Can it go on like this? Can South African hearts take the pitching, heaving, surging progress of the Good Ship Protea across the Caribbean? How can any cricket lover, however salted, stand being run on to reefs one day, only to be plucked to safety the next, and gusted onward as if nothing had happened?
If South Africa’s World Cup campaign could be plotted as an 18th century pirate map, it would be a chart laden with signs of wonder and mystery. ”Here there be tygers,” it would warn over a likeness of a Bangladeshi batsman; but an inch to the right, under the legend ”No Gayle doth here blowe”, it would promise safe harbour in Grenada.
Buffeted alike by catastrophe and good fortune, the Proteas seem rudderless, their sails full but their wheel spinning in the breeze; a crew equally capable of pusillanimous pussyfooting as of plundering.
At least, so far, the scuttling we feared after the Bangladeshi ambush has not happened. New Zealand, as much Blackbeard as Black Cap in this competition, are bound to present a withering broadside on Saturday, an onslaught that the South Africans are unlikely to weather. But the soft merchantmen of England, lying just beyond the horizon in their leaking tub, should surrender once steel is drawn.
For now, the terrible scare of last weekend has not proved fatal, and South Africa’s semifinal chances are still middling. As long as England aren’t hiding any cannons under the salted pork …
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The Proteas’ own ordnance has finally been primed with the return to form of a young gun called AB de Villiers; and it was his knock in Grenada, quite often literally staggering thanks to cramp, that reminded one that, while the Proteas may be weaving about on this map, their course across the wider ocean is far more resolute.
Indeed, De Villiers’s masterpiece was simply the latest addition to a map that has been 16 years in the drafting, a history of South Africa’s evolution as a force in one-day cricket. Just as it was the mariners who pushed back the fog of the unknown, so it has been batsmen — some good, some great — who have opened new lands for South African cricket.
Consider Adrian Kuiper, hitting his country’s first six in its first match: De Villiers was just seven years old when that pioneering ball splatted into the concrete of Eden Gardens. Three years later it was Dave Callaghan, his 169 not out lighting the gloom beyond the magical 300-mark for the first time; and then Mike Rindel, grinning sheepishly as he took 106 off Wasim and Waqar, and laid to rest any last vestiges of hero worship that might have lingered in South African minds.
But power, if it is to be real and lasting, cannot only build and look forward: sometimes it must look down, and massacre innocents to make a statement. Gary Kirsten took that step in 1996, flaying the United Arab Emirates for 188; and at long last, South Africa had arrived, and was ready to challenge the newest regime, the Australians. That challenge was usually rebuffed, sometimes shattered, but always it regrouped, to try again and to improve: Herschelle Gibbs’s immortal 175 against the regime last year was the final and defining detail on the map first sketched so boldly by the 1991 team. A line was drawn at the Wanderers. The Wessels-Cronje-Pollock era could not play better one-day cricket.
But perhaps De Villiers’s era can. To this observer at least, his innings was a glimpse of a future in which South Africans solve problems as fast as Australians did in 1999 and bat as freely as West Indians did in 1985. This is batting without baggage. We wait and hope.
So, where is Jacques Kallis in all this? How has it come to an ill-tempered pseudo-debate about his value? Where is Kallis’s mark on the map of one-day progress?
The simple answer is there isn’t one. It is glaringly absent.
Which is why his innings against the West Indies — a beautiful series of poses, the bowler and fielders incidental to the ascetic grandeur of his technique — was so frustrating. Innocents no doubt wondered why he hadn’t played like this throughout his career, but those who have watched him for longer were wracked by more painful ifs and buts: if only, one sighed, he had been part of a team that had allowed him to play like this throughout his career.
The mind runs away with itself when one wonders what Brian Lara might have looked like, what era-defining delights he might have produced, had he spent the past 12 years batting at number three for Australia, instead of plunging away with a bailer in the eternally flooded bilges of West Indian cricket. And although different forces animate the two stars (Lara seems powered by volcanic fire, Kallis by the grinding of glaciers), one can’t help imagining that had the South African played under similar circumstances, the past decade would have been a thing of throat-clutching splendour.
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