The velvet violence of Vernon Philander

“He’s taken the coaching of fast bowling to the next level of thought.” – Fanie de Villiers on Vernon Philander.

TELFORD VICE in Johannesburg

VERNON Philander is too easy to caricature. You know the type: off-duty night club bouncer. Hardness in the eyes. Doesn’t say much. Suggestion of a life lived hard. Somehow lacking couth. And black. Or, as we say in South Africa, coloured, which is how most of our compatriots of Philander’s race and culture self-identify. Something else we say in South Africa — or, more usually, think — when we see someone who has Philander’s skin colour and swagger is: gangster.

Ravensmead, the Cape Town suburb Philander is from, has its own “gangwatch” Facebook page that urges readers to “say no to crime” and “expose them”. But Philander is a long way from someone who has fallen in with the 26s or the 28s, gangs that started in prison and have developed a subculture involving complex hierarchies, justice systems, codes of conduct, their own languages, and tattoos that denote allegiance and rank. Even so, and especially if we’re in Cape Town, where coloured gangsterism is acknowledged by all as at once a major cause and a major effect of social strife, we assume people like Philander must have dodged a bullet not to have fallen victim to this social disease. We particularly assume this if we’re white. Let’s call lumping Philander into that bracket what it is: racist.

That’s not all about him that is misunderstood. In a cricket culture strewn with fast bowlers of the big, booming variety, Philander is neither big nor booming nor even particularly fast. What separates him from the rest is skill and subtlety, accuracy and an acute awareness of line and length, and just enough movement to cause trouble. That isn’t always appreciated in South Africa, not least because it isn’t often seen.

Fanie de Villiers was one of those big, booming fast bowlers, a man who looked like a galloping scarecrow as he attacked the crease, but who played with a heart at least as big as his boots. In retirement, De Villiers has positioned himself among the conservative voices in the ever ongoing transformation debate, and has sometimes been less than complimentary about Philander. So it was startling to ask him one question on Wednesday and receive almost four minutes and more than 500 words worth of undiluted adulation as an answer: “You’ve got to tick a few boxes, if you look at fast bowlers from a fast bowler’s point of view. There’s an energy-saving box. You need to have a wow factor. You need to be able to get wickets not just with lbws but with balls moving away and balls moving in, which is difficult for a lot of bowlers. And, on top of that, you need a bowler who can think about the game. You could probably put a fifth category in there — muscle endurance levels, or the show horse kind of fast bowler you get. That’s probably the only box that Vernon doesn’t tick too well.

“The wow factor in him is that he lands right next to the stumps, which allows him to get wickets if the ball moves just a centimetre. Most of us who land far away from the wicket — in other words putting the ball far away from off stump’s line [as it leaves the hand] — need to do so much more with the ball to get a wicket. That’s probably his biggest attribute. In the 30 years that I’ve been watching the game, Glenn McGrath and Shaun Pollock were the only other two guys who could do that. He hasn’t got a quick run-up because he closes up [his action] so much that he can’t really follow through.

“The second factor is that, if you deliver a ball that goes towards the slips, which is as good as an away-swinger, you’ve always got a chance to take a wicket. Those two categories are probably the most important of the lot, because that gives you the opportunity to get more wickets than anybody else. Landing close to the wicket is maybe 70% of his success, bowling a ball that moves away is another 15 to 20%, and you can throw in the lbws earned by balls moving back in.

“He’s never been a show horse athlete, let’s face it, like the Dale Steyns or the Glenn McGraths of the world. But he doesn’t need to be. He doesn’t need to have pace either. He gets it right with landing close to the stumps. If he bowled a foot outside off stump having landed a foot outside off stump, he wouldn’t have played for South Africa, I reckon. That’s how important the technical part of the game is. He’s proven — as have Pollock and McGrath — you don’t need big swing. If you can land close to the stumps you can take wickets in any part of the world.

“Dennis Lillee and those guys, they needed raw pace, they needed a hell of a long run-up, they needed an energy-burning capacity that’s terrible for fast bowling. How much energy does Vernon use when he bowls? He’s not even building up a sweat. He’s jogging in and delivering, and going back to jog in again. And he’s more effective than most in the world. He’s taken, I reckon, the coaching of fast — or faster — bowling to the next level of thought. Sometimes somebody ticks two of the boxes and they are world beaters. He’s one of those.”

