THAT Ricky Ponting is the most successful captain among the 48 men who have led teams at the World Cup is no surprise.
So much so that those with whom the buck stops at next year’s tournament could do worse than follow his example.
Ponting was a straight A skipper, winning 89.66% of his record 29 games in charge and he took Australia to the title in 2003 and 2007.
Only Clive Lloyd, who led West Indies to glory in 1975 and 1979, has also been there, done that more than once.
What made Ponting so good? That he had a hell of a team at his disposal for much of his tenure didn’t hurt.
Neither that he spent most of his career as the best, or nearly the best, batter in the game — especially in a team culture that demands you play at least as good a game as you talk.
Ponting was an unvarnished talker, saying things like, “We’ll be able to put a stronger team on the ground and we can hopefully get back to playing the way we have been over the past few weeks. If we do, we’ll be very hard to beat.”
No bullshit there, and it helps when you can weld that kind of clarity to a killer pull shot, among an array of dazzling strokes, and walk out for the toss holding a team sheet listing a dozen gun cricketers who could stroll into any other team.
South Africa’s best World Cup captain has been Hansie Cronjé, who presided over 11 victories in 15 matches; all played, you would hope, before he succumbed to matchfixing.
Graeme Smith also won 11, but of 17. His six losses are twice as many as Cronjé’s defeats.
Again, so far so predictable. But who would have thought Brendon McCullum is the second-most successful World Cup captain, and easily in Ponting’s league with a winning percentage of 88.89 — better than Lloyd, Kapil Dev, Allan Border, Imran Khan, Arjuna Ranatunga, Steve Waugh, MS Dhoni and Michael Clarke.
All have, of course, bested McCullum by winning the damn thing. All of his nine games at the helm where at the 2015 edition of the tournament, when he took New Zealand to the final, where they crashed to Clarke’s Australians — the only match he lost.
The thread connecting McCullum to Ponting is their peerless batting ability. Both were outrageously aggressive, admirably brave, superbly skilled hitters of a cricket ball.
It’s worth remembering that only batters have captained sides to World Cup glory. The closest there have been to exceptions are allrounders Dev and Khan.
That’s true because not only because most skippers are batters, but also because it’s difficult to lead by example as a bowler. Everybody bats. Not everybody bowls.
For all its modernisation and rapid change in the T20 era, cricket remains a game that runs on human nature.
Like all of us, players give of their best when they are inspired, and that won’t change before the 2019 World Cup.
Good thing for South Africa, then, that they will be led by someone who understands captaincy and inspiration as well as, if not better than, anyone in sport.
The burden is yours, Faf du Plessis. South Africans know you’ll welcome it.
The Springboks didn’t wear rainbow laces against Wales in Cardiff on Saturday. Perhaps that’s what we should expect from a society that preaches progressive but is poltroon in practice.
RAINBOW RATTLING – What your laces say about you. (Pic: Sharon McCutcheon on Pexels.com)
Times Select
TELFORD VICE in London
THREADS long enough that are woven strongly enough to hold two halves of a shoe snugly together, capped with a tiny tube to keep them for fraying back into threads.
There doesn’t seem to be much to a bootlace. But rugby is tying itself into knots about them.
If you’re still with us, lock up your prejudices. Of course, you don’t have them. But please ensure everyone else, especially your children, remain within earshot. If only to hear you air those prejudices — the ones you don’t have — as you read further. And for you to hear yourself.
Rugby’s suits in Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, Wales and the United States made “rainbow laces” available to their players for matches at the weekend in response to Gareth Thomas falling victim to a vicious attack by a 16-year-old on the streets of Cardiff.
That doesn’t add up for a man 1.91 metres tall and 103 kilogrammes heavy, who in 2005 was fined £1 000 and ordered to pay £1 900 in compensation for his role in a bar brawl in France in which he and his mates were so pissed they moered each other.
Thomas owns 100 caps for Wales, 23 as captain, including in 2005 when they won the Grand Slam for the first time in 11 years — and with that the Six Nations — three appearances for the British and Irish Lions, leading them twice, and four for Wales’ rugby league side.
