It’s been a rough summer for Aamir Sohail. During his relatively brief tenure as captain of a Pakistan team rotten to its core with cliques and politics, festering allegations of match-fixing and the towering egos of ageing superstars, the plainly spoken opening batsman would no doubt have dodged more than his fair share of cricketing dung. But over the past few months he has often had the air of a man right on the very extremity of the ragged edge.
His almost tangible despair is understandable. On the one hand, Sohail clearly does not suffer fools. On the other, as a commentator, he is contractually obliged to do just that. Bombarded with the platitudinous garbage that passes as commentary on the national airwaves, his delivery has become increasingly clipped, perhaps even sullen.
At the start of the summer, he engaged politely as Zolani Bongco lectured him on the strategy of captaincy. By a fortnight ago, he had been reduced to disbelieving pedantry, suggesting to a senior expert that perhaps an lbw appeal against a left-hander had been turned down because the ball had pitched a foot outside leg stump.
On Sunday afternoon, he could clearly take no more. Pakistan had just bled their way to an excruciating defeat at Centurion and no doubt his pride had taken a dent. But it was the assault on his intellect that would have hurt most as his colleague let slip his yapping gob and poured out a stream of meaninglessly upbeat drivel. Pakistan, the pundit whooped, were going to struggle to come back from that ass-whipping.
When Sohail replied, it was in a barely suppressed shout. ”You cannot write off Pakistan like that,” he snapped, bursting the puce bubble of moronic bonhomie that had prevailed. Awkward silence …
One had to feel for Sohail, trapped as he was in the land of easy cliché. How to prove his point? Who would take such a claim seriously, after Pakistan had played like first-rate losers? Why shouldn’t we write off Pakistan, after that ghastly creep to defeat?
And then came Wednesday night, and one wished Sohail had been allowed to do a lap of honour around Kingsmead. You cannot write off Pakistan. Ever. They may squabble and sulk; they may fly home in fits nursing sore cuticles; they may even row mid-pitch (who but the elemental Shahid Afridi would have the gall to wag an indignant finger in the face of the imperious Mohammad Yousuf, as happened at Durban after a near run-out?). But although they play like clods today, all it means is that they are one game closer to playing like gods.
Before Wednesday, Sohail’s voice was a lonely one — that of a prophet howling in the wilderness — and had he suggested that the series currently under way was a dress rehearsal for a possible World Cup semifinal, he would have been ridden out of town on a rail.
At Centurion, Pakistan looked unlikely to make the final eight in the Caribbean, let alone the last four. But that was before Wednesday, and before Afridi squatted face-first into two Makhaya Ntini length balls and angled them past his nose to the fine leg fence.
Afridi was, of course, magical, and Yousuf’s serene century a genuine treasure in these times of batting hyperinflation, when any old tonk will do. But it must be said that South Africa bowled horribly, perhaps startled off their lines and lengths by the almost unprecedented sight of Shaun Pollock being carved for multiple boundaries in his opening spell. One hopes Mickey Arthur has taken Andre Nel and Charl Langeveldt aside and explained, with the help of lavish illustrations, the difference between a Yorker and a bouncer.
But the poor showing by the bowling attacks from both teams has not managed to dim the spectacle we have before us, and the one that now looms ever larger in the Caribbean. The crunching punch and counterpunch of Centurion and Durban have set the tone for the next two months. Key players are firing spectacularly — Afridi, Jacques Kallis, Yousuf, Mark Boucher — and suddenly one can’t help looking ahead, projecting current form into March and April.
After all, Pakistan have an admirable record in the Caribbean in recent seasons, perhaps the result of finding familiarly slow and dusty pitches there. Admirable, but not stellar. That honour belongs to South Africa, utterly dominant in the islands for some years now. And dominance is what the rest of the current series will be about. For once, one-day cricket means plenty.