One of adolescence’s keenest disappointments is discovering that the idylls one’s parents described have fallen into disrepair. Fabled holiday destinations, described for years as exotic pleasure domes, turn out to be asbestos caravan parks full of emaciated dogs with biliary and morbidly obese harridans with curlers in their hair.
The maddeningly exciting theme park of family lore has, in the 20 years since Dad visited, seized up with rust and neglect. The bumper-boat pool is green with scum, the twirling tea cups have weeds in their saucers, and the roller coaster is slowly being cannibalised for scrap.
Is it ungrateful to compare a cricket tour of the West Indies to a dilapidated funfair, to suggest that the cricket on display is the equivalent of empty shopping packets and old ticket stubs fluttering sadly on tangled barbed wire? Surely any Test series is an occasion, especially one spread across the tarnished jewels of the beautiful, poor West Indian islands?
But the trouble is one can’t pretend that the 1970s and 1980s didn’t happen. One can’t watch bowlers toil at Sabina Park without remembering fuzzy footage or crisp black and white photographs of batsmen playing for their lives on a mud pitch rolled so flat and smooth that they could see their bats and stumps reflected in it.
One can’t endure sessions of haphazard, directionless and timid batting by the West Indies without imagining what it must have been like to watch a helmetless Viv Richards hook Dennis Lillee off the end of his nose. It’s no use trying to be interested in a tall fast-medium bowler who can’t settle on a length and who’s fitness is suspect, when Michael Holding and Curtly Ambrose are strolling amiably through the crowd behind the stands.
Yes, times change and teams wane, but oh, what a waning it’s been, and how paltry the modern fare seems when the aftertaste of what came before lingers.
Still, this series should be watched closely, if for no other reason than history. This is only South Africa’s third tour of the Caribbean, and it is not entirely impossible that it could be South Africa’s last.
The next trip to the West Indies is scheduled for 2010/11, and given the rate at which the structure of the island game is fracturing and imploding — with rows over sponsors decimating the first Test squad — that one can’t help feeling that there might not be a West Indies team to go back to in five years.
Yes, half a decade should be enough time to reverse the decline of the once-great team, but its governors and accountants have provided no evidence to suggest that they are either able or willing to put the game ahead of their own limited interests.
Secession, disintegration — even a wholesale emigration by players —must surely become a very real prospect.
But what of today? South Africa should win the series comfortably. Ray Jennings has been indulging in neon billboard language about whitewashes, but whether Graeme Smith’s tourists shut out their hosts or drop a Test, all that matters is that South Africa go in, take what they need for their confidence and their trophy cabinet, and leave.
Only Bangladesh and Zimbabwe are lower in the world rankings than the West Indies, and Smith and Jennings will do well to handle them with the same clinical disdain they showed Zimbabwe last month.
Which is not to say the tourists should idle, or won’t be stretched at times. Indeed, few things would hasten South Africa’s international recovery more than a decisive, career-stabilising series for players like Jacques Rudolph, Andre Nel and Monde Zondeki.
Likewise, the next two months will provide AB de Villiers with a very small barrel full of very fat fish, and how he spends the next 10 years of his life could be greatly affected by how he shoots those fish.
Of course, the first challenge to Jennings’s whitewash dreams is the weather in Guyana. It will rain at the Bourda Oval because it always does. It probably is right now.
In fact, just 45% of all Tests at the venue provide a result, a statistic that isn’t being helped by Shaun Pollock’s absence.
Still, if the monsoon clouds over South America have a silver lining, it is the month-long rest Pollock will have had when he returns for the second Test on April 8, and whichever ragtag bunch of decent first-class batsmen the West Indian selectors have cobbled together for that game are sure to have their priorities hastily rearranged.