Bar behaviour aside, surely the only Gareth in all of Wales who has earned more respect never has to open a door or pay for a drink and is invariably called, with a small, reverent bow, Mr Edwards?
Thing is, there’s more to Gareth Thomas than all that. He is also something a 16-year-old on a beery night in Cardiff refused to accept as part of reality: gay.
So out came the rainbow laces in solidarity, as shown by match officials as well as players. Rugby has flirted with them before, but this time, thanks to the dramatic images of Thomas’ bloodied, swollen face on social media in the preceding days, the connection was visceral.
Big ups, then, to rugby. Except that backing for the call was scant and not universal even in the teams whose administrators said they were on board.
On Friday, England flank Sam Underhill explained why he wouldn’t lace up more colourfully than usual to run out against Australia at Twickenham the next day: “It sounds a bit ridiculous given the size of the issue they are representing, [but] it is more to do with the thickness of the laces. They are actually really uncomfortable in my boots. And they are really long.”
He had me at uncomfortable. He lost me at long. No-one in a dressingroom filled with all sorts of tape and flunkies to apply it to all sorts of body parts packs a pair of scissors?
As for the Aussies, they have to put up with the neanderthal views of Israel Folau, who has hid his fascism behind religion to say: “Gays can go to hell.” How many agree with him is not known.
South Africa? The Springboks didn’t wear rainbow laces against Wales in Cardiff on Saturday, and while team sources said “SA Rugby supported the initiative”, I could find no such support. Perhaps that’s what we should expect from a society that preaches progressive but is poltroon in practice.
Unsurprisingly, the bilious stinking underbelly of online comments sections rumbled with rancour in response to all this. Everything from the “disgusting, satanic Jew-owned corporations who tried to kill God and own rugby” variety to “would anyone have worn special laces if he was not a homo” was out there.
The owner of the first view needs a doctor, probably more than one. The person who made the second point should remember that Thomas was attacked precisely because he is gay.
And they might want to think about his response. “This morning I’ve decided to make what I hope will be a positive video,” he said in a video posted online on November 18. “Last night I was the victim in my home city of a hate crime for my sexuality.
“Why [do] I want it to be positive? Because I want to say thank you to the police, who were involved and were very helpful and allowed me to do restorative justice with the people who did this because I thought they could learn more that way than any other way.
“And also to the people of Cardiff, who supported me and helped me. Because there’s a lot of people out there who want to hurt us. But, unfortunately for them, there’s a lot more who want to help us heal.”
Referee Nigel Owens — also Welsh, also gay — took a similar course of action after he suffered abuse in 2015.
“I didn’t see the tweet until it was brought to my attention,” Owens told the BBC on Sunday. “It was reported to the police by other people.
“It was from an 18-year-old lad who lived … 10, 12 miles away from the village where I live. He tweeted a homophobic comment that was deemed serious enough to be dealt with by the police.”
Owens also opted for restorative justice, which entails the offender apologising to the victim in writing or in person.
The teenager sent Owens an apology on Facebook and agreed to meet him under police supervision.
“You had a sense that this was a young man who was apologetic for a moment of stupidness,” Owens said. “We shook hands and we moved on, and he won’t have a record for the rest of his life.
“Hopefully he would have learnt from that, and more importantly he’ll be able to pass that message on to people around him if something similar crops up again.
If you’re part of the LGBTIQ community, you’re entitled to be angry at Thomas and Owens for not holding their offenders up to the glare of what they deserved, law courts and all. Maybe you feel cheated out of justice.
But you might decide whether they are showing all of us a better way; a way that is about building instead of breaking down, of going forward rather than back, of progress rather than retribution.
And you have to wonder whether people like Thomas and Owens are fine men — of rugby and beyond — not despite the fact that they’re gay but because they are gay.
Lace that thought into your boots, kids, and make the world a better place.
