If you were England, would you want to stay in South Africa any longer than it takes to get on a plane out of there?
TELFORD VICE | Paarl
THERE was a lot wrong with the picture at Boland Park in Paarl on Sunday at the moment the ODI series between South Africa and England was to have started. Only the middle stumps had been pitched at either end and the entire table remained roped off. The ground was as empty as the grass banks and stands all around. But there was no need to adjust your set.
The strains of Toto’s indestructible anthem to cheesiness oozed around the ground: “I bless the rains down in Africa …” Except it wasn’t raining in this patch of Africa. It was 27 degrees Celsius going up to 32 and as bright as the bubbles in the glasses of sparkling wine served at many nearby wineries. On a day as clear as this, you really can see forever. Only you couldn’t see any cricket.
The press who had arrived at Paarl’s lovely tree-ringed ground at least an hour before the scheduled start — as per Covid-19 regulations — knew something was up: there wasn’t a team bus in sight, much less players.
More positive tests for Covid-19 on Friday, this time among the workers in the hotel where both squads and their support staff are staying, had prompted a delayed start while England — who didn’t see the medics on Friday because, unlike the South Africans the day before, they had no cases of the virus to report — awaited the outcome of the brain-scraping they underwent on Saturday. “Whilst the ECB awaits ratification of those test results the decision has been taken to delay the start of today’s ODI match,” CSA and the ECB said in the day’s first statement. It would not be the last.
Around toss time, Sky and SuperSport commentators announced that the match had been abandoned. Half-an-hour into what should have been the contest, the ICC tweeted that the game had been abandoned. It quickly updated that status to “suspended”. Where was CSA’s confirmation? The silence was suffocating.
“‘Fools’ said I, ‘You do not know. Silence like a cancer grows …’” It wasn’t Simon and Garfunkel’s lilting, folksy, acoustic 1964 original version of the Sound of Silence that filled some of the emptiness at the ground. It was Disturbed’s growling, guttural, heavy metal 2015 version. The anger in the song met the frustration of the moment like a fist to the jaw.
An hour and 20 minutes after the coin was not tossed, a joint statement by CSA and the ECB arrived to say what everyone knew by then. But wait. There was more: “ … two members of the England touring party have returned unconfirmed positive tests for Covid-19 …”, and, “A decision on the remaining matches in the series will be taken once the results of the tests are ratified independently by medical experts.”
Remember that the first ODI had been originally scheduled for Newlands on Friday, and postponed to Monday after another South African positive test on Thursday — the third announced since England arrived on November 17. Remember that the last ODI remains set for Newlands on Wednesday. For now. *
Remember that Sam Billings, Lewis Gregory, Jason Roy, Liam Livingstone and Tom Curran — all members of England’s squad — are supposed to play in the Big Bash League in Australia after the tour, although word is Curran will withdraw. If you were among them, with decent money on the line, would you want to stay in South Africa any longer than it takes to get on a plane out of there?
Now remember the chorus from the Indigo Girls’ deep-thinking Closer to Fine: “And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains. I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains. There’s more than one answer to these questions. Pointing me in a crooked line.”
Sorry, Girls. There is one answer only, and it’s ringing ever louder: the tour will surely be called off and damned as a catastrophe. In that case, what happens to the ICC World Cup Super League points that were on offer? And to the USD4.2-million CSA would have earned from the broadcasters, who got only the bang of three T20Is for their buck? And to South Africa’s plan to host Sri Lanka, Australia and Pakistan in the coming weeks and months? What happens to cricket in a country where the game was in bad shape long before England arrived?
“I never meant to cause you any sorrow. I never meant to cause you any pain.” That was Prince and the Revolution grinding their way, as louche as you like, through Purple Rain, the last song played at the ground on Sunday, and perhaps the most apt, before the DJ pulled the plug and the real sounds of silence eerily reined.
The void was occupied by a single thundering question: how had this gone so badly wrong? It would be easy to sling the blame CSA’s way; to say they should have ensured their bubble was secure. But CSA is not in the bio-security business. Thanks to years of mismanagement, it is barely in the cricket business. So when money beckons in the shape of a tour by England, and the players want to make the most of their time in the fairest Cape by spending some of it, say, on the golf course, you try to accommodate them. Do you thus bend the bubble rules? Do you have a choice?
A question for the Vineyard Hotel, one of Cape Town’s finest, where the squads are staying amid other squads — the police variety, to keep things as they should be — what the hell happened? “At this stage, it is not clear how the staff members became infected as neither have left the bio-secure area since 16 November and they do not work on the same team or in the same area,” Roy Davies, the general manager, was quoted as saying in a release by the hotel. “Our Covid response team is endeavouring to establish all the facts and contact tracing is underway. Our number one priority is the safety and wellbeing of our staff and guests and we have placed all our resources and efforts into investigating and resolving the situation. Both infected members of staff and the [South Africa] player are currently isolated in on-site apartments some distance from the hotel which have been kept sterilised and available for this purpose.”
In other words, Mr Davies knows, or says he knows, about as much as the rest of us. If you’re part of the South Africa or the England camp, that is terrifying.
To take your mind off all that, you might have gone back to your room and turned on the television to watch Australia play India at the SCG in the second T20. Cricket, actual cricket, is unspooling as it should, and you feel the tug of its connecting thread. You see spectators, actual spectators, lapping it up. Everything is right with this picture. You do not adjust your set. Instead you feel the thread slacken as you slump into a funk on your bed.
*Monday’s match was cancelled, leading to speculation that games could be played at Newlands on Tuesday and Wednesday.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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