The little town of Devizes, nestled in the west country of England, had its cricket club incinerated last week by a flaming rabbit. A nearby bonfire ignited its tail, and groundsmen watched, no doubt in appalled fascination, as the incendiary bunny made a doomed dash into the club’s large storage shed. At least £60 000 of damage ensued.
‘We’re 99% confident it was the rabbit that caused the fire,†the town’s fire chief told The Guardian. ‘It was either burnt to cinder or it escaped through the small hole in the corner of the shed, but I imagined it perished and went to bunny heaven.â€
The moral of this Pyrrhic victory for pastoralism is clear: in cricket, you never know when you’re going to get burned by a rabbit.
Sri Lanka haven’t been cricketing rabbits for a decade, but still, as the South Africans poked through the ashes and cinders of the Test series, one couldn’t help recalling a certain Pythonian fuzzy bunny, one moment grazing sweetly in a pasture, the next tearing the throats out of screaming knights errant.
Where did it go wrong, after the thumping draw at Galle? Or was it going wrong even then, as the serene Mahela Jayawardene was humoured all the way to double century? Was Graeme Smith’s post-match euphoria misguided, given the inexplicable docility of a pitch notorious for its spite and a match-winning spinner who, it turned out, was three overs away from needing surgery?
Certainly, the batting collapses at Colombo last week seemed to be products of a team badly under-estimating their hosts, expecting a rabbit and getting a tracheotomy. But, despite their failure to reach 200 in either innings, South Africa’s batsmen remain formidable. Not so their bowlers.
For those frustrated by the apparently horizontal learning curve of Nantie Hayward, his selection at Colombo smelled of desperation.
Indeed, Hayward’s abject performance would seem to be the epitome of the problems that beset the Proteas’ attack. But Hayward’s critics should first pause and consider, possibly with some horror, that his efficacy at Test level is almost exactly equivalent to that of Makhaya Ntini, a bowler with an infinitely better reputation and considerably more responsibility in the team.
But introspection and one-day cricket rarely mix. The next fortnight will ease away the tourists’ long-term fears with some quickly tonked runs, some cheaply bought wickets, and should things fall apart again, a one-day series loss is easily explained away — or at least explained — with good-natured shrugs and platitudes about lotteries and any given team on any given day, and so on.
But a maiden Test series loss to Sri Lanka, sans Muralitharan, won’t be wished away, and neither will the drought of penetrative bowlers.
November’s tour of India is starting to look scary.
Shaun Pollock can’t carry on doing this by himself. It’s time Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail grew some teeth and lit some fires of their own.