Ngidi’s sudden removal from the equation leaves a 1.93-metre hole in South Africa’s bowling plan.
TMG Digital
TELFORD VICE in London
IT’S difficult for South African supporters to know what to make of the knee injury that has taken Lungi Ngidi out of the mix for at least three months.
Should they worry that a key member of the attack might lose his edge leading into the World Cup?
Should they be angry that this calamity befell Ngidi in a damn fool irrelevant T20 tacked onto the end of the limited series in Australia, and is the only reason the cursed match will be remembered?
Both. But there’s no point dwelling in the dark past, especially as he will need to be replaced for South Africa’s home series against Pakistan and Sri Lanka this summer.
In the not quite two years since Ngidi made his international debut in — would you believe it — a T20 against Sri Lanka in Centurion, he has shown intelligence to match his physicality.
Fifteen wickets is decent for four Tests, and he has proved himself well capable of switching gears to slip into white-ball mode.
All good. Except that Ngidi’s sudden removal from the equation leaves a 1.93-metre hole in South Africa’s bowling plan.
He is their leading wicket-taker in one-day internationals this year: three more than Kagiso Rabada for three fewer runs in 16.2 fewer overs.
How to fill that gap? Maybe by installing a 1.96-metre fast bowler, albeit someone who, unlike Ngidi, doesn’t look like something straight out of Wakanda as he bounds towards the bowling crease.
Chris Morris is that fast bowler, and the fact that injury and questions over his consistency have limited him to five of the 17 ODIs South Africa have played in 2018 are convincing reasons to have a good long look at him this season.
And he can bat. But that promises to complicate things because it means Morris is already in the running for the allrounder’s berth.
So is Wiaan Mulder, another possible understudy for Ngidi. Except that an ankle injury means he was last seen on the field in the first ODI against Zimbabwe in Kimberley on September 30.
But the update on him, as given by South Africa’s team management on Tuesday, is promising: “He is progressing well with his rehab and is expected to start batting. [His] expected date of return to play is the second week of January.”
Duanne Olivier is an option, even though he has only bowled a red ball for South Africa. But he will have to curb a tendency to keep thundering in while apparently giving little thought to tailoring his bowling to the conditions and the match situation.
Still, and even though the Mzansi Super League (MSL) is far from the best barometer for players with World Cup potential, the six wickets Olivier has taken in three games— the scalps of Quinton de Kock, Andile Phehlukwayo and Christiaan Jonker among them — won’t hurt his chances.
Then there’s Corbin Bosch, who has replaced Ngidi in the MSL. Bosch has played only four list A matches, but it’s already apparent that the kid can bowl: six wickets at less than 30 and fewer than five runs an over.
Just like Tertius, then. Unlike his father, he can also bat. And he’s also tall.
Boxing makes heroes out of the hated and Macbeths out of mediocrities. It is humanity at once victorious and vile. If you can’t read or write – or both – about boxing, best you stop reading and writing.
BOXING – Once it hooks you, there’s no escape. (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com)
Times Select
TELFORD VICE in London
A heart thumped loudly on the corner of Oxford and North Streets in East London on a grey winter’s day in 1992. It was in my chest.
The previous September I had been hired by the Daily Dispatch to cover cricket for no other reason than that was the vacancy. But what I really wanted to write about was boxing.
In the white world, cricket was played by kids from larney suburbs who went to even larnier schools, whose committees were strewn with their successful parents, who drove them everywhere they needed to go or bought them motorbikes.
I was from shabby places like Stoney Drift, Milner Estate, Panmure and the Quigney — yes, all of them — and schooled accordingly. Neither of my parents had a driver’s licence, much less a car. My mother earned money as a fortune teller. My father was often in jail.
So I was made for boxing. That’s why I was on the corner of Oxford and North.
Weirdly, the shift roster at the Dispatch showed I had three days off consecutively. I resolved to spend them in a large room that sat between a slew of shops atop a flight of stairs and behind a glass door halfway down the hill that connects North to Oxford and Buffalo Streets.
