There’s a touch of a young Clint Eastwood to George Linde’s jib, and some of Kepler Wessels’ cussedness in his saunter.
TELFORD VICE | Paarl
This time last week George Linde was minding his own business in the bio-bubble, the odd man out in South Africa’s T20I squad. He had last played a match in the format almost a year previously, when he conceded 18 runs in the only over he bowled and was run out for two. Why did South Africa want him around considering they had Tabraiz Shamsi and Keshav Maharaj? Even Jon-Jon Smuts seemed ahead of him in the queue, albeit Smuts is more a batting than a bowling allrounder.
Linde’s performance was far from the reason the Cape Town Blitz lost to the Nelson Mandela Bay Giants at Newlands on December 6 — his most recent T20 before the current series against England — but you wouldn’t have thought he was on course for a place in South Africa’s side.
He played six matches out of a possible 10 in last season’s Mzansi Super League, took five wickets, was 24th in terms of economy rate among bowlers who had sent down at least 10 overs — and 14 places off the bottom of that list — and couldn’t score more than 63 runs in six innings, two of them unfinished. If Linde had potential to play in the shortest format at the highest level, it wasn’t self-evident.
So expectations weren’t high when he was named in the XI for Friday’s first T20I at Newlands, and had dwindled further when he came to the crease with eight balls left in an innings that had shambled to 161/5. But there’s a touch of a young Clint Eastwood to Linde’s jib, and some of Kepler Wessels’ cussedness in his saunter, and he didn’t seem surprised when he lashed the third ball he faced through extra cover for four. The seventh, a full toss, disappeared over square leg for six. Maybe this “kid” — he turns 29 next Sunday — could play the game at this level after. But the proof would be in his strong suit.
Accordingly, expectations perked when he stood at the top of his run holding the new ball. And peaked when Jason Roy leapt at the second delivery like a man taking a spade to a snake. Quinton de Kock held the edge, and Linde had made his case. It needed the skill and quick thinking of Kagiso Rabada, diving low and forward at square leg, to claim a catch from Dawid Malan’s scything sweep. But catch it Rabada did, and there it was: after nine deliveries, Linde had figures of 2/2.
South Africa lost, convincingly, a match that clearly was their first in almost nine months. They batted too boldly, bowled too breezily, and made too many decisions better suited to beach cricket. But Linde’s performance was a reason for them to be if not cheerful then at least cheered that attitudes were in the right place.
Would the second game of the series in Paarl on Sunday deliver more such evidence? Or was that too much to expect considering South Africa’s state of unreadiness, at least some of it due to lockdown regulations?
Certainly, unexpectedness was in the air in the hours before the match, what with a posse of riders from the Draconian Motorcycle Club — as their leather jackets proclaimed — forming part of the motorway traffic heading to Paarl on a hot, bright morning. The club’s Facebook page implores members to support efforts to raise awareness about what the racist right wing calls, falsely, an epidemic of farm murders in South Africa. All of 21,022 people were murdered in South Africa from April 2018 to March 2019. Only 57 of all the country’s murder victims in 2019 were farmers. The Draconians wore helmets, so it wasn’t possible to tell if some of their members were the white former players who have raised the same red herring in their criticism of cricketers espousing or supporting Black Lives Matter ideals.
About that, at Newlands two banners were affixed to the stands reading: “We stand in solidarity against racism and gender based violence. CSA stands for equality.” Neither of the banners made it to Paarl. Maybe there was too much motorcycle traffic on the motorway.
This time Linde took guard in the 14th over with South Africa having crashed to 95/5. He turned the first ball he faced off his hip, easy as you like, for two. He survived an appeal for leg-before by Jofra Archer, coming round the wicket, hit his team’s first four in 10 overs when he slapped Tom Curran through cover, and launched Curran’s next ball over long-on for six. Then he sent Chris Jordan’s attempted yorker scurrying through third man for four. He was run out for a 20-ball 29 to end a stand of 44, the biggest of the innings, he shared with Rassie van der Dussen.
Soon there Linde was again, standing at the top of his run, new ball in hand. Roy made another mad lunge, this time at the first delivery of the innings, and damn near edged it again. But there were no more wickets for Linde. Not yet, anyway. Even so, 0/27 from four overs is more than decent against a bristling batting line-up on a flat if slow pitch.
South Africa lost again, though less convincingly, and with that went the series. It’s unfair on Quinton de Kock considering his inexperience as a captain, but the fact is he now owns the worst record of all 11 leaders the South Africans have had in this format: played 10, won three.
But Shamsi, whose spirited bowling that earned him a return of 3/19 was another spot of sunshine in the gloom, wasn’t looking too deeply into all that. “We haven’t played together for nine months,” he said after that match. “So it’s going to take us a little bit of time to gel again. There’s no need to panic.”
Not to panic, but to be concerned going into the now irrelevant third match at Newlands on Tuesday. And, if that doesn’t go well enough, ahead of the three ODIs.
But while you have odd men out like Kepler Eastwood in the side, players who know how to get a job done even when belief in their ability to do so wavers, you have something. It’s called hope. You also have something else: a way to meet those pesky expectations.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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