Next Sunday South Africa will play Bangladesh in the ICC Champions Trophy, and unless the cosmos is controlled by an excitable Bollywood screenwriter, an 11th consecutive one-day loss will be averted by Graeme Smith’s team, a ghastly record dodged, and perhaps a moment of clarity achieved.
The absence through injury of Sachin Tendulkar from this week’s one-day triangular with England (a money-spinner shoe-horned in before the arrival of the rest of the teams) seems proof enough that the said palpitating scribe is in fact not our Supreme Being.
All the same, one can’t help feeling that some melodramatic and somewhat condescending deity is doodling with South Africa’s fortunes: providing shameful opposition to end a shameful run seems less merciful than spiteful.
Nonetheless, Smith and coach Eric Simons must be looking forward to sidestepping the spotlight, as Australia, England and perhaps Pakistan jostle for position in its beam.
Also worth watching next week will be the United States team: real comedy is so rare nowadays. One must assume that their invitation to England is politically and economically expedient, the International Cricket Council (ICC) eyeing a mountain of dollars somewhere down the road. Certainly there were teams more deserving of making up the 12, like Holland or Hong Kong or Guam or the Vatican Choir Social XI.
Captained by a 34-year Jamaican expatriate with genuinely awful career statistics, Team USA features only one former international player, the beefy West Indian tonker Clayton Lambert.
Otherwise its ranks are filled with expat bits-and-pieces players, most of them entering their autumn years, like Howard and Mark Johnson, 40 and 41 respectively, and the 38 year-old Pakistani leg-spinner Nasir Javed, whose 20 years of first-class cricket yielded 54 wickets in 13 games. He is either a marvellous self-motivator, or horribly unable to take a hint.
Still, they laughed at Columbus too, and the debut of the Americans is a welcome sign of the ICC’s eagerness to spread the game. More impressive, however, are signs of that organisation’s growing willingness to entrust the sacred duties of the game to technology.
Hawkeye-assisted lbw decisions are a season or two away still, but umpiring has taken another wobbly step into the world it entered all those years ago when Tendulkar was given run-out by someone behind a television monitor.
Indeed, should Nasir Javed get one to turn, perhaps off a crack, umpires will be wired with stump-microphone audio to make sure that clicking noise was ball on outside edge and not a 38-year-old kneecap surrendering.
But more pertinently for the top teams, playing at an intensity where outcomes can be decided by a single run or delivery, no-balls will be called by the third umpire. No doubt, this will slow the game slightly, but an extra 10 minutes is an insignificant price to pay for accuracy and an end to the gut-wrenching injustices sometimes done to batsmen by overstepping bowlers and lazy-eyed umpires.
But then again, cricket’s idiosyncrasies have always had a way of squeezing out from the confines of technology and legislation. It is still a funny old game, and one can only hope that next Sunday it isn’t the Bangladeshis who are laughing.