I climbed the stairs, reached for the door handle, took a deep breath, and prepared for my life to be changed forever. It was, and in less than a second.
The stink hit me like Joe Frazier’s left hook. It was the smell of years of compacted, dried sweat that seemed to have seeped into everything and everyone in the room. It was also the smell of hope.
The walls were plastered with posters that fuelled that hope, which could be heard in every slap of leather on leather. Or on skin and, somewhere beyond that, on flesh and bone.
As in most boxing gyms, the ring dominated. But there were significant distractions. Look over there — that’s Welcome Ncita! There — Vuyani Bungu! And there, in a corner of the ring, arms draped over the ropes, surveying all with a sharp eye, a skew smile, and a ready mouth, stood Mzi Mnguni, the king in his castle.
I froze for a moment in the open doorway, trying to find air to breathe in the stew of sweat and hope, and knowing that every pair of eyes in the place had fixed on the only white face around.
Turning, I closed the door, said not a word, made for the perimeter of the room and found a seat among dozens of onlookers. No-one asked who I was or why I was there. Who I was didn’t matter. Why I was there was obvious: like everybody else, for boxing.
By the end of that day Mnguni, Ncita and Bungu knew who I was, and by the end of the third I had interviewed all of them and several more.
And so the Dispatch’s cricket writer began flinging boxing stories at his editors. Bless the old buggers, they published them.
Over the years I have returned to boxing at every opportunity, as a reader as well as a writer. How could I not? It’s less a sport than a means of social, financial and physical survival. It makes heroes out of the hated and Macbeths out of mediocrities. It is humanity at once victorious and vile. If you can’t read or write — or both — about boxing, best you stop reading and writing.
Unlike too many cricketers to count, I have yet to be disappointed by an interaction I have had with a boxer, trainer, referee, promoter or administrator. Some have behaved like benevolent uncles, others like the crooks they are. One wanted to beat me up.
The magic followed me from East London, the crucible of the fight game in South Africa, when I moved to Durban — so bereft of boxing now that people there still speak of Brian Baronet and Tap Tap Makhathini — then to Johannesburg — where boxing goes to make money — and then to Cape Town — where an epic on the Whiteboy family lays, as yet, unwritten.
I thought I was leaving boxing behind when I moved to London in September. What I hadn’t counted on was boxing refusing to leave me behind.
Within days of arriving I was trying like hell to be accredited for Anthony Joshua’s fight against Alexander Povetkin at Wembley. Sorry, you’re too late, the suits said. That didn’t stop me from writing about their showdown: boxing is always bigger than fight night.
By then we had settled into a flat in Bethnal Green. A short ring walk away on a house on Paradise Row, a blue plaque reads, “Daniel Mendoza, pugilist, 1764-1836. English champion who proudly billed himself as ‘Mendoza the Jew’, lived here when writing ‘The Art of Boxing’.”
Mendoza won 34 of his 37 bareknuckle fights. He was born in England and he was indeed Jewish, but also of Portuguese heritage. He stood only 1.7 metres tall and weighed just 73 kilogrammes, but he won the world heavyweight championship. He invented the left jab and the sideways step, and liked to say he was the first Jew to talk to King George III.
Talk about being made for boxing. In his diary, Mendoza wrote about a trip to watch a fight that itself involved fisticuffs — once in an altercation with the driver of another cart, then with a shopkeeper who he felt was trying to hoodwink him, and again simply because he took umbrage at how someone looked at him.
Just up the road is the funeral parlour from which Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who were prominent amateur boxers before they became Britain’s most notorious gangsters, were buried.
“In the East End, when we were kids you really had only one of two choices if you wanted to make anything of yourself in life; you either became a boxer or a villain,” Ronnie Kray wrote.
Before they owned the streets I now walk and cycle daily, the Krays learnt their trade at the Repton, which trained its first fighters in 1884 and is now Britain’s oldest boxing club. It’s still going strong in a red-brick building 450 metres away from where I am punching out these words.
