On the second afternoon of the final Test of the summer, as Pakistan softened and dribbled into the cracks like an ice-cream cake in the Sahel, a debate raged in the Newlands’ Railway Stand.
The issue of the hour was the correct pronunciation of Ashwell Prince’s name, and while the poses of the rival camps were identical — almost supine, as if trickling down their plastic chairs in a tangle of baggy shorts and cheeky T-shirts — their positions were diametrically opposed.
The first insisted that the batsman’s name required a flourish of the Cape Flat’s dialect, with the ”sh” obliterated (as if by a passion-gap, for instance) to produce something like ”Ass-will”.
Not so, said the other lobby. Its position, stated equally uproariously, was that Prince’s first name was ”Ash-well”, the ”well” stressed and enunciated with toffee-nosed Etonian haughtiness.
But when the man in question plucked a screamer out of the air at backward point, and roared his triumph straight at the debaters, they quickly found consensus: their man of the moment had only one moniker, and that was Ashy-P. Neither an afbriekertjie vannie vlaktes, nor a ponce from the burbs, Prince, it seemed, was something more refined: a gangsta-rapper in whites. He was, in short, pimpin’.
It was all in fun, of course, part of the endless good-natured nonsense that the Newlands faithful produce hour after hour: only under the Oaks could a gigantic woman once have screamed an ode up to Meyrick Pringle in the dressing room — ”Pringle, I’m single, you make me tingle!” — and been warmly applauded by her fellow fans.
But one couldn’t help thinking that there was something quite substantial in any debate about Prince’s identity.
At some point some journalistic wag, praising Prince’s flowering as a reliable international batsman, will make some ghastly headline invoking the Frog Prince being kissed.
But the leaden wit will disguise a truth about Prince that has become increasingly evident this season: the left-hander doesn’t need any princesses to plant any wet ones on his forehead. He is both frog and prince, and long may he remain both.
In six Tests this summer, South Africa’s top six batsmen — the specialists tasked with putting the bulk of the team’s runs on the board — scored 2 736 runs off their blades. (Many dozens more were gifted to the Proteas by abject Indian and Pakistani back-up bowlers, and worse wicketkeeping; but the less said about these the better).
Of those runs, Ashy-P scored 546.
Shaun Pollock and Inzamam-ul-Haq were ruled to be men of the respective series this summer, but Prince was clearly the Man of the Season from a South African perspective; the unglamorous bedrock upon which more eye-catching efforts were built.
This is, of course, not new territory for those who follow South African cricket: we have been here before.
Fourteen years ago, to be exact. Now, as in 1993, we have a confrontational, often controversial left-handed captain who rubs the selectors the wrong way and whose form is an ongoing national debate (Graeme Smith/Kepler Wessels). We have a supremely talented and elegant — but enragingly erratic — opening batsman (Herschelle Gibbs/Andrew Hudson); a gifted young leader out of his depth in the number three spot (Hashim Amla/Hansie Cronje), and a golden child whose unfulfilled batting genius is plastered over by staggering fielding (AB de Villiers/Jonty Rhodes).
We have a wicket-keeper batsman with the ability and outlook to drag the top order out of the muck (Mark Boucher/Dave Richardson); a famous all-rounder criticised for batting too slowly despite regularly redeeming the top order while nipping out a couple of crucial wickets (Jacques Kallis/Brian McMillan).
And of course we have a world-class fast bowler carrying the attack (Makhaya Ntini/Allan Donald), backed up by a veteran line-and-length merchant blessed with immaculate control, whose rampant form in one-dayers belies an ageing body no longer entirely suited to Test cricket (Pollock/Fanie de Villiers).
The team of 1993 was in transition. The headlines screamed for consistency. The ”90-for-5” syndrome was identified and grafted on to the national sporting consciousness. No flies on the bowling attack, the pundits agreed, but the lower order was digging the team out of trouble too often.
And then along came a left-handed Capetonian, awkward at the crease, no spring chicken, but gifted with immense powers of concentration. Gary Kirsten was known as Snick at high school, thanks to a penchant for doing just that, but things had changed since puberty.
And things have changed for Prince too, since his Eastern Province incarnation as a carefree dasher with a first class average in the low 30s. Whether he is the new Kirsten remains to be seen; but South African cricket is much better off knowing that there is at least one broad bat between it and surrender.