How familiar it has all become, this elliptical cricketing orbit that every few years drags South African teams through the shrivelling radiation of the Australian game. How hollow the optimistic journalism has come to sound, these dutiful column inches that precede each harrowing, pronouncing that the lessons of the past have been learned, the chinks fortified.
And how intriguing it is to see that no matter how much new blood is transfused into the injured body of South African cricket, and no matter how many tough-guy monosyllables Graeme Smith chews up and spits out, the old scars keep showing, pale and tender and thin as tissue paper.
The trouble with psychological baggage is that it threatens to turn even the most banal activity into an iconic, textbook case of whatever it is that one is ailing from.
And so it was in Perth this week, as predictable rustiness and forgivable nerves suddenly unravelled into stark staring madness, a whooping headlong rush to fling the bedpan at the orderly and to embrace every cliché of failure that has dogged South African cricket for so long. Losing a tour opener is not worrying in itself. But losing it by an innings in three days to Western Australia (a team lolling a very distant last place in that country’s domestic competition) suggested that the demons so lacking in the pitch, weather and bowling had regrouped elsewhere.
The official scorecard of that match reports that it was a 23-year-old left-arm wrist-spinner called Beau Casson who finished the match with 8/88; but you don’t have to be a psychologist — or an exorcist — to know that it was Shane Warne who did all the damage. The ball may have been coming out of the left hand, and the grunt and rotation may have been more restrained, but surely all the tourists saw was that old blowtorch focus, that arm dragging down across the chest, that awful drift and drift and drift towards a tenuous length on an indecisive line perhaps just outside leg stump. Casson bowled the balls, but Warne took the wickets.
The word from the tourists’ media entourage, which one can only assume is the roughly paraphrased word from the team itself, is that there is no reason to panic.
This is a damned foolish thing to say. The whole point about panic is that is doesn’t need reasons. It feeds on suspicion and denials, and when teams start telling their supporters not to panic three days into a tour, one’s panic receptors are merely agitated anew.
Mind you, not everyone is concerned. Pat Symcox, once a slow bowler and now a purveyor of cheerful claptrap, told the Herald Sun that it was ”payback time” for the tourists against the champion leg-spinner. (You may recall previous payback times, and how they generally involved sweeping with eyes clenched shut and Warne skipping down the track to give first slip a pat on the bum.)
Finally admitting that the Australian has ”had it over” South Africa for years, he opined that the team’s success hinged on how well they managed to neutralise the spinner.
Given that he last played Australia almost four years ago, Symcox (who has taken 598 fewer Test wickets than Warne) could be forgiven for peddling strategies half a decade obsolete. But one would have thought he’d at least watched a little cricket during that time. For instance, in September England proved that being at sea against Warne doesn’t necessarily condemn one to defeat. Last month the West Indies demonstrated that the whole question of what to do with him becomes academic if Brett Lee is in the mood.
Glenn McGrath is bowling too well to risk anything more than a single one-sentence mention, lest one goes off the rails and starts frothing for paragraphs on end. And looming over all these developments in Australian strategy is the creature known as Stuart MacGill; but more of this on the eve of the first Test …
Suffice to say Symcox’s strategy simply won’t cut it. To reanimate the old Australian war-chant, ”Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if Warnie don’t get you, there’s three other blokes queuing up who must.”
On Sunday the South Africans will get a mulligan: the same venue, the same opposition, and a whole extra day thrown into the bargain. of course this also means that Warne, in the body of Casson, will get another crack at them. They may redeem this week’s fiasco, or they may have to tell us again not to panic. But whatever happens, one already knows the simple equation of this tour: if Australia and South Africa play to their full potential, none of the Tests will go past lunch on the fifth day, the Boxing Day game at Melbourne will be a rain-affected draw, and Australia will take the series 2-0. Amen.
Of course no meditation on cricketing thrashings can go by without a special mention of Pakistan’s dismissal of England’s claims to greatness. The sport’s lore holds that when English cricket is strong, the game in general is strong; and this seems fair.
But surely it is time to add a postscript: when Pakistani cricket is strong, the game is spectacular. One is tempted to describe Inzamam-ul-Haq’s towering, unflappable presence in Buddhist terms, rather as if the Himalayan prince had reincarnated for the sole purpose of hitting cover-drives; but this might be heretical given that much of Pakistan’s newfound steel and spirit reportedly derives from a renewed devotion to Islam within the team.
The religious politics of the region are complex (rumours abound that the conversation to Islam of Yousuf Youhana, now Mohammad Yousuf, was less about seeing the light than about comparing carrots and sticks), but for now Pakistan’s cricket is clear as crystal. Long may it scintillate.