I do mean punching. I type, with two fingers, like Smokin’ Joe used to hook. And I have plenty to punch about, what with the East End of London able to lay claim to boxers like Henry Cooper, Lennox Lewis, Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn.
From the scrappy streets of East London to the deep, dark east of London is a long journey. But, for a boxing tragic, it’s just a hook and a jab from one hot corner of the global ring to another.
Woman cricketers talk about themselves as batsmen. Do we respect their right to self-identify, or do the logical and call them batters?
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in London
BATSMEN or batters? Pitches or wickets? Groundsmen or curators? Chinaman bowlers or left-arm wrist spinners? South Africa or Proteas?
Or all and any of the above? It’s time to revisit the way we talk about cricket. Or is it?
Old-fashioned cricket writers change every “batter” players and coaches utter in press conference and interviews to “batsman” in their articles. Why? “Batters play baseball, son, not cricket.”
But what if the player holding the bat is a woman? She’s clearly playing cricket, not baseball. She’s also not a man. Batswoman? Good luck with that.
It doesn’t help that woman cricketers talk about themselves as batsmen. Do we respect their right to self-identify, or do the logical and call them batters?
In which case the same should apply to men and to hell with what the old farts of the pressbox think: batters all.
Just such an old fart, the late, almost always great, never boring Trevor Chesterfield would screech across the room, in his falsetto voice barbed with a New Zealand accent that never flattened despite the decades he spent in South Africa: “It’s a pitch, ya bloody troglodyte — the wicket is those five bits of wood standing up at either end.”
And he was correct. On a bad day he would also call you a “bloody drongo”. On a good day he would explain that surface was an acceptable alternative to pitch. But you would hear from him, loudly, if you called it anything else: deck — “Oi! Drongo!” — track — “Shaddup troglodyte!” — strip — “What the hell? Keep your bloody clothes on!”.
Chester Trevorfield, as he was called by visiting compatriots, would insist that the last runs to be added to the batting team’s total were called sundries. The rest of us called them extras and reminded him he was tallying a scorecard, not a laundry bill. Bloody drongo.
Groundsman is on the same path to extinction as batsman. Except that they’re called curators in Australia, which won’t sit well with non-Australians — who will argue that if we follow that example we should also say the score the wrong way round. And go nuts as a nation when people are caught ball-tampering.
Besides, proper curators are found in museums attending to dead things — just like your pitch, hey boet? More contemporary specimens of the ilk drape themselves around chronically cool cafés, pouring over leather-bound laptops and “curating” exhibitions of the tattoo scabs of other, slightly less obscure hipsters.
Chinaman is a derogatory term and should you use it without that qualification you are practising racism. Should you be ignorant of that fact when you employ this epithet, you are guilty of preaching racism.
The C-word was racist long before it came to cricket at Old Trafford in 1933, when West Indies left-arm spinner Ellis “Puss” Achong — the first test player of Chinese heritage — had Walter Robbins stumped.
Most of Achong’s deliveries were of the orthodox finger-spin variety. But he slipped in the odd bit of wrist spin, and the ball that dismissed Robbins pitched near the right-hander’s off-stump and turned towards middle to sneak between his legs untouched was just that.
“Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman,” Robbins is reputed to have muttered to West Indies’ captain Learie Constantine as he stalked off.
The pejorative implication of Robbins’ alleged statement clangs loud and clear. Good thing someone of Constantine’s classiness was on hand to see his prejudice and raise the stakes, again reputedly, with: “Do you mean the bowler or the ball?”
This old fart of a cricket writer balks at using Proteas because it is insipid marketing-speak for a team who already have a name.
But South Africa is the geographic and ethnographic name of a country, and sport becomes part of a greater evil when it is hijacked by illusions of patriotism or dangerous nationalism. Just as it does when it is appropriated by people who measure success in the amount of money made from selling branded replica jerseys.
So, what exactly do we talk about when we talk about cricket?
“That’s probably the position that’s up for grabs the most in that side at the moment.” – Shaun Pollock on South Africa’s search for a No. 7.
