During the second Test last week, a peculiar exchange took place between South African commentator Neil Manthorp and one of his unbearably prissy and pedantic New Zealand counterparts. Labouring towards some sort of expression of the lack of bite in South Africa’s bowling attack, the Kiwi suggested that there was a lack of ‘nip†about it.
Manthorp’s reply was inexplicable. With the stern air of someone who has witnessed an awful faux pas but is determined to be the bigger man, he said, ‘We don’t talk about ‘nip’ in South Africa, because of its racial connotations. We prefer to talk about ‘zip’.â€
To the instantly subdued Kiwi, a man, it must be said, whose commentary displays all the tact of a walrus in rutting season, Manthorp as a white South African would have seemed eminently qualified to lecture on racism, and nothing further was said. But it left one wondering how a derogatory name for the Japanese, 50 years out of use, suddenly became a landmine of political correctness on a cricket field in New Zealand. Telling the boss that you’re nipping out for a fag suddenly seemed an awfully dangerous thing to say.
But whether you call it zip or nip, there wasn’t any on display last week, or the week before, for that matter. And if the South African attack makes it three in a row in Wellington, one will have to start talking about future successes in terms of zip. As in zip, zippo, nada, niente.
Batting failures are spectacular, immediate and memorable, and so South Africa’s implosion, symbolised by Graeme Smith’s leg stump going over first ball, was the focus of many post-mortems after Auckland. Smith is a good leader and naturally blamed himself and his batsmen, perhaps unfairly drawing fire away from his bowlers. Because it is they who cost South Africa the series halfway through the second Test.
Any batting list in world cricket can collapse on any given day, but bowling attacks do not collapse.
They have off sessions, a flat hour or two, but the extraordinary resignation evident in every bowler in the squad is not accidental or normal.
They are tired, certainly. Smith’s appeal to basic humanity after Auckland was frustratingly diplomatic, as he conceded that his team was tired, but then, he said, so were most teams.
If only he had spoken his mind, that Shaun Pollock should have had his feet up for the last four months, but silly limitations like the human body have no part in modern sport, and he was obliged to fudge his protest and turn it into a mea culpa.
But a long rest will not give Pollock the extra 6kph he needs to surprise batsmen into mistakes, nor will it enable Makhaya Ntini to swing the ball, or make him deliver from closer to the stumps. South African bowlers have battled for wickets in the past. In fact, the last tour to New Zealand in 1998 featured remarkably similar figures in the first two Tests.
But there are two major differences between then and now. The one is Alan Donald, his career recent enough to put Ntini’s role as strike bowler into unfavourable perspective, and the other is economy.
Donald is gone, and so, it seems, is the ability to dry up runs. Both formed the backbone of our cricket in the early 1990s, but that match-winning failsafe available to captains from Kepler Wessels to Pollock — the tactic of turning off runs as if with a switch — has become a steady trickle, conceded to good batting and mediocre. Even on the flattest of pitches the tourists of 1998 conceded a full run per over less than their modern counterparts in New Zealand.
And then came Wellington, as it has now, where Pollock and Steve Elworthy jagged and swung the ball about to share 15 wickets, and the spectre of life after Donald subsided. If we are to head for the off-season without a real sense of dread about life after Pollock, the tourists need to mow down some Black Cap batsman — and fast.
Not that anyone wants to see South Africa drawing the series. Lovers of the game, irrespective of their nationality, can only want one outcome: a thrashing by the home team. The unfurling of a new banner on the field is a moment to be enjoyed for its freshness and dynamism as much for the tremendous good it will do in a game always in danger of stagnating for want of strong competition.
Best of all, the New Zealanders play marvellous cricket. They bat like blacksmiths and ignore their limitations as bowlers, and it is not impossible that Smith’s team are unwilling midwives to a new brand of play that will prove as unique and enthralling as that of the Caribbean cowboys of the 1980s or Australia’s automata in the past decade.
According to cricket lore, when English cricket is strong, world cricket is strong. England’s pulping of the wretched West Indies could point to a sport in good health, but a maiden New Zealand series win against South Africa in 10 attempts and 80 years would be an unequivocal exclamation mark on the game’s chart.