Three weeks ago, both the Champions Trophy and the Proteas were in the dock, accused by their critics, of which your correspondent was one, of promoting listless, bloated, second-rate cricket; of privileging corporate waffle over pragmatic common sense; and of generally contributing to the despair that too much bad cricket, played by too many bad teams, has inflicted on the game’s admirers for too long.
This week, both were cleared of all charges and carried shoulder-high from the court: both have emerged, at least for now, as high-class entertainers and purveyors of surprisingly satisfying play.
Of course the verdict has left hundreds of millions decrying the blindness of justice, players and supporters who feel as robbed by luck and capricious pitches as the South Africans did at the start of the tournament, before they rediscovered their esprit de corps. The dismal showing by hosts India has unleashed a storm of selectorial soul searching as the tour of South Africa looms closer; and Pakistan’s capitulation could have been described as Zimbabwean if it had not been so lively.
However, in this instance, the scales of cricketing justice seem to have got the balance just right. Asia’s teams were average when they needed to be excellent, while the semi-finalists turned it on exactly when it mattered. And perhaps none more so than the South Africans. Thrown a lifeline as they went under for the last time by the becalmed Sri Lankans, Graeme Smith’s ragtag band of castaways went from damp to diabolical in the space of a week, keel-hauling their rescuers before making the Pakistanis walk the plank.
The ebullient Dwayne Bravo and Chris Gayle may have swaggered and slashed like rum-fuelled Caribbean pirates against England, but the only true buccaneers on display have been African.
This is not excessive praise. Perhaps it is not even praise at all. The hallmark of the thoroughbred corsair is not his brutality, his ferocity, or his ability to stare down the odds. Instead it is his desperation that makes him what he is; a slightly wild-eyed refusal to be taken alive, allied with a pragmatically cowardly reluctance to go down with the ship. He will stab when he can no longer shoot, bite when he can no longer stab, and spit when he can no longer bite; and it has been this impetuous, almost feral fighting spirit that has been so remarkable about the South Africans.
The Australians have looked professional and surgical, the New Zealanders endearingly resolute and fallible; but the Proteas have looked hungry. Ravenous, in fact.
Mark Boucher must take considerable credit in this department. His keeping against Pakistan was a highlights reel in itself, and to see Herschelle Gibbs whipping the ball in flat to Boucher’s suddenly flypaper-sticky gloves was to remember another partnership between keeper and cover fieldsman. David Richardson and Jonty Rhodes were two rock-steady foundations upon which South African one-day supremacy was built in the mid-1990s; and it cannot be coincidental that the team’s current renaissance mirrors Boucher’s return to form.
But even Boucher’s mercurial presence on the poop deck of the Good Ship Protea is overshadowed by her most priceless weapon, the cannon that is Makhaya Ntini. He will never develop a genuine, controlled outswinger, and will therefore never straddle the highest summits of Test cricket; but in the shorter game his into-the-collarbone and up-the-nostril line and length seems to become more devastating with each passing season.
Before the start of the Champions Trophy it was easy to point out, with bleak resignation, that if Ntini got crocked before the World Cup, the Caribbean in April would be a very grim place for South Africans. Today the same applies, but with a new air of anxiety; because for the first time in many months, there is the faintest glimmer of a suggestion that a World Cup semi-final spot might not be the stuff of seafarers’ tall tales any more …