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in London
IT’S the number of the deadly sins, it made for a magnificent western, and it’s lucky. It’s septem in Latin, sjö in Icelandic, and, in isiZulu, isikhombisa.
It was worn by George Best, Richie McCaw, and this guy — who reckons it’s among the few vacancies in South Africa’s World Cup XI.
“In the current set-up, with South Africa picking the four main bowlers, the No. 7 role is quite important. They’ll have to try and bat with the tail at times and make sure they contribute.
“That’s probably the position that’s up for grabs the most in that side at the moment. There are probably four guys who are all vying for that same allrounder’s spot at No. 7, to be able to bowl most of their 10 overs and contribute with the bat.”
Shaun Pollock knows what he’s talking about because he’s walked the walk. He had No. 7 on his back for most of his 303 one-day internationals and he is South Africa’s most successful No. 7 batsman in terms of innings, not outs, runs and half-centuries.
Only 16 of all the 1 015 men who have taken guard at No. 7 in ODIs have scored a century. Pollock’s 130 in a losing cause for the Africa XI against their Asia counterparts in Bangalore in June 2007 is among them. He arrived with the scoreboard glowering 31/5 and his team in search of a steadily receding target of 318, and was last out with just 35 needed.
Thing is, Justin Kemp is also one of the sweet 16. He walked out at Newlands in November 2006 with South Africa reduced to 76/6 and smashed 100 not out to take them to a total of 274/7. A demoralised India were hammered by 106 runs.
So it’s not easy connecting the dots between a cultured clipper of the cricket ball like Pollock with Kemp and his booming broadsword of a bat.
Pollock had made himself unavailable to bowl in that 2007 Afro-Asia Cup. Was he a genuine No. 7 in that series considering, if they aren’t keeping wicket, they are invariably required to add at least a few overs to the cause? Or did not having to think about how he was going to bowl to whom clear enough space in his head to help him to give of his best with the bat?
Faf du Plessis is asking different questions about the No. 7 spot for the World Cup, not least who he might be. Discussing the issue this week, Du Plessis listed Wiaan Mulder, Dwaine Pretorius, Andile Phehlukwayo and Vernon Philander as candidates.
A classy No. 7 gives a team options and take control in pivotal situations. All the players Du Plessis mentioned can do that, and more. As can JP Duminy, Chris Morris and Farhaan Behardien.
But Mulder is losing ground as he battles his way back from injury, Phehlukwayo is unafraid but also at times unconvincing, Philander’s opportunities to be taken seriously as an allrounder — which should have happened — have been wasted, and Morris has struggled with consistency. Pretorius lacks experience, but Duminy and Behardien no longer have Pretorius’ spark.
Whoever lands the job will have to align themselves with South Africa’s evolving philosophy.
“In the past six months or so we’ve discussed … where we’ve gone wrong in the past, mainly at big tournaments,” Du Plessis said. “I do feel that within the batting line-up there is a regular occurrence of a fear of failure. That comes from pressure.
“[But] even if you didn’t get the results or the runs that you would have liked, at least mentally you would have challenged yourself; there’s something you would find out about yourself as a batsman.”
Maybe even, if you’re lucky, that you’re a magnificent No. 7.
SOUTH Africa’s World Cup preparation has been hobbled by a serious knee injury suffered by Lungi Ngidi.
The fact bowler has been ruled out for at least three months, which means the best-case scenario is that he will return near the end of February.
With a bit of luck and a lot of rehab Ngidi could be back for South Africa’s five-match series against Sri Lanka in March —their last one-day engagement before they play the opening game of the World Cup against England at The Oval on May 30.
But he will miss the five ODIs against Pakistan in January, which would be a better test of his form.
“Lungi fell awkwardly while fielding during the T20I against Australia [on] Sunday,” South Africa team manager Mohammed Moosajee was quoted as saying in a Cricket South Africa release on Friday.
“He underwent investigations and further assessments with knee specialists upon his return to South Africa which revealed a significant ligament injury to the right knee.
