Is it really 10 years since that great duel between Michael Atherton and Allan Donald at Trent Bridge? Yes, it is.
Now that the cricketing summer is about to begin in earnest, after the low-key series against New Zealand and the interminable Twenty20 competition, England can look forward to another rousing encounter with South Africa.
In six series with England since their readmission to world cricket in 1992, South Africa have won two, lost two and drawn two. The most recent engagement, three winters back, went England’s way — but the evidence suggests the teams are more evenly matched.
Certainly the tourists are talking up their bowling attack. In Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel, Makhaya Ntini and Andre Nel, they have men fast enough to make a few English eyes water.
Rousing is the word because these teams, being comparable in ability if not in temperament, have made a habit of producing compelling cricket. And lots of incidents too.
In 1994 there was the dirt-in-the-pocket business at Lord’s when Atherton, the England captain, was caught on camera doing something peculiar to the ball, and then Devon Malcolm’s nine wickets at The Oval helped to square the series.
In 1998 there was the game of 10 LBWs at Leeds, where England, fortunate to be only one down after three Tests, eventually emerged as winners.
Five years ago the 22-year-old Graeme Smith marked his appointment as South Africa’s captain by making successive double hundreds to get his team off to a winning start, only for England to peg them back in the final Test when Marcus Trescothick made a double century of his own and Andrew Flintoff gave notice of his burgeoning talent by clobbering the bowlers all round The Oval.
But the finest memory of these meetings was surely supplied by Donald 10 years ago, and not only at Nottingham, where Steve Dunne, the New Zealand umpire, infamously denied him the wicket of Atherton that may well have swung the game — and the series — South Africa’s way.
How beautifully Donald bowled that summer. The bare bones reveal that he took 33 wickets at 19 apiece. They do not tell you how fast he bowled, for so long, in all conditions. His performance at Old Trafford, where Shaun Pollock was absent, and where injuries robbed him at different times of the support of Lance Klusener and Jacques Kallis, was one of the great feats of fast bowling in the modern age.
However well the South Africans bowl this summer — and Steyn in particular looks primed — they would do well to rival the Donald of 1998. He was a magnificent athlete, an admirable competitor and, yes, a great fast bowler.
Sometimes, when people reflect on the outstanding fast men of the past three decades, of whom there have been so many, his performance is overlooked. It shouldn’t be. The man was a champion.
South Africa would have won that series 10 years ago had Hansie Cronje not batted on into the third morning at Old Trafford.
In the past they have been too cautious for their own good. Let’s hope they come out to play this summer. If they do, we are in for a cracking month.