Sober reflection and an objective perspective are one thing; but being a wet blanket is quite another. And the soggy rags have been out in force since Sunday.
The drippy lament, like Chinese water torture, has involved hammering the same muddy point over and over again, until one is ready to confess to anything. It was just a bloody game of cricket. Plink. South Africans always overreact to sport. Plunk. Surely the media has better things to do than froth for days over a single victory? Plop.
Indeed, one of the party poopers cut to the chase by titling his online ten cents’ worth ”It’s cricket, for god’s sake”. It was an unwittingly accurate statement.
Religion and sport are often blurred in this country. We tend to pray to our sportsmen and cheer our prophets. But the vast majority care intensely about both. Intellectuals don’t always like this fact, but then again intellectuals don’t always like bathing or deworming their six cats either.
Certainly, bums on seats should never be an argument for a pastime’s cultural or societal worthiness but, as the Elvis compilation puts it, 50-million fans can’t be wrong. The fact of the matter is that 48% of our compatriots are active supporters of the game. In other words, 21-million people care about, enjoy and value cricket. That’s as many as voted on March 1. Put like that, South Africans care about cricket as much as they do about democracy.
But weight of numbers isn’t why Sunday’s game was important. It was important because it made us so happy, and so glad to have watched it. For the realists, Calvinists and art critics to deny the public three or four days of euphoria — in a calendar that is usually packed with random death, violation and official sleaze — is not only churlish, but suggests a startling lack of empathy.
Haymaking needs to happen in sunshine, and for now the sun is beating down.
Mickey Arthur may have tried to drop the curtain on the glee by declaring the hoopla officially a thing of the past, but you can’t switch off bone-warming satisfaction that easily.
Just ask Roger Telemachus, still clearly glowing half a week later. The burly seamer was hostile with the ball, thumping it through with focus and determination; but it was with the bat that he raised 21-million bums off seats. The hook shot is always thrilling to watch, with its naked aggression from both bowler and batsman, and implicit threat of reconstructive dentistry. Usually there is an anticlimax: a top-edge, a miscued thwack out on the leg side. But when Telemachus reared up on his toes and let fly, it flew.
”I’ve always been a guy who can hold a bat,” he says from Stellenbosch where Eagles are battling Cobras in a game that sounds like one of Aesop’s fables. ”I batted number four in the Nuffield team.” But time in the nets with Corrie van Zyl at Free State has made all the difference. ”You’ve got to stand still and wait for the ball.”
One of the autumn’s most memorable sights has been Telemachus striding to square leg after clearing the ropes in a focusing ritual straight out of the Gary Kirsten handbook. ”You’ve got to think about the next ball, prepare yourself. That last one’s gone.” He can’t help adding, ”Out of the park.” Right on, Roger.
I suggest to him that those last-over no-balls on Sunday were simply a magnanimous effort to keep Australia in the game. ”It was naughty,” he mutters. ”Very naughty.”
Telemachus isn’t at Newlands as the first Test gets into its stride. He’s half an hour away, in the swelter of Boland Park, doing what he does most summer days. Is it difficult getting up for a domestic four-day game in front of four Bolanders and a goat, after having played in the greatest one-day game ever? ”That’s what I do,” he says, and you can tell he means it. ”I’ve got a passion for the game. That’s what I do.”
It’s an attitude that has stood the national attack in good stead in recent weeks, but that was an attack with a fully fit Shaun Pollock. At the time of writing on Wednesday, Pollock’s selection was in doubt, and if he is now playing, it will be at best a ginger effort for the veteran.
That may not be a bad thing. Pollock has been a champion for a decade, but a few months shy of his 33rd birthday, he has bowled well over 35 600 deliveries in international cricket; 11 000 more than the famously hardworking Courtney Walsh had managed at the same age. Pollock has given almost everything, and in light of recent canings by India and Australia one isn’t sure he has anything left to give. Knowing that the wickets must come from elsewhere, the Proteas’ attack may start adapting. Heaven knows, after Sunday the only way is up.
BW (Before Wanderers), with a fit Pollock, South Africa must have been favourites at Newlands. Now, AW, and almost Post-Pollock, the teams must surely be level, with South Africa boasting the confidence and Australia toting the skill.
But in the new AW era, anything is possible. As Roger Telemachus says, ”We thought we’d see how far we could go, and everything just fell into our laps.”
Could it fall into their laps again?