“Due to the significant nature of the injury he will require a minimum of 12 weeks of rest and rehabilitation to make a successful return to play.”
It takes a lot to make an impression in a place as thick with quality fast bowlers as South Africa, but Ngidi has proved he belongs in his four Tests, 13 ODIs and seven T20s.
He is central to the old-fashioned, still effective South African method of taking the game to opponents with the help of booming fast bowling, and no doubt held one of the “12 or 13” places Faf du Plessis said on Monday had been all but nailed down in the World Cup squad.
Ngidi’s injury pries one of those nails loose but there is time to hammer it home again.
HOW much preparation is enough, and how much is too much? The question is pertinent to teams who hope to go all the way at next year’s World Cup.
South Africa can’t be accused of not doing their homework. No major team will play as many as the 10 one-day internationals they have scheduled before the tournament starts with their match against England at The Oval on May 30.
And the plan would seem to be coming together.
“There are definitely more answers after this tour than the previous tour [to Sri Lanka in August],” Faf du Plessis said this week after his team returned from Australia, where they won the ODI series 2-1.
“We’re starting to get better and better the more we play together. It’s good to see the stuff we’ve been speaking about — combinations and the style of play — [that] the guys are getting used to it; they’re finding their roles in the team.”
New Zealand come closest to South Africa’s workload with nine ODIs remaining before the World Cup.
India, Sri Lanka and West Indies will play eight each, and England and India are in for three apiece.
Australia, the worst-performing team in ODIs this year with only two wins from 13 games, which makes this the Aussies’ least successful year in the format, and who would seem to need all the practice they can find? Three.
But World Cup success isn’t all about how much time teams will spend on the field before the tournament. For instance, which field is important.
All of South Africa’s 10 ODIs, in the shape of series against Sri Lanka and Pakistan, will be played at home — where conditions will be markedly different from what they will encounter in England.
None of the teams above will go into the tournament in ODI mode. South Africa, India, England, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and West Indies will all have to slow down a touch from T20 pace. Australia and New Zealand, who will go to the World Cup from Test series, will need to speed up.
This is, of course, an exercise in nitpicking. Modern cricketers are well-versed in switching from one format to another, most of those who will be at the World Cup have built up valuable experience of English conditions, and they will all play warm-up games in England before the tournament starts.
What will matter more is how well the teams know themselves — what they’re good at and less than good at, and how to put opponents where they want them in those terms. On that score, the signs from South Africa’s camp are promising.
“We’re not only focused on our XI,” Du Plessis said. “We’re focused on our XV to get it as strong as possible for the World Cup.
“[Coach] Ottis [Gibson] and I have said for quite a while now that everything we think and everything we do isn’t about now and it’s not about the game we’re playing now.
“It’s mostly about looking ahead. We’ve been planning this for a long time. We both feel as if we’re going in the right direction.
“The next two series, especially the one against Pakistan [in January], will be good tests. They’re a very good team, particularly in white-ball cricket.
“It’ll be a good place to test ourselves against a strong team.”
“We’ve been working a very long time to make sure we’re getting our combinations right, and it would be wrong to doubt that over a T20 tournament.” – Faf du Plessis hands down a Mzansi Super League reality check.
TMG Digital
TELFORD VICE in London
WHAT to do when you’re stuck for several hours in the wasteland of the soul that is an international airport?
Submit to the sensory swamp of duty free shopping for stuff you neither need nor want that’s outrageously more expensive than the same thing in the real world. Consume distinctly below average food and drink at stratospherically above average prices.
Try to avoid all the sneezing, sniffing, snotting people also doing so as you do so. Wonder how anyone survives a trip to the horrific smokers’ lounge.
Consider getting a massage. Feel your muscles go rigid with tension when you discover how much that would cost you.
Go to the loo.
Repeat all of the above.
Perhaps because they had run out of things to do, maybe because they were bored, or had forgotten to bring a pack of cards, South Africa ended up occupied — and not only in the loo sense — when they stopped over in Singapore on their journey back from Australia.
