In late August, cricket is in decline. In the northern hemisphere, green pitches and white kits have been baked brown and run ragged. Test matches continue to be won and lost, but their details find no purchase in the memories of the spectators, still sustained by the fresh dramas of June and July, when the real tourists came and scintillated. Late August is a time for a two-Test visit from Sri Lanka or New Zealand, a chance to experiment with a youngster or two, a time to settle down with a book.
At the southern end of the world, rugby has rendered all thoughts of cricket ephemeral, its immediacy and emotional payload barging the game — a faint memory of spindly, sunburned men doing skillful things quite gently — out of the way.
Which is why cricket’s sudden assertion of itself on the international sporting scene seems not only out of character, but somehow unnatural, as if a high tide had come instead of a low, or a summer had followed an autumn.
Indeed, nothing has jolted and upset the natural order of things than England’s magnificent resurgence against Australia. Just as the English season should be winding down, we are being presented with a spectacle that is quickly gathering about itself the aura of cricketing history in the making, a genuinely classic series in which the names of Andrew Flintoff and Brett Lee don’t need marketing hyperbole to stand alongside those of Ian Botham and Dennis Lillee in the (all too short) catalogue of grand Ashes battles.
So suddenly has wonderful Test cricket blossomed in England, blessing this series with a magisterial quality usually reserved for memories of Bradman and Miller and Compton and Botham, that players could be forgiven this week for being swept up in it all, like 22-year-old Australian debutant Shaun Tait, who (with a grand total of zero Test caps to his name) expressed the hope that he and Lee would form a pair as fearsome as Lillee and Jeff Thompson.
It was big talk, but somehow a breath of beautiful history through what has been a stifled sport: how engaging to have debutants hoping to be great, rather than to be acceptable, to give 100%, not to let the team down.
Of course the sport’s presence on front pages isn’t due entirely to its Ashes renaissance. If it bleeds it leads, the cynics insist, and certainly in Zimbabwe the game is in the last throes of its fatal haemorrhage. On Wednesday the touring Black Caps fell a run short of the highest score in the history of one-day cricket, plundering 397/5. That they did it in a rain-reduced 44 overs should have been impressive. Instead it was immensely sad.
Last season I suggested that Zimbabwe’s cricketers had the frightened but grim look of conscripts. Nothing has happened to dispel that impression, and watching them get bowled out twice in a single day in the second Test, one had to wonder whether Robert Mugabe’s sports ministry had simply plucked healthy-looking boys off the streets, showed them which way up to hold a bat, and pushed them into the dressing room.
Still, in this case it took two to create a fiasco, and the Black Caps’ presence in Zimbabwe represents a fairly spectacular display of political cowardice by a nation once known for its howling righteousness. In July an attempt by opposition parties in New Zealand’s Parliament to have the tour declared illegal (by refusing the team exit visas) was squashed by Prime Minister Helen Clarke, who held that exit visas were a God-given right to New Zealanders.
It had clearly escaped her that a once-off suspension of this right would not only have been wholeheartedly endorsed by her electorate (who almost universally decried the tour), but would have been a tangible act of protest against a state in which most God-given rights (whether exit visas or a roof over one’s head) have been incinerated by a fascist government.
One would be tempted to suggest that money has talked once again, but even here the logic is startlingly thin. New Zealand would have been fined $2-million by the International Cricket Council (ICC) for pulling out of the tour, because in the modern game a cancelled tour means lost television revenue.
But who exactly would pay actual money to broadcast the Zimbabwean team’s awful floundering? And who would watch it? Whether $2-million or a handful of dimes, whatever the ICC would have fined the Black Caps was way too much. And whatever the amount, the New Zealand government should have paid it, putting its money where its flapping mouth has been for so long.
Money has, however, been talking elsewhere. The recently completed (or should that be flushed?) Afro-Asian Cup stank from start to finish of sharp men making fast money, both legally and not. The less said about this tacky pawnshop of a series, the better.
Certainly, the international conglomerate teams of the Afro-Asian blot seemed particularly cheap and nasty this week as it emerged that Graeme Smith and Shaun Pollock will lead World XIs against Australia in October. Their teams are Marvel Comics incarnate, Boys Own fantasies in which a cricketing Justice League including everyone but Mohammed Ali, Joe di Maggio and Batman will stand shoulder to shoulder against their common enemy, Australia.
In all the hype it was easy to miss the quick and quiet promotion of Jacques Kallis to vice-captain of the national side, a solid move that must surely signal the end of Nicky Boje’s career. For his part, Captain South Africa aka Biff aka mild-mannered Mr Smith, has been confirmed as skipper until after the World Cup in 2007. One would have expected nothing less for the leader of the cricketing free world.