That the second Test at Newlands was one of the dullest in living memory cannot be held against Hashim Amla, or dim the glow of his first hundred in the grown-up version of the game. The strategic circumstances and anti-atmosphere of this most pointless of series will fade, but Amla’s step across the threshold of cricketing adulthood will not.
Indeed, who today remembers that Hansie Cronje’s first ton was struck in a Test against India in which, given the choice between watching the strokeplay on offer and attending a four-day lecture on photosynthesis, most pundits would have stampeded towards the auditorium?
When relishing the nostalgia of Andrew Hudson’s trailblazing hundred in Barbados, does it matter for an instant that it flowered before empty stands, or that a baby-faced southpaw called Lara held up the South Africans in the second innings? Not in the slightest. All that remains is its epic lustre, jousting in our memories with the Courtney Walsh-Curtly Ambrose hydra of the last day.
No, not only will Amla’s score stand in the record books, but it will become slowly cocooned in the memories of those who care about him and his batting, the banal details of the game shucked off, until only his score and his raised bat remain. Of course, how long the rest of Amla remains is another question entirely.
To say that the jury is still out regarding the quality of his batting is to be guilty not only of gross cliché, but also of oversimplifying what is a complex situation. Amla is not Gary Kirsten in 1994 nor Jacques Kallis in 1997. He is not an affable bloke produced by a comfortable cricketing nursery who is a year away from getting his mind right and getting stuck in, free to focus on his technique and to leave the world to the worldly.
Whether he intended it or not; whether it is an invention of the media or shaped in some way by real facets of his character; whether it means everything or nothing; one can’t deny that Amla brings overwhelming political, social and even religious baggage with him into any selection discussion. The briefest of online searches reveals him being used as a jingoistic racial icon by Indian nationalists – both Indian and South African.
Some white English-speaking journalists here and abroad describe him in faintly sweaty, palpitating prose that they hope disguises a sheepish political correctness: please God, bring us a black Kallis to wipe away our sins.
Islam Online features a long heart-to-heart about his faith and his sport. And then, of course, there are the constant murmurings about captaincy, mild and rhetorical for now; but politicking is never understated for long.
The suits and the homogeny-mongers will no doubt deny that Amla’s much publicised principles make him something unusual. It’s not about what happens off the field, they will insist. But when last did the rigorously secular Agence France-Presse news agency describe a debut centurion in terms of his faith? Consider the second paragraph of a report from Newlands:
”A tall right-hander and a Muslim with a special dispensation not to wear the logo of the beer company that sponsors the South African team, he played a chanceless innings on an easy-paced pitch.”
Those of faith will be gratified. To the religious, one’s god is considerably more important than one’s height or which hand one bats with. As descriptions of a religious man go, one could do a lot worse than mentioning spiritual conviction in the same breath as physical attributes.
But to the secular, used to the humanist, individualist and profoundly mundane philosophy and language of cricket, it is a bolt from the blue. This is not to say that faith has no place in the game: Jonty Rhodes, Hudson and Cronje demonstrated the contrary to South Africans, and Pakistan’s resurgence reportedly owes a great deal to the strong spiritual, as well as tactical, leadership of Inzamam ul-Haq. But it is nonetheless jarring to a sensibility still grounded in playing the ball and not the man.
All of which suggests that the jury cliché is simply not expansive enough to reflect what we’re doing with Amla. His is a man and a player who will require more than juries. He will require commissions and select committees, and possibly some expeditions sponsored by the National Geographical Society.
In the meantime, the honest reporter must resort to traditional methods of divining Amla’s fate. His supporters point to his dominance in first-class cricket and extrapolate, using considerably more emotion and sentiment than skill, that four-day sprees will translate into five-day monuments.
Were they students of the game instead of cheerleaders they would know that first-class form is only the crudest of guidelines. Amla’s Test debut in 2004 was helped by the murder of South African innocents whom we shall laughingly call bowlers; but by the time he was dropped after a rotten run against England, it was unkindly suggested that he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.
His recall last month was similarly inspired by the carnage he created in domestic cricket, and his ton at Newlands will have given fresh hope to those amateur soothsayers who insist that there is a correlation between first-class and Test cricket. But we cannot spend any more time indulging this fantasy: Graeme Hick, Ajay Jadeja, Michael Bevan and Martin van Jaarsveld are ample evidence of this.
Instead we must look at Amla the Test batsman, warts and all. Those warts include a tendency to play away from the body; to chase wide deliveries and hit them in the air with hard hands; to play around his pad from time to time. In other words, to bat just like Kallis did in 1997. It could be worse. And one can’t help thinking it could yet get a lot better.