In case you have never been to one or hadn’t noticed while watching on television, a one-day international contains a lot of cricket. A single delivery can include action from seven or eight players and there are 600 deliveries in a match.
A football match lasts just 90 minutes but nobody ever described a fixture between two top teams as a ”lottery”, so why did the old farts describe one-day cricket as such when it lasts as long as it takes to earn a silver medal in the Comrades marathon?
Probably because cricket, of all the team games in the world, is the most individual. In every other sport it’s possible to cover for your teammates and be covered by them. Apart from backing up a teammate’s throw from the deep, there’s nothing you can do for the other 10 members of a cricket team. You have to throw, catch, bowl and hit the ball by yourself.
But, most critically, you have to think for yourself. Which is why coaches and captains drone on ad nauseam about the value and importance of experience and it’s why Graeme Smith and Mickey Arthur reminded supporters that the Proteas had young and/or inexperienced players in ”key, decision-making positions” in the XI after the wretched performance against England at St George’s Park last Sunday.
”It was not an excuse,” insists Arthur, ”it’s just a fact. We made the decision to have Wayne Parnell sharing the new ball, to have Ryan McLaren bowling in the middle overs, to open with Hashim [Amla] and have AB [de Villiers] and JP [Duminy] at three and four. We made those decisions because they are the best in the country, but they are still learning their trade.”
In most major cricket-playing nations an ODI player is regarded as ”experienced” once he has reached 50 caps so, whereas McLaren, Amla and Parnell have some way to go, Duminy’s 54 and De Villiers’s 93 caps make claims of ”inexperience” look thin until you remind yourself that they are both just 25 years old.
Experience is not just about knowing whether a pitch will be quick or slow, it’s about recognising the emotion and adrenalin that is generated by the enormity and brilliance of a win such as that at Newlands which preceded the St George’s debacle by just 36 hours. The simplistic and unsympathetic would say the Proteas were ”over confident” in Port Elizabeth. The realistic and honest would be more inclined to admit that any team would struggle to control their exuberance after thrashing their opposition in such dramatic fashion.
”Yes, we started as if we wanted to put another 350 on the board instead of checking ourselves and coming up with a realistic target,” Arthur admitted.
Amla acknowledged his role in setting the tone for an embarrassing slide to 119 all out: ”One of the duties of the opening batsmen is to send a message back to the change room after about five overs with details of how the pitch is playing compared to the team’s pre-match prediction. With Graeme [Smith] dismissed early it was up to me to take more responsibility for that by slowing down and analysing things. But before we knew it we were three or four wickets down and it was almost too late to recover.”
A football correspondent with excellent journalistic credentials but absolutely no cricket ones watched and listened with great interest when the defeat was analysed.
He asked, with equal seriousness and innocence, why the cricket coach was able to ”escape” so freely when the team’s tactics had been so badly exposed. In football, he said, the manager was in charge of tactics and therefore took responsibility for a team’s failures.
”It would be very interesting if we could take off a batsman and replace him with a bowler, or vice versa, or send on a great fielder for the closing overs. That might make us closer to football coaches, but the reality is that cricket is very different,” Arthur said with a smile when the question was relayed to him.
”Coaches do 99 % of their work before the players get on the field but when the players get on to the field they are on their own. We can only try to empower the players to make decisions for themselves.”
As the international fixture list stands at the moment, South Africa have only 30 more ODIs before their opening game in the 2011 World Cup. That’s an awful lot of cricket when viewed as 18 000 deliveries, but precious little when measured in time to gather that invaluable commodity, ”experience”.
That’s why the squad won’t change much for the next 15 months. It’s also why the captain and coach fight so hard to hold on to Mark Boucher (who, by the way, turned 33 on Thursday and has 288 caps) and it’s why the result of Friday’s final match against England at Kingsmead means everything in the short term but not much at all in the long term.