Even those of us who have been critical of Nicky Boje over the years had to blanch for the poor creature this week, as the national selectors cut his throat, tied him to their chariot and dragged him around the walls of the Wanderers.
The Free Stater may have spent much of his Test career rivalling Ashley Giles and similarly defunct purveyors of pie for the title of the most innocuous left-armer in the game, but nobody, however mediocre, deserves to have his dignity mutilated like that.
The press release that announced the recall of Paul Adams to the international arena said encouraging things about hard work and balanced attacks, but its subtext was brutally blunt: if South African cricket has to choose between Boje and a broken has-been lolling in the doldrums, who last played India a decade ago, who bleeds boundaries and telegraphs his deliveries in semaphore, Morse and Braille, and who is abject with the bat, it’s no contest.
The message sent, the icicle driven into Boje’s heart, his resignation accepted with disingenuous surprise, Adams was summarily dropped from the squad. It was an immense relief, but doubts linger. Adams, it seems, is part of the long-term national plan again. Shudders.
Of course it’s possible that the selectors have seen some dramatic change in the Capetonian, and that we should await his rebirth as a strike bowler with glee. But if they are going on evidence of the recent past — two first-class seasons in which Adams managed 22 wickets at almost 48 apiece — then they are clutching at phantom straws.
But perhaps the strangest aspect of the entire Adams-Boje soap opera is the redundancy of it all: in this Test series agonising over whether and when to play a spinner is rather like wondering which colour to paint the nuclear bomb one is about to drop.
The intensity of the physical assault launched by Makhaya Ntini and Andre Nel on the Indians during the one-day series was startling: quick bowlers rarely operate at full pace in the shorter game these days, let alone attack torsos with malice aforethought.
But now, with a 15-day interrogation awaiting the tourists, that brutal campaign comes into clearer focus. Fast bowlers are bullies, first and foremost, and like all bullies, they are sustained by the submission of their victims: the more obvious the flinch, the greater their disdain for the flincher, and the more violent their persecution becomes.
India have flinched more than once, and at precisely the wrong time. Now they must look to their chest-guards and to their gods.
Or to Sourav Ganguly. The artist formally known as Maharajah was a late arrival in this country, summoned from the international wilderness to add some backbone to India’s invertebrate top six. It seemed a curious move at the time, given his reported aversion to hard graft and a distinctly mediocre record in South Africa: two fifties in 10 innings hardly seems to qualify one as a batting messiah.
And yet, despite all the flashy, feeble dismissals and churlish peeves in the past, the former captain has revealed an aggressively stubborn streak over the years, a penchant for performing when he gets utterly the hell in with everything and everyone around him. A few wretched sessions for India could be just the spark the Maharajah needs to ignite.
However sensible Ganguly’s recall might be, however, India are still in deep trouble, both technically and psychologically.
A report earlier in the week revealed that they had set their bowling machine on a ”Pollock length”, apparently in an effort to figure out ways of scoring off the veteran seamer. Scientific training is one thing, but this stank of outright panic, especially to South Africans who can still remember their own twitchy teams doing precisely the same sort of thing in the grim mid-1990s, almost every season containing a much-vaunted and subsequently shattered plan for combating Warne or Muralitharan or McGrath or Waqar or Wasim.
Like all those plans, this one seems logical on paper. Leave Pollock to settle and you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t; as liable to nick off defending as attacking.
New Zealand fell into that particularly frustrating hole in April, opting to concede maidens to him in return for safe passage outside the off-stump; but the inevitable edges came, and with them came superb figures for Pollock just when it seemed that his Test career was nearing its end.
The trouble with logical plans, though, is that they can easily become headlong stampedes once things go awry. Or mechanical, unthinking trudges towards catastrophe: in cricket it’s always the other bloke who gets you, and it’s not unlikely that Indian batsmen will dutifully nudge Pollock for singles only to be steamrolled by Nel at the other end.
Sure, coach, caught at deep fine leg off the glove for nine isn’t ideal. But look on the bright side: Pollock didn’t get me, and those three singles to third man were class …