“I’m hopeful that once all of this passes and coronavirus dies out, everything will go back to the way it was. But I don’t know …” – Laura Wolvaardt
TELFORD VICE | Cape Town
A thuggish question can stalk an otherwise genial interview like a virus searching out an unwashed hand. Interviewer and interviewee alike might consider the enquiry jarring, abrasive, even rude. But, more often than not, both know it’s coming. Like Laura Wolvaardt did.
Considering the collision between the crisis the world has been plunged into by Covid-19 and the fact that Wolvaardt turned down a place at one of South Africa’s leading medical schools to pursue a cricket career, this time the question all but asked itself.
Doctors help people stay alive. Cricketers … what do they do for us, exactly? We need, desperately, all the doctors we can find. If every cricketer vanished suddenly, who besides those nearest to them would notice? Has Wolvaardt doubted her decision to play cricket for a living when she could have become someone more useful to society?
“Not yet, actually,” Wolvaardt told Cricbuzz in reply to an admittedly more gentle riff on that theme. “Because even if I were in med school right now I would be sitting at home as well [due to lockdown]. Everyone is in the same dilemma. But it was something I thought long and hard about for two years after high school. Stellenbosch [University, where she was accepted] did keep my spot for me, so that option was open. But they were only able to do that for two years, which is fair enough. I can’t expect them to keep it forever not knowing when I’ll return.
“Earlier this year I had to make a final decision. I’d been putting it off and hoping that the answer would kind of appear in a cricket game, or I would do something and just know which I would want to choose. But it was definitely the right decision for me at the moment. If I had chosen to go to med school I wouldn’t have been at the [T20] World Cup this year, which went really well for us as a team. In games where we play well, I’m like, ‘Ja, this was the right decision’. So it’s frustrating at the moment; having chosen to play cricket fulltime and now not being able to play cricket. But when I’m on the field I don’t doubt it at all.”
Besides, it’s not as if Wolvaardt wasted the substantial resources required to produce a doctor by going through those motions only to hang up her white coat and not practise medicine. “[If she had chosen to study] it would still only be first-year medicine with another 10 years to go before I became a specialised doctor. If I were to start I would want to be 100% committed to it. I don’t think it’s something you can do when you’re itching to get to cricket practice after class. You’ve got to be all in and put in the hours. When I’m all cricketed out and not wanting to go to practice anymore I’ll maybe consider doing medicine again. I’d have to re-apply and go through that process again. It is difficult to get in. I think I was lucky the first time, or grateful that I got that opportunity. It’s a risk turning down a spot, it always is. So we’ll see.”
The use, to reporters and readers, of someone smart enough to have cracked the nod with a prestigious medical school is that when they are asked even abrasive questions they answer them properly. At a time when truth is hard to find amid the dangerous nonsense spouted by too many governments, when companies are less interested in keeping their employees alive than in making money, and when dolts confuse surfing the internet with research, Wolvaardt’s matter-of-fact honesty takes us back to a time when everything made more sense. That is, a few weeks ago.
“From a player’s point of view I would like to get playing as soon as we can and get back to practice,” Wolvaardt said. “But we all have to be patient. I guess if we start too soon we risk another one of those surge things, or whatever they call them, and we’ll be back where we started. It’s the right decision to limit contact as much as possible, and then we’ll just have to wait it out and see, with the numbers and the stats, if it’s safe enough to go outside.”
South Africa has been under one of the world’s more severe lockdowns since the clock struck midnight to herald March 27. No outdoor exercise was permitted until May 1. Citizens wearing face masks and staying at least 1.5 metres apart are now allowed to run, walk or cycle — not swim in the ocean or in public pools — between 6am and 9am. Universities, schools, cinemas, bars, hairdressers, gyms and the seating areas of restaurants remain closed. For seven weeks no-one has been able to buy alcohol or tobacco. At least, not legally. The measures appear to be working: the country’s coronavirus infection and death rates are among the lowest. But there are worrying signs that the authorities are enjoying enforcing their emergency powers too much.
“In everything I do in life, whether it’s studies or my cricket, I’m quite specific and calculated about what I do. I won’t do something for the fun of it.”
Wolvaardt spent the first month of lockdown, which dampened her 21st birthday on April 26, using little beyond her own bodyweight and resistance bands to train in her 20-metre long driveway: “I’m glad that we can run in the mornings now. It’s been a long few weeks. I’m not sure when we’ll get back to playing cricket, which is the most frustrating part. But I’m doing alright.”
