After action, the old cigarette ad suggested, came satisfaction. South African sport usually takes this one step further: after satisfaction, crucifixion. The afterglow of temporary success has barely winked out when we invariably start apportioning blame for past losses.
Having smashed a depleted Australian team at the Wanderers and Centurion, it is, therefore, now time to pillory whoever it was who prevented us from beating them at Sydney and Melbourne and all the other Australian venues where the Proteas were played like a banjo and then flushed down the bog.
Finding the culprit will take sophisticated detective work and diplomacy.
One cannot go around making wild allegations. Even more importantly, one mustn’t jump to conclusions about players’ guilt. Which is why we must carefully weigh the evidence, consider the circumstances of both tours, take into account form, politics and the fluid nature of the game of cricket and only once all of this has been done properly should we demand that Graeme Smith take full responsibility for everything wrong with South African cricket and resign, promising never to set foot on a field again, and to go on a frigging diet while he’s at it.
This is not an exaggerated version of what is going on in pubs — and newsrooms — around the country. Indeed, Smith might now be entitled to believe that the only sin greater than losing to Australia is losing to Australia and then beating Australia. Now that the yapping local mob has had its collective pecker engorged thanks to those two splendid wins (if one-day cricket can ever be described thus), it feels perfectly entitled to start barking orders; and at the top of that list is the dumping of Smith as skipper.
I have been a vocal critic of the southpaw slugger. His penchant for using trash-talk instead of footwork to get through dips in form and favour is juvenile, and on the field his captaincy can be as insipid as his rhetoric about it can be bumptious.
His career is still young, but so far he has not proved himself to be a good captain.
But does that make him a bad captain, or worse, a rotten captain as some critics assert? Of course not. The reality is that Smith is a solid leader (at least in public), a fine motivator, and a decent public speaker. He is unquestionably a splendid opening batsmen, when everything flies in formation. He will almost certainly never be as good a captain as Mike Brearley or Stephen Fleming, but that is irrelevant. Right now, he’s the only game in town.
Clouding the issue is this country’s inexplicable infatuation with Hansie Cronje. Having chosen to ignore his wholesale betrayal of their affections and the game they purport to love, his fans continue to believe that Cronje was the greatest South African cricket captain ever.
Smith can never be anything but an amateurish English schoolboy next to Hansie’s memory. Of course, those of us who watched Cronje’s captaincy through binoculars and not rose-tinted glasses remember a different captain: erratic, conservative, reactive instead of proactive, and hugely over-reliant on Allan Donald. But don’t try telling them that in Bloemfontein.
In the meantime, Smith should keep on keeping on, trying to beat a better team. His batting at Centurion was brutal and deeply gratifying, and made some amends for months of sound bites. Let’s hope we continue to hear nothing but the crack of leather on very heavy willow.