/ 11 January 2008

Series starts hotting up

”Chanderpaul!” Makhaya Ntini’s urgent screech cut through the banal burble of Cape Town’s shambolic excuse for an airport like a new razor blade meeting a virgin cheek on a Highveld winter’s morning.

Ntini was the first of South Africa’s players to pass through the security check, despite having to go through that tedious process with a wife, a lively young son and a gurgling baby. Would you look at that: we all grow up eventually.

”Chanderpaul! Where is he?”

Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s approach to batting is not unlike that of a black hole in outer space swallowing up every smidgen of light and matter within its gloomy reach. Chanderpaul hungrily consumes every delivery he faces, but he refuses to do anything useful with any of them unless he has no other choice. If he can’t leave a ball or block it or simply refuse to countenance the damned thing, he gives up the fight, lowers his standards and concedes defeat by scoring a run. Sometimes even two.

Ntini’s approach to life, love, bowling and everything else couldn’t be more different. He squeezes every last drop of zest out of each moment and slurps it up with gusto.

Two less like-minded souls could surely not be found anywhere. But there they were amid the nonplussed Spanish tourists and the bored shoeshine men, mates sharing a smile and a chat.

The previous day at Newlands Ntini had been trying to take Chanderpaul’s head off. On Thursday at Kingsmead, hostilities were resumed in the third Test with the series on the line. But in the bubble provided by those few minutes as players from both teams milled about, even as airport staff ignored the fact that another flight would not take off at the advertised time, all was easy and calm.

Perhaps cricket isn’t such a funny game after all; perhaps it does breed adult human beings. Actually, when Chanderpaul is batting, cricket is about as funny as opening wide for root canal treatment.

But it certainly is fun when Ntini is bowling.

That’s what has made this series more interesting than it had a right to be before the first Test in Port Elizabeth. The contrasts between the teams and the individuals involved have coloured the cricket an irresistible shade.

We were given an inkling that South Africa would not have matters all their own way in the Standard Bank Pro20 game at St George’s Park early in the tour, when the Windies whipped out four of the home side’s better batsmen in the time it takes to blow the froth off a beer.

Then came the first Test and the West Indians outplayed Graeme Smith’s team in all departments to win for the first time in this country — and with a day to spare. As Al Pacino might have said, ”­Hoo-hah!”

South Africa delivered an archetypically beefy performance to level the series in Cape Town, where several players were in danger of being lost without trace in the depths of a kelp forest outfield that was surely last mowed when Desmond Tutu was still the Arch.

Like Japanese soldiers marooned on some spit of land long after World War II, they would have taken to their deaths the memory of the epic fourth afternoon when Chris Gayle batted with a broken thumb and a molten hamstring to give the South Africans something to think about. All the while Chanderpaul, of course, maintained the stoic presence of a pillar box at the other end of the pitch.

A target boosted by their efforts was thought by some to be beyond South Africa’s reach on a pitch that had taken on the character of a recovering smack addict — spiteful and nasty and given to irrational ­outbursts.

But Smith grabbed hold of the game to deliver the kind of innings that reminded all who saw it that, after all the grandiose gumph that comes with being an international cricket captain, he remains one shit-hot ­batsman.

And so to Durban, where this absorbing duel resumed on a muggy morning on Thursday. Before the match ends we will have seen plenty of Ntini’s brand of passion, as well as Chanderpaul’s, and all the flavours in between. Can’t hardly wait.