Now the world is about to see him go. The fourth Test between South Africa and England on Friday will be Philander’s 64th and last. But he could bow out with a bang: the 39 wickets he has taken at 15.69 in his seven matches in Johannesburg make the Wanderers his happiest home hunting ground in terms of average.

Philander began his career under Graeme Smith, now South Africa’s acting director of cricket, who said on Wednesday: “His skill against left-handed batsmen was a huge thing. He was effective and he got us into games, allowing other people to be more aggressive and attack more, because we always know ‘Vern’ was going to be reliable and give us what we needed. I think the one thing that always gets missed about him is that he’s a fantastic competitor. He’s got the bit between his teeth and he gets into contests. And his ability to front up. We are all put under pressure in the international game. It’s how you regroup and front up again that matters. ‘Vern’ was fantastic from that perspective. An element of that needs to come back into our national side — how guys front up under pressure and perform when needed; when the moments are right. He was outstanding.”

That hasn’t always been how Smith has spoken of Philander. During South Africa’s series in England in July and August 2017, after Philander withdrew from the fourth Test at Old Trafford with a lower back strain, Smith said on the BBC’s Test Match Special: “He can’t seem to make it through series; his body is maybe not fit enough. It’s been an issue but it’s becoming serious. You’re trying to build a team and if your senior players can’t get through tours then you’ve got a problem. He took a blow [on the hand while batting in the first Test] at Lord’s and it took a crane to get him back onto the field. There’s been too many times where you’re fighting to get him onto the field.”

On Wednesday, those sentiments were missing from Smith’s approach. But he still had unfinished business with Philander, mostly in a good way: “I would have loved to see him progress more in the short formats. My argument with ‘Vern’ has always been has he always got to that level of talent that’s he’s had? Has he worked hard enough, at times, to get there? Certainly what he’s produced in the Test format for us, his record speaks for itself. He can be proud.

“Now the conversation is how do we keep him in the system, because his knowledge on bowling and his skill is something we cannot afford to lose. As CSA [Cricket South Africa] we lose too much intellectual property all the time. Even post my 11 years of captaincy no-one sat down and said, ‘What did you learn? What are the systems?’. It’s an area we’re not very good at. So we’ve got to try and keep all this knowledge of international cricket and quality players in the system to hopefully develop the next heroes.” 

Philander will end his career under Faf du Plessis, who only had good things to say on Thursday: “We would like to see Vernon leave the game in the way he deserves. I want to see him get the storybook ending that he deserves. He has been such a great bowler for this Test team. Hopefully he can sign off on a high. He deserves respect. He has been one of the most skilful bowlers in the team.

“It was great to know as a captain you can give the ball to someone with control. Test cricket is all about control. When the ball is moving around it feels like he can get a guy out at any stage. If the wicket is a bit slow I know I can get control out of him. I know that ‘Vern’ gives me that. He’s a banker.”

Understandably, Joe Root was less inclined to afford Philander what Quinton de Kock on Wednesday called “a good goodbye”. Asked what makes facing Philander difficult, Root said: “He’s very accurate. He gets the ball to move off the straight. He hits the seam and he asks good questions for long periods of time. He’s a proven performer everywhere he’s been and he’s got a very good record here. So from our point of view it would be nice to keep him quiet for this last Test match, and I’m sure he’ll have a very good time down at Somerset.”

That’s where Philander will be playing in a few months’ time, having agreed one of the least controversial Kolpak contracts yet signed. He will turn 35 in June and is clearly past his best at international level, having gone 16 innings without taking five wickets: in his first 16 innings he had six five-wicket-hauls. But he promises to be lethal at county level on English pitches, and Taunton should be happy to have a man so admired in his own country — albeit in qualified language — and beyond. And, please, don’t confuse him with a gangster.

First published by Cricbuzz.  

For SA, Ellroy is still here

Cricketminded South Africans are like James Ellroy, who has an unhealthy obsession with his mother – who was murdered when he was 10. We relive the horror of 1999 every four years, and will continue to fixate on Klusener, Donald and all that. It’s that simple and that messed up.

