When the appointment of a new coach elicits a response unapologetically laborious and manufactured, the end is near. Outrage, finger pointing and name-calling in media and public debate indicate, at the very least, the presence of a pulse in any sport. But the plastic, listless response to the appointment of Ray Jennings suggests that to most who care about the game, South African cricket has flatlined.
Jennings would no doubt call this outlook defeatist, although not in so many syllables. The nation’s back pages seeped purple this week, metaphor stretched comatose on the rack of journalistic ineptitude; martial imagery and thinly disguised libel vying for column inches.
Perhaps, to draw a veil on all this capering, one should leave it at this: the national team will henceforth be coached by a morbidly alcoholic novelist who enjoys bullfighting, who slaps wounded soldiers while doing morale walkabouts at the front, and who would have burnt Vienna to the ground had he not had to hurry home to strangle an infant son with a bowstring.
But behind the requisite condescension and secret Schadenfreude-fuelled fantasies of politically incorrect clangers at press conferences lies the acceptance that Jennings might just work. The immense and systematic vandalism of the game perpetrated by Hansie Cronje was largely a product of his decision to install himself as alpha male and to hell with the rest.
The leaders who followed — Shaun Pollock, Graham Ford, Eric Simons, the self-constricting Graeme Smith — were civil human beings, their humility making them entirely unsuited to filling and healing the hole left by the towering mutation of Cronje’s vanity and greed.
Perhaps now is the time for another alpha male to lift his leg over the old stinks, to scratch dirt over old diggings. And few can lift their legs higher or with greater enthusiasm than Jennings.
Of course this is no way to live and no way to play sport, and even those who feel confident that he has the blunt brutality to wrench the team out of its current torpor cannot believe that the Easterns and South Africa ‘A†godfather is a long-term solution. That way Rudolph Straeuli lies. But temporary treatments are no less honourable or important because of their transience: ask any discarded Elastoplast.
Which is why the eye-rolling over Jennings’s possible rehabilitation of Daryll Cullinan is premature. The
argument that taking Cullinan to India would be a backward step denies the reality that South African cricket has been taking backward steps, nay, dashing headlong towards the rear, for the past five years.
Indeed, some suggest the retreat began with the excommunication of Bob Woolmer in 1997.
Cullinan’s record in India is debatable (remove his one superb defensive century, and it looks mediocre), but his selection would be valuable for reasons as symbolic as tactical. The summer of 1976 found England’s batsmen utterly unstrung by the aggression and speed of the touring West Indians: Holding, Roberts and Croft had single-handedly dismantled English cricket.
Out of desperation the 45-year-old Brian Close was called up to take first strike, and was duly given what by today’s standards would be a tour-threatening and lawsuit-eliciting working over by Holding. In fading light on July 17, Close took body blow after body blow, his Yorkshire pride never allowing him to rub the ghastly welts.
It was later famously reported that when he took off his shirt for painkilling injections, it looked as if handfuls of marbles had been forced under his skin. It was Close’s last series, and the West Indies remained untameable, but he had put his back to the wall and added a new and morale-rescuing chapter to the catalogue of British sporting heroics.
If Cullinan can contribute even the illusion of maturity and reliability, he will have done his job and can return to retirement with dignity. If his return happens and fails, no blame should be levelled at either him or Jennings: Elastoplasts don’t always stick.
Unlike Indian criminal charges. The spin-doctoring is still purring along, but it is a foregone conclusion that Herschelle Gibbs will not tour India for fear of arrest. He and his handlers seem unconcerned about the tacit admissions this action makes, but then Gibbs has always scudded before those winds that ruffle people with more complex notions of responsibility and decorum. Nicky Boje’s non-participation is less certain.
At least the next few weeks won’t be short of arresting developments.