Makhaya Ntini bowls extremely quickly. Stand behind the batsman at any practice session, and one realises anew that the fan or even the competent amateur player hasn’t the faintest idea of just how quick a real fast bowler is. Even five yards back, protected by Jacques Kallis’s bat, his technique, and some sturdy chicken wire and netting, there is a moment of terrified glee, a mental flinch, as if the force of the controlled explosion that is a fast bowler will somehow prove irresistible to bat, flesh and wire.
There is no good way to watch fast bowling, which might explain why cricket’s most stirring spectacle has slowly deflated in the public imagination to something on a par with the most superficially entertaining acts, hitting sixes for example. Televised images are foreshortened, making the sprint to the wicket look like a wobbling jog. The ball’s flight looks no more impressive than a seagull swooping down to investigate a dustbin. Watch it live, from midwicket, and the ball disappears entirely, the delivery ironically rendered unwatchable, and therefore uninteresting, by its sheer speed.
But up behind the net, the sound is the difference. When Andre Nel bowls, you hear a thud as the ball pitches, and then a whoosh. The slower the bowler, the more apologetic the thud and the longer the whoosh. With Ntini — and Kallis, when he feels like it — there are two quite different sounds. The first is a splat, as if the 10 or 15 blades of grass under the ball were bursting along their seams. And then, almost instantly, there is a hiss. Splat-hiss, quick as a rifle shot and its echo.
Thus reintroduced to the frightening, wonderful talent of the fast bowler, it seems extraordinarily churlish to suggest that Ntini is not a thoroughbred. But the reality is that he still bowls appalling overs from time to time, often precisely when his captain needs him to be bowling vicious ones. His outswinger is an optical illusion: when batsmen hop away to give themselves room, and the ball coming in holds its line, it will always look like a banana-ball pitching middle and hitting second slip. He can be relied upon to make inroads into average batting teams, but hasn’t yet demonstrated an ability or a desire to dismantle the best time after time.
And yet, in the context of the summer just ending in early sunsets and morning frosts, Ntini has been utterly invaluable. In his prime Gary Kirsten was ”the banker” of the team. If bowlers received half the attention batsmen did, Allan Donald would have been the Minister of Finance; and Shaun Pollock’s services to the local game defy neat nicknames. And yet I would suggest that none of those three, despite their glittering records, ever carried South Africa for a season in the way that Ntini has so magnificently done.
The numbers tell the story. Ntini took 34% of all South Africa’s wickets, and bowled 41 overs more than his nearest colleague, the apparently indefatigable Pollock. Most teams rely on spinners, whether specialists or part-timers, to wheel through overs while the speedsters rest. This summer six slow bowlers were tossed the ball. Ntini bowled 85 overs more than all of them combined.
In other words, any discussion of South Africa’s bowlers, and what they might have done without Ntini, must invariably end in allusions to disastrous canoeing trips up excremental creeks. The sheer weight of his burden took us into Muttiah Muralitharan territory and, although Dale Steyn did an admirable impression of Chaminda Vaas, Sri Lanka’s one-ring circus is not a show we want to emulate.
Certainly, one must concede that most teams’ attacks would have looked ragged after back-to-back series against Australia, and every international specialist bowler in the world right now, including the pie-chuckers of Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, has bowled 50 or 60 overs more than he should have this season if he wants to make it to 35 without a Zimmer frame.
Nonetheless, one can’t help wondering whether run-a-ball centuries and stupidly flat pitches and boundaries pulled in as tight as a sponsor’s fist haven’t dulled our relationship with bowling.
Ten years ago, a bowler was a bull. Today he is a carthorse, hobbled by chronic injury, with an air of the knacker’s yard about him just months into his career. What has happened to the fans and media who hounded Richard Snell for getting too much swing? God, what riches! When will a South African seamer again be accused, as Craig Matthews was, of being so accurate that he was boring batsmen out?
Luckily, the time for questions is over, at least for the next few months of ”winter”. A pointless series is past, played at the great venues but horribly out of season and reeking of the Just-Add-Petrodollars-and-Stir Test series they used to stage in small Arab fiefdoms. It’s best forgotten. Now is time for weary dogs to be allowed to lie, and more importantly, to sleep.
And when they wake up, we’ll toss the ball to Makhaya and pray.