It has become too easy – and too common – for cricket writers to vandalise the well-intentioned and badly conceived commentary of their televised counterparts. It is a well-established hypocrisy by now, writers heaping scorn upon a mispronunciation or a stammer, as monosyllabic redundancies pour from their laptops.
South Africa start another long cricket season at an inhospitable venue, where they will take on the world’s most unusual spin bowler. The problem for Graham Smith and his tourists is that the reassuring normality of a Galle Test generally involves 60 overs of Muttiah Muralitharan and four fielders chafing one’s shins and bottom with their cap badges.
Right now, nobody is throwing eggs at the glass doors of 120 Bree Street in Cape Town. On a similar stretch of pavement, this time outside Johannesburg’s Fourways office park, bundles of razor wire are not being unrolled. In fact, nothing at all is happening, which seems to be the modus operandi of the global middle-class protest movement.
Australia’s cricketers, currently playing Sri Lanka, are in unfamiliar territory. The Test venues are small and seedy. The surrounding jungles and mangrove swamps are infested with leeches, and sparsely peopled by simple peasants, some of whom are heavily armed and distrustful of foreigners.
Sixty years ago the vanguard of Pax Americana waded and crawled through pink swells on to Omaha beach, and Britannia’s 300-year rule of the waves was emphatically over. Given the reverberations of June 6 this year, it seemed somehow spiteful of the American Professional Cricket organisation to announce its birth this week.
”This is how Nero listened. His eyes are almost closed, regarding the tablecloth with a slow-burning, unblinking intensity. Once he moves his lips as if rehearsing a pronouncement, and then resumes his distrustful stakeout of the salt cellar to his left. Away from the cameras and the parades, the pre-arranged spontaneous displays of public adoration, Don King looks terribly tired”. Tom Eaton caught up with the master boxing promoter on his whirlwind tour of South Africa.
”What have you got for us?” asked Fifa’s director of acquisitions. ”Ostrich-egg clocks, bushman thumb-pianos, that sort of thing. Pierre here is awfully fond of those Zulu girls.” It was time for Operation Witblitz Koeksister. Danny Jordaan gave the pre-arranged signal and Charlize Theron entered.
It was immensely satisfying that Brian Lara reclaimed his world record for the highest score in Test history in Antigua this week, but his 12-hour mugging of England’s bowlers was remarkable not for its gluttony but for its familiarity. Ten years ago to the week Lara helped himself to similar fare from a similar English team.
The Pro20 cricket series launched this week is being punted as “cricket for a new generation”. All hope for the future is lost.
It all began with Madonna. Had she not performed at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in the summer of 1993, and had her devotees not trampled that magisterial paddock into dust, and had the shameful conditions not wrecked Brian McMillan’s knee, Gary Kirsten might not have played his 101st Test this week.