Scorecards, compactly final, insist that cricket matches are singular events. Results imply a beginning, a middle and an end. Match reports enforce closure. Test matches begin (the dailies imply) in order to finish.
But the weekly commentator, cut adrift from this headlong rush to climax by an eccentrically arbitrary deadline (the end of the fourth day), has the opportunity to play truant. Suddenly finding himself without a story, and having nothing to do but make terribly obvious speculations about a South African victory (‘South Africa will probably win yesterday, says ace boy reporter a day after the fact!â€), the first win in 10 months, he begins to wander about.
There is nothing like not watching cricket to make one aware of the sensation of watching cricket. Look away from the middle, and the match dissolves into an afternoon’s view of sky and indistinct movement. Quickly the series, so officiously defined by dates and venues and statistics, evaporates into nothing more, nothing less, than a mood.
The surface tension broken, the peculiarities of a Test match at Newlands begin to appear. A Sapa correspondent is losing at computer solitaire. Someone from The Guardian is scratching unevenly at pen-pictures of the England team for a future edition of Wisden, pecking disconsolately at his Lilliputian laptop: he has found himself referring to ‘highs†and ‘lowsâ€, and recognises the awfulness of the prose but at the moment has nothing better, and hastens on.
‘It’s not the sun that burns you,†a Capetonian veteran tells the visiting journalists near him. ‘It’s the wind. You’ve got to look out for the wind.†They oblige, squinting out into the glare in search of searing gusts of plasma.
It turns out the sun actually does some burning too. On the temporary northern stand, swaying imperceptibly on its scaffold, one isn’t sure if the general confusion over who is on strike (half say it’s Strauss, dismissed last evening, the other half say it’s Thorpe, yet to come in) is a result of myopia or sunstroke. Neither hinder the man who is carefully, Satanically, pouring warm beer on to the head of a child rooting about in the darkness below for a lost ball.
Jacques Kallis thumps in from the Wynberg End, graceful as a Clydesdale, and puts his shoulder into one that lifts and swings away unmolested.
Later — perhaps 10 minutes, perhaps 40, one isn’t sure — the site screen has jammed again, and someone asks why all grounds in the country are now called Sahara Park. South African accents turn it into Sara Pork. English ones, adding a curious breathiness, manage to sound like Brando’s Colonel Kurtz, one sweat-bead away from insanity: Sa-horror — Sa-horror —
Later still, there is a crack and a cheer. Unobserved, someone has scored something to some point of the ground. Just this knowledge is satisfying, and conversations continue, none about cricket.
With lunch near, a middle-aged couple get into a lift. They are unmistakably English. She is short, allegedly blonde, with thin, immaculate lips. His is shorter, has a scorched nose, and smells expensive. Quickly she slips off her sandals and produces a pair of high heels from her bag. They stroll out into the crowd, overdressed, serene, his ear brushing her shoulder …
Makhaya Ntini is yelling quotes from Eliot’s The Waste Land from fine leg.
‘Weialala leia / Wallala leialala†he bellows, clapping his hands. Then: ‘Come now come now boys!â€, and once more his exhortation begins, Xhosa sabre-rattling transformed into Rhine-maiden ditties by distance and heat and the murmur of thousands of people watching the game pass by.
Pleasure through osmosis, drowsy sport; Newlands at New Year.