A curious thing happened in Bloemfontein on Wednesday night, just as Herschelle Gibbs was caught at short fine leg. Of course it was obscured in the excitement that followed — excitement first created, and then drowned in, by Justin Kemp.
But it remained, nagging and only half-recognised, as Kemp preempted the wrong shot (Who’d have thought Darren Gough would bowl a yorker at the death? Fiend!) and Mark Boucher flailed wildly to leg with nine runs needed off eight deliveries.
And then it all became clear. A Kabir Ali beamer slapped for four; three runs needed off six deliveries with wickets aplenty; the run-out; the other thing (one stops looking, or is it caring?); oh God, the tie. Finally the light dawned, putting Gibbs’s dismissal into clear perspective, and answering that rhetorical lamentation that has become worn out with over-use in the local press over the past 18 months.
Where is South African cricket going? Wednesday night revealed all. South African cricket is going Caribbean. We are the West Indies of five years ago. Ours is the team that slowly sucks the hope out of its chroniclers, that endlessly disappoints its fans, that talks of renaissance when its last sustained flowering was before the birth of seven-year-old Kallis-worshippers.
Graeme Smith has become Lara-like in his role as mediator between the longsuffering fans and courtiers of Canute sitting on their soggy thrones in the United Cricket Board head offices. The affable shrug, the patently improbable one-liners about turnarounds and confidence, the teasing implied promise of a phenomenal return to form by the left-handed skipper, banking on our
nostalgia and all those highlights of both Smith and Lara doing the wild monkey-dance all over England’s bowlers at various times over the past 10 years.
Something called ”inter-island rivalry” has reportedly suffocated most reforming efforts in West Indian cricket. One assumes this is a preppy euphemism for nationalism and intransigence based on clan, racial or corporate loyalties. If this is the case, it simply reiterates the Caribbeanisation of local cricket. Here the islands are fiefdoms of race and money, of provinces steeped in insular suspicion being given orders by social engineers whose mandate they have never recognised.
Of course, Kevin Pietersen didn’t help, with his flagrant disregard for the sensibilities of his local critics. One day South Africans will learn that booing expatriates is not only ugly, but that it simply galvanises wills already proven to be strong by their decision to leave the comfort zone of white South Africa and make their own way in a new — and usually ambivalent — country like Australia or England.
Pietersen’s political motives, whether fashionable or not, are his own business; but he made his penchant for medium-paced rubbish served up on middle and leg very much our business, and it was splendid viewing.
Steven Lynch, the editor of the website Cricinfo, said as much once he’d finished mopping the saliva off his chin and chest with a napkin. In an article entitled ”A star is born”, he allowed himself a moment of pure, innocent adulation, declaring that Pieterson’s ton had been crafted against South Africa’s ”first-choice Test attack, minus Nicky Boje”.
This is, of course, nonsense. South Africa’s first choice Test attack comprises a 22-year old Mike Proctor, a 28-year old Allan Donald, and a 25-year old Shaun Pollock sharing first-change duties with a fracture-free Mfuneko Ngam.
No, ours is an attack first-choice by default, a fact made painfully clear by Paul Collingwood sweeping Pollock for four. Ten years ago the Englishman would have wound up sans jawbone for such effrontery, but times have changed. But just as Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh bowed out to watch the impotent posturing of Nixon Maclean and the glaring ordinariness of Reon King, so Donald and (soon, one suspects) Pollock observe André Nel, who really needs to sit down and watch some old videos of real fast bowlers.
However, Nel was blameless in that familiar surrender on Wednesday night, when all the clichés — a young team, the crucial and awkwardly timed loss of the established Gibbs, the over-protected Ashwell Prince — came together in a pantomime reminiscent of That Which Must Not Be Spoken, Edgbaston 1999.
Boucher’s attempts to clear deep midwicket off every delivery — when a run a ball would do — were the over-eager grasping of a man starved of victory, and not particularly confident the opportunity would arise again. He looked every inch a West Indian.
This is a team that has not only forgotten how to win, but isn’t sure it ever knew.