A glint of red leather and gilt foil flashed through the sunlight for a sliver of a magical moment. The season was upon us.
TELFORD VICE | Newlands
SOUTH African cricket’s new normal is suddenly real. Not quite new and far from normal, but real. The opening round of franchise fixtures is underway, and the anxiety about the game returning from its pandemic purgatory is eased, albeit slightly.
In first-class matches that started on Monday, the Cobras are at home to the Titans at the construction site formerly known as Newlands, the perennially soggy biscuit we call Kingsmead hosts the Dolphins and the Lions, and the Warriors go from one sleepy town to another — but leave the Eastern Cape’s ocean behind — to take on the Knights in Bloemfontein.
No perfect summer’s days anywhere are more perfect than Cape Town’s. With Table Mountain basking in the windless sunshine, the trees atop the ground’s only surviving grass bank providing pools of shade, desolate stands all around, and hard hatted builders beyond busy with a major redevelopment, Lizaad Williams glided lithely towards the crease from the Wynberg end cradling the jewel that would become the first delivery of the season.
Williams slipped past the magisterial figure of Marais Erasmus and a twitchy, primed Pieter Malan, before collecting and then unfurling himself. A glint of red leather and gilt foil flashed through the sunlight for a sliver of a magical moment.
At the Kelvin Grove end stood that splendid splinter of a cricketer, Janneman Malan; his back angled but straight as a stump, his head turned and level, his bat cocked. He had, it seemed, been there for as least as long as the mountain. The waiting was over. But maybe Malan needed a nanosecond more. The ball evaded all his elegance and thudded into his pads.
Then it came, the sound some of us had wondered whether we would ever hear again without the help of knob-twiddling wizards in a studio somewhere. It met our ears like the first breath of a new life. An appeal! It was neither half-hearted nor full-throated, but there was enough heart and throat in it to remind us that there is, still, human juice in the too often dry business of cricket. Mr Erasmus was unmoved. Everyone else was unsurprised.
The episode was an apt addition to this time of indecision and fuzzy logic. No knees were taken before the start of play, a fact that will be noted with anger in some quarters, disappointment in others, and admiration in still others. Consternation swelled when it was realised that the usual sources for online scoring on the games were no longer offering that service because CSA had changed data contractors.
The ground was all but empty because coronavirus regulations prohibit crowds, but also because there are so few spectators at first-class matches in South Africa that, for years now, the gates have been thrown open; no tickets required. Or have there been minimal spectators because CSA doesn’t deem its premier domestic competition worth paying money to watch? If they’re giving it away for free it can’t be much good, surely.
Something else has stayed the same: rain washed out the first session in Durban. But things couldn’t have been more different in Bloem, where Jacques Snyman was run out for a 78-ball 109 — the highest score before lunch on the opening day of a first-class match in the country since Lawrence Seeff reached 119 not out at the interval on his way to 156 at Claremont, a posh Cape Town club, in 1978. It wouldn’t have helped the Warriors’ focus that six of their players had to be withdrawn after testing positive for the virus or having contact with someone who has been diagnosed.
Ah yes, that. Issues of which players have gone where, which young guns could shoot the lights out, which beards are turning terminally grey, and which teams might be headed for the title are, for once, moot. None of that matters more than cricket surviving the collision of its twin existential threats — Covid-19 and CSA’s chronic self-destructiveness — and finding its way back onto the field.
The virus and its consequences arch over everything like a vast poisoning parabola. It will be with us long after the strange summer of 2020-21 is a memory. Like every other human pursuit, all the game can do about the pathogen is to take every practical precaution to stop it from spreading.
But how might cricket win a fight against its dirty, diseased self? People elected and appointed to serve the sport who violate that trust and put themselves first deserve nothing but contempt. And dismissal, and possibly prosecution, and a warning never to go anywhere near a committee room or a ground ever again.
Happily, the board has been rooted out. But the members council, which currently includes five of the former directors, lingers still. Some of them were elected after the damage was done, but the new dawn will be cruelly false if cricket is to take any of these flawed figures into its future.
The unfairness is that these people have tainted by association those in cricket’s less visible avenues who are committed to doing the right thing, and doing it well. The franchises and provinces are hives of hard work and resourcefulness that soldier on despite near desperate financial circumstances. Even in CSA’s offices it is not difficult to find, amid the cynics, the naysayers and the simply crooked, those who do a damn fine job and seem determined to keep doing it, no matter what.
It is they, rather than a smattering of reporters, who deserved to see a moment after lunch at Newlands on Monday. Junior Dala, his shaven head gleaming with sweat under the sun at its hottest, bustled towards the compact, organised Tony de Zorzi. The ball veered at the left-hander through the air then, after pitching, ragged away from him like a ping-pong ball that had caught the edge of the table.
De Zorzi was trapped in a twilight zone. He knew he shouldn’t play the stroke he was playing but couldn’t stop playing it. Heinrich Klaasen caught the ball, and all went up as one, perhaps more in recognition of an excellent delivery than belief that the edge had been found. Not out, said Abdoellah Steenkamp.
Nothing had happened. Yet everything had. Hark, the new normal.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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