TELFORD VICE in London

JUNE 17, 1999 is melting into evening around a packed Edgbaston. David Shepherd peaks out from under his cap, mouth agape, like a man looking for a place to have a pint in a village not of his ken.

Thump. That’s Lance Klusener’s bat on the pitch. Thump. It’s less a sporting implement than something Bruce Wayne might have welded and rivetted into rude being deep in the dark of a Gotham City night on time off from Batman duty. Thump.

Nine down. One to win. Three balls to get it. A place in the World Cup final to refuse to think about, for the next minute or so, anyway.

Klusener has been what he has been for much of the tournament: South Africa’s cocaine, a rush of runs snorted on a page of the scorebook. Only nine of his 31 have not been reaped in fours and a six — which would have been the end of him had Paul Reiffel not palmed the ball over the boundary.

Here comes Damien Fleming, gliding over the wicket with … a yorker that hooks away from Klusener, who pickaxes an ugly pull and spends a splinter of that mighty bat on a bottom edge that sends the ball squiggling past Fleming, who looks back in panic …

Klusener is a pale pink ghost as he flies down the pitch, eyes hard black, blood frozen in his veins. Allan Donald doesn’t see him because, having come close to being run out the ball before, he’s held his ground and, damn the man, turned around.

The awful apparition of Klusener’s unheralded presence jolts Donald with fright, which makes him drop his puny bat. He stares at it flaccidly for the longest instant in the history of everything, and turns, batless, witless but not heartless — you can see it thumping through his Y-front shirt (whose idea were they? Homer Simpson’s?) — to meet his destiny at the far end of the pitch. He’s dead and, like an exhausted but still running antelope about to be hauled in by a marauding lion, he knows it. 

Mark Waugh, half running, half falling his way round the back of the non-striker’s end from mid-off, gathers the ball and flips it gracelessly but effectively to Fleming, who seems shocked to have to catch the thing as he stands midpitch, apparently dazed and confused by the traffic. A primordial yawp escape’s Adam Gilchrist’s throat: “FLEM!!!!!!!!!!!” Fleming gets a childlike underarm lob to Gilchrist, who accepts it on the bounce and does the needful. Tied. Australia are going to the final. South Africa are going home.

The free-from-anything-that-tastes-like-something custard yellow the Australians’ kit had faded to seconds earlier bounces back to its usual evil glow of nuclear butter as they celebrate coming back from Klusener’s blizzard of blows like antelope who have outrun the lion.

Donald knows nothing except that he has to shake hands with the other non-winners on the field. Klusener hasn’t stopped moving since trying to take the single that never was. His run slows to a walk in the depths of the outfield, and he seems aghast when the Aussies catch up with him to offer their hands. He shakes them. The surrender is complete.

It’s a cruel scene; a look into the souls of men resigned to failure only be reprieved by the failure of other men. Nobody has won. Nobody has lost. Nobody knows quite what the hell has just happened.

Unless, that is, you’re a South African and watching from across the equator. You stare at your television knowing that that can’t be it. That any second now Raman Subba Row, the match referee, will appear on the boundary and wave the players back onto the field. You know “Shep” will smile and cock his head sideways in wonder at it all as he makes his way, slowly but deliberately, towards the middle, and that his colleague, “Venkat”, will follow, looking lost in languid thought.

You know Fleming will bowl that ball again and that Klusener will face it again, and that he will crack it through the covers and all the way to the fence, and that that will be that. So you wait …

I’ve been waiting for almost 20 years now, living with my still searing memory of the moment — it’s agonisingly accurate; yes, I had the guts to check the footage — and wondering when it might be soothed. Or at least when it might have the poison drawn from it by subsequent success. 

Until that happens, cricketminded South Africans cannot move on. The past is the past, but the present is also the past. Might the future also be the past? For us, it’s been late on the afternoon or early in the evening of June 17, 1999 at Edgbaston for too long. And we don’t know how much longer we will be trapped in this purgatory. We know what it means to wait for Godot.

We’re cricket’s version of James Ellroy, the self-styled “Demon Dog of American Literature himself”, author of “LA Confidential”, “The Black Dahlia”, and “American Tabloid”, and who has an unhealthy obsession with his mother — who was murdered when he was 10. Ellroy has spent his next 62 years marooned in the madness of that moment, recreating it in his disturbingly violent but worryingly readable books and even seeking relationships with women who physically resemble his mother.

