A few days before the Proteas left for their tour of Sri Lanka coach Mickey Arthur said two very odd things. Those who follow the grand soap opera of international cricket will recall ingénu Arthur from last season, endlessly optimistic as one Australian after another deflowered his charges, ultimately claiming a relatively successful year as the South Africans ambushed a jaded, understaffed New Zealand squad on midwinter green-tops.
But even by his Orwellian standards of revisionist newspeak, Arthur’s pre-departure announcements were bizarre.
The two curious statements went thus: firstly, Herschelle Gibbs, by some distance the best cover fielder in the world, would be the Proteas’ first-choice first slip.
Secondly, Sri Lanka’s recent massacre of England’s one-day team might have led to their becoming ”arrogant”, which could only benefit South Africa.
In other words, Arthur’s strategy for the Test series involves waiting for those posturing Ceylonese popinjays to lash everything straight at first slip. At first glance this seems to be so stupid, on so many levels, that further investigation seems pointless. However, reputations have been impugned, and besides, public doltishness of this magnitude can’t be left unchallenged.
To speculate — hell, even to fantasise — that Sri Lanka have returned home ”arrogant” takes a special kind of thick. Certainly, former skipper Arjuna Ranatunga enjoyed a protracted love affair with himself but, for the rest, Sri Lanka is a team more akin to monks than marquises. Muttiah Muralitharan, their talismanic spinner, could have spent the last decade enjoying threesomes and throwing, er, bowling cricket balls through hotel television sets. Instead, he can still barely bring himself to make eye contact with interviewers.
But, more pressingly, what on earth is going on when a national coach publicly expresses the hope that his opponents will be over-zealous in their plunder of his team? Has it really come to this; that we must hope to be pole-axed quickly so that we can get a clear shot at his shins while we’re lying on the pavement?
Unfortunately, the loony rhetoric seems to be rubbing off. This week Cricinfo quoted AB de Villiers waxing hallucinatory about Muralitharan. ”I’ve seen him crumble under pressure,” said the youngster. ”I’ve seen batsmen taking him on, going for like 80 in 10 overs, and they take him off.”
The website didn’t go on to reveal whether or not De Villiers had also seen the Virgin Mary in a pepper-steak pie, or had throw-downs with Elvis.
There is good news for South Africa, though. Shaun Pollock has left Mrs Pollock holding the (second) baby, and will be available for the second Test. Hashim Amla, Jacques Rudolph and the lad De Villiers all helped themselves to a Sri Lankan A-team attack that included a handful of internationals. And best of all, none of this is happening in Galle.
Galle, of course, is where Muralitharan opens the bowling and visiting teams follow on by lunch on the second day. It produces matches as sporting as brain aneurisms. But it’s a different story at the Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo, a venue that has in recent seasons denied the ace offspinner his usual ludicrous returns and rendered him merely extraordinary (a pedestrian 21 wickets in his past three Tests, at 21 runs apiece).
The bad news, unfortunately, has nothing to do with Muralitharan. Indeed, the last time South Africa played at the SSC, when they were thumped by 313 runs despite having Pollock and Jacques Kallis as bowling options, the spinner didn’t even play.
No, the trouble with the SSC is that blokes like Kumar Sangakkara have a habit of compiling big hundreds there. Big hundreds need big replies, and when one is chasing 450 to draw level even part-time tweakers and B-grade medium-pacers start messing with technique and application.
Of course it could have been much, much worse: Chaminda Vaas might have been fit. Sri Lanka’s young seamers make up in heart what they lack in penetration, but none of them comes close to the veteran left-armer, who has been nigh unplayable at the SSC over the past couple of years, enjoying figures almost Edwardian in their drama and disregard for the mathematical laws of modern cricket.
The home team has lost a weapon that is, ironically, as predictable as it is deadly: batsmen know that Vaas’s in-swinger to the right-hander is coming, and that it will bend late, and hit middle halfway up, and arrive at about 135kph; yet predicting it and despatching it have always been two very different things.
Especially if you’re Gibbs. Major questions still hang over his penchant for playing around his front leg, and with a new wrinkle having emerged — a habit of being clean bowled by straight deliveries — Gibbs will be targeted despite Vaas’s absence. Frankly it’s not higher-grade maths: apart from a handsome 97 at Centurion in 2002, he has never scored more than seven against Sri Lanka. Betting men might be forgiven for putting a tenner on the South African not reaching 15 in either of the Tests, bowled or LBW in all cases.
But just don’t bet on Mickey Arthur talking sense come Monday (God willing) and the post-mortem.