There is reason for all of us to wonder just how mad the world is going to go. Of the global population of 7,594-billion, only 144 of us — or 0.000001896233869% of those alive — might have an inkling. They’re the people who, as of Saturday, are at least 102 years old and were thus around to experience the 1918 influenza epidemic that infected 500-million and killed an estimated 100-million. “Even my grandma [who is in her late 70s and lives in Belgium] was saying she never thought she would see something like this in her lifetime,” Wolvaardt said. “It’s crazy that we are all just indoors and no-one is doing anything. I was at the shops the other day and we had to wait and go in one-by-one. It’s insane to think that’s what it’s come to, compared to before, when we used to stand in buses and trains at the airport with thousands of people.”
The illness itself and the death and destruction — of the global economy, chiefly — it has, is and will cause are the biggest concerns. But lurking just out of focus in our collective consciousness is another thuggish question: what type of society will be left once the fog of dread lifts? And will it go completely, or linger like a mugger in the dark? How will cricket fit into that future imperfect society? Already there is serious talk about legalising ball-tampering, even corrupting the umpires into the bargain by having them oversee the practice. If players are no longer allowed to rub spit and sweat onto the ball to manipulate its condition within the currently permissible limits, other ways will have to be found for cricket to conjure the pretence that it is unchanged by the pandemic.
“It’s more an aspect of men’s cricket because they play Test matches and we only play the white-ball formats,” Wolvaardt said. “In our games the ball never really gets old enough for reverse swing to come into play. We do shine it in 50-over games to try and keep it in as good a condition as we can because our fast bowlers always like the ball to have been worked on when they get it back at the death, but not excessively as the men do in Test matches.”
But there’s more to this than bodily fluids. Not to put too flippant a point on it, will umpires measure the gap between slip fielders to ensure social distancing is maintained? What might that mean for the Ashes, considering people have been told to stay at least 1.5 metres away from each other in Australia and two metres in England? Should cricket, or any mere sport, even be part of this conversation?
“It depends on how early we go back,” Wolvaardt said. “If we go back and there’s still some small percentage of the population that has the virus they’ll have to try limit things as much as they can. Maybe no handshakes and no crowds, that type of thing. But I’m hopeful that once all of this passes and coronavirus dies out, everything will go back to the way it was. But I don’t know …”
Wolvaardt’s voice trailed away to a disconcerting silence. For someone whose brain is wired for science, uncertainty is not an option. If it is not or cannot be known it does not make sense, and if it does not make sense it is to be regarded as a threat. “In everything I do in life, whether it’s studies or my cricket, I’m quite specific and calculated about what I do. I won’t do something for the fun of it. I usually like knowing why, and what the purpose of doing something is. Technique, for me, is quite an important aspect. I work hard to make sure everything’s right. If I tick the boxes I’ll always have a good foundation to work from. It’s the same with my studies. If I study all the material and do everything that is asked of me or is in the guidelines, then the chances of success are better. It’s the same when I’m trying to build a long innings — staying patient and knowing what my role is.”
At the T20 World Cup in Australia in February and March, that role was to sit padded up watching Mignon du Preez and Suné Luus seal victory over England. Wolvaardt also wasn’t required against Thailand, who buckled under the onslaught of Lizelle Lee’s century and Luus’ half-century. When Wolvaardt finally got out there, against Pakistan, she faced 19 balls before stroking her first four. She hit seven more, including three consecutively to finish the innings 53 not out off 36. No-one else hit more than four boundaries, not least because of an unusually SCG outfield. Fifteen of her 38 scoring shots, including all but one of her fours, scurried away in the V or through the covers. In the semi-final against Australia, she opened the face of her bat to square drive the first ball she faced to third (Woman? Person? Surely not man?). Australia won by five runs, but not before Wolvaardt made an unbeaten 41 off 27. Her runs came from 13 of those deliveries, nine of them driven.
What this will tell the cricketminded scientists among us is that Wolvaardt drives like a dream. What it tells those of us who watch cricket to appreciate the quatrain of contrast in the bowling of Vernon Philander and Dale Steyn, to wonder what kind of impressionist painter Brian Lara might make, to try and see through the fire in Virat Kohli’s eyes and into his head, is that science and art can co-exist in one player.
Calling Wolvaardt’s driving surgically precise is lazy. Likewise comparing her technique, favourably, to Jacques Kallis’. Certainty and uncertainty surely have never lived as amicably as in the fluid sweep of her bat through the line of the ball, which seems almost incidental to the completion of the stroke; a pebble on an airport runway unnoticed by the jets grandly sweeping past. It’s difficult, for a long moment after the insignificant dot has been dispatched, to look away from Wolvaardt, much less to imagine that humans are on this earth to do anything but hit a cricket ball like that. This is what perfection looks like, and all it costs to witness it is the taking of your breath for a sliver of a second.
We do not need cricketers. Just like we don’t need musicians, painters and writers. Scientists and doctors keep us alive. But artists, cricketers among them, remind us why we want to live.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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