So it is with South Africans, who relive the horror of 1999 every four years and at frequent intervals inbetween, and will continue to fixate on Klusener, Donald and all that until their team win the World Cup. It’s that simple and that messed up.

And it wasn’t always thus. In 1992, when Kepler Wessels was only 412 and Jonty Rhodes was a boy and Peter Kirsten was reborn, South Africa were heroes undone in their semi-final by outrageous rain rules and Neil Fairbrother, who managed to turn the sexiness of batting left-handed look like he was brushing his teeth at the crease. Four years later on the subcontinent, where they had no business reaching the knockout rounds, a properly sexy left-hander, Brian Lara, yanked them back to reality with a shimmering century in a Karachi quarter-final. And then came 199 bloody 9. Nothing has mattered nearly as much since. Ellroy is here and is showing no signs of leaving anytime soon.

In 2003, there was a soggy mess when Mark Boucher bunted for none instead of belting for at least one what became the last ball of the game against Sri Lanka at Kingsmead because he thought South Africa were ahead of the Duckworth/Lewis target. The scores were, in fact, level. Another tie and another exit — this time in the first round. Shaun Pollock’s tenure as captain disappeared into a puddle in the aftermath.

Four years later, in a semi-final in St Lucia, South Africa were 27/5 inside 10 overs bowled by Nathan Bracken, Glenn McGrath and Shaun Tait. Headlights would have batted better, nevermind rabbits. Australia sailed into another final, and to a hattrick of titles.

New Zealand, invariably as clever as they are not overpowering, found a way into the South Africans’ heads in their Dhaka quarter-final in 2011, and what should have been a straightforward chase to 222 crashed and burned to 172 all out. How Graeme Smith walked into the press conference that followed in a more or less straight line, and how he didn’t throw his chair at a reporter who said South Africa had gone from “chokers to jokers”, was singularly impressive.

In 2015 South Africa finally won a World Cup knockout match, sweeping aside Sri Lanka in their quarter-final in Sydney with nary a blip of their heart-rate monitors and, in the process, snuffing out Kumar Sangakkara’s record century streak at four. Might that have been the year they could exorcise their Ellroy? It might, until the suits insisted on the inclusion in the XI for the semi-final against New Zealand in Auckland of Vernon Philander and his dodgy hamstring and ambivalent tournament form at the expense of Kyle Abbott — their best-performing seamer in the competition — on racial grounds. The diktat was especially cynical and stupid considering Farhaan Behardien, who would have the same effect on the colour quotient, would have fitted well enough into the mix. 

In his most accomplished game as a captain, AB de Villiers managed through canny bowling changes and field placings to limit the damage the brave but bruised Philander might have allowed to be caused. But there was little de Villiers could do about the mental meltdown the administrators’ disastrously timed interference had set in motion. That South Africa took the game as deep as they did is a monument to their fortitude: the contest had been decided long before Grant Elliott ripped the chilled velvet of the night sky with a straight six off Dale Steyn that settled the issue with a ball to spare. de Villiers either spat with rage or retched with sadness at the press conference. It was difficult to tell which through eyes that no longer believed what they saw.

So here we are, in 2019, with no AB, who has retired from the international stage but can easily be seen visiting his genius on a T20 tournament near you, half a ‘Hash’, whose beard is almost all that remains of the player he used to be, and a dwindling Dale, who at the time of writing was battling another shoulder injury. Things are bad enough for South Africans to have made something like peace with the probability that this will, again, not be their year; that after the final at Lord’s on July 14, 2019 it will still be June 17, 1999 for at least another four years.

This tournament will likely be even more difficult for the sacred in a South African society where the profane — rugby — has already won the World Cup twice and cricket is still thrashing about trying to get to the church with its head on the right way round. So you can’t blame some of us for wondering whether a first-round exit would be the least painful: get in, don’t get far enough to stoke hopes, get out, and get going on building the generation who will have to carry the burden onward, what with several senior players ready to call it a career.

