nervous Smith, and while one does not want to suggest that the Kiwi skipper is engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent, Smith should think long and hard before trying to outfox the canniest captain in the game today. Roll on the Tests.