What did they do? They watched cricket.
And, to hear Faf du Plessis tell it, they were more than happy to do so: “For the first time there’s a real energy around the national side about domestic cricket.
“I can’t remember any time when the whole team got together to watch a domestic game back home online.”
That game was part of the Mzansi Super League (MSL), and soon Du Plessis and the rest of the players South Africa will take to next year’s World Cup will be, too.
Could the tournament help the selectors decide who those players will be?
“We have an idea of probably 12 or 13 guys who are locked into that squad,” Du Plessis said. “But you always have to leave room for guys who come in and shoot the lights out with red-hot form.”
Might that work in reverse? Could someone who is among the all but chosen “12 or 13” play himself out of the reckoning for the final 15 with a poor performance in the MSL?
Spoiler alert: herewith a reality check.
“Not if he’s in the plans,” Du Plessis said. “There’s an intense heat to international cricket, and in a perfect world you’d always like your international players to come down [to domestic level] and perform.
“But we’ve been working a very long time to make sure we’re getting our combinations right, and it would be wrong to doubt that over a T20 tournament.
“It’s important that you stick with the guys you think are going to make difference, and leave two or three places open.”
That’s right, sportslovers, after all the suits’ serious silliness and all their marketing minions’ manufactured merriment and all the pretend passion, the truth about the MSL is that it is just another trivial T20 tantrum trying not to be as forgettable as the one that went before and not as random as the one that will follow.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. Especially if you’re stuck in a lift or a toilet. Or an airport.
“It’s difficult to experience the hurt that Australian cricket is going through if you’re not there; the public is angry at what happened.” – Faf du Plessis
TMG Digital
TELFORD VICE in London
IT’S no secret that Faf du Plessis understands Australians better than most South Africans.
Maybe that’s part of the reason why he has, as South Africa’s captain, reeled off four consecutive series wins against the Aussies — in Test and one-day series, home and away.
For good measure, he added victory in the one-off T20 between the teams at Carrara in Queensland on Saturday.
That marked the end of Du Plessis’ first visit to Australia since March, when Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were exposed as ball-tamperers during the Newlands Test.
With that Australian cricket was plunged into a pit of painful introspection from which it has yet to emerge.
Reviews into the culture of the game have formed a backdrop to a slew of forced and voluntary personnel changes, and softened the experience of playing in Australia for visiting teams.
“They were tame; you could sense why,” Du Plessis said about the reception the South Africans received from the hitherto über aggressive Australian players.
“It’s difficult to experience the hurt that Australian cricket is going through if you’re not there; the public is angry at what happened.”
Cricket Australia (CA) swiftly banned Smith, Warner and Bancroft for between nine months to a year — significantly more serious punishment than what they copped from the International Cricket Council, and that has been considered heavy-handed in South Africa and beyond.
“CA have been firm in the sanctions they handed down,” Du Plessis said. “A lot of people asked them to change them but they have remained firm because they see how much it has affected the general support. They were really hurt.”
What was it like playing against suddenly touchy-feely Aussies, and how long might that last?
“You understand why they are doing it,” Du Plessis said. “You understand why they want to play a different brand of cricket.
“There are a lot of eyes on them; the style they play and the way they carry themselves as cricketers but also as people. I understand where it’s coming from.
“They’ve got really good cricketers and they’ll find out over the next six months or so if it’s really something they believe in.”
Not that he was going soft on the opponents who have come down the hardest on South Africa over the years.
“I remember like it was yesterday about the pain and the hurt and the embarrassment and the scars [other South Africa teams] got in Australia; about always going there and always losing.
“It’s been something that motivated me. I love playing there, it brings the best out of me.
“Always, when there’s a fight, it brings the best out of my character. I’m trying to find that same recipe when I play against other people. Maybe I must go pick a fight.”
Or hope to meet Australia in, say, a World Cup final before they’re hit over the head and remember who and what they were and will be again.
Bulletproof Truth 