Because that’s what it could take to heal this hurt, to make 1999 just another crazy year in history; a reason to remember, not a fear to forget. Aiden Markram was born in 1994 and Kagiso Rabada a year after him. With luck and good parenting — which they seem to have been fortunate enough to enjoy — what happened at Edgbaston will be more like a scratched knee in their consciousness, and for others of their vintage, than the hole in the heart it is for older South Africans, players and civilians alike.

That Markram captained South Africa to triumph at the 2014 under-19 World Cup in the United Arab Emirates, where Rabada was rampant in the same cause, can only fuel this narrative. It’s going to be up to today’s kids to grow up into the world beaters of tomorrow. Not only are they too young to have fully felt the shock of 1999, they also don’t know what it means to have been raised during the apartheid years — which has saddled those of us who were with a shadow of denial that dogs every facet of our lives.

We were told that what was called South Africa’s team in 1970 was the best in the game. Nevermind that they were drawn exclusively from the ranks of the tiny white minority and did not play against opponents who weren’t anything but white. The fakery was plain, and it gave rise to a crippling doubt — if the team weren’t as good as they were said to be, how good were they? And how could we know if the side who came back into the fold almost 22 years later were anywhere near as good? Or better? 

To be a South African who carries these questions within them in an exponentially smaller but not dissimilar way to those who never get over the long ago death of a parent, is to lug a special load through life. There was no white-ball cricket before the separation, and Test cricket has become its own shining thing that has separated itself from the relentless comparing that happens lower down the game’s food-for-thought chain. So South Africa’s experiences at the World Cup are the closest we can come to knowing answers that will forever be unknowable, and it’s driving us mad.

We can only hatch theories or, equally as damaging, pretend none of what went before ever happened. And try to believe that the history of South African cricket as an entity on the international scene began when Jimmy Cook and Andrew Hudson were hit hard by the reality of walking out to open the batting in front of 91 000 in a one-day international against India at Eden Gardens on November 10, 1991.

It didn’t, of course. It started and ended where and when it remains today: at Edgbaston on June 17, 1999. Ellroy is here.

First published, before the 2019 World Cup, by the Nightwatchman.

Cricket’s ugly old man is a knight, and good men do nothing

“I don’t care a toss about her, love.” – Geoffrey Boycott doesn’t get why people are aghast that he has been honoured despite his conviction for beating up a woman.

TELFORD VICE in London

RAIN, cricket and England. That’s just how things are here in summer. So there was nothing unholy about the trinity gathering over Lord’s last month on what was billed as the first day of the second men’s Ashes Test.

It’s at times like these that commentators earn their money. Without field placings to fuss about, strokes to salivate over, bouncers to babble on, and the drama of dropped catches, what’s going on out of the pressbox window — not a lot besides the groundstaff’s hard work — won’t hold an audience for long.

If the rain keeps coming, broadcasters who aren’t resourced well enough admit defeat and resort to alternative programming.

That doesn’t include Test Match Special (TMS), which has brought cricket to the BBC’s listeners since 1957. Regardless of the weather TMS is on the air and in a class of its own, at least in English.

Nowhere else is cricket presented anywhere near as wonderfully. Television has yet to beam footage as captivating as the spoken word pictures painted by the TMS team.

They’re a touch fuddy-duddy — there’s a poshness about too many of them that doesn’t sit well with those of us who aren’t — it took them far too long to involve women, and they are too accepting of the banality of those who were exponentially better at playing cricket than they are at talking about it.

But TMS is unarguably the best in the business and a blessing the cricketminded among us should count at every opportunity.

As rain soaked Lord’s on August 14, TMS went above and beyond even all that.

Cancer ended, cruelly early, the lives of Ruth Strauss and Jane McGrath. Emma Agnew is also battling the disease, and winning. Strauss and McGrath left behind them four children and two husbands: Andrew Strauss and Glenn McGrath. Agnew’s husband, Jonathan Agnew, is the BBC’s cricket correspondent and the fulcrum around which TMS turns.

Instead of filling the empty airtime with wittering about long ago exploits on faraway fields, or nurdling this way and that through a debate about who should bat at No. 5, or wondering what’s for lunch — all staples of cricket conversation on TMS and elsewhere — the three husbands spoke about their wives. And about cancer.

They talked of bravery and commitment, of love given and received, of the best times of their lives. And the worst.    

They told their stories with openness and honesty, and with an uncommon softness that only added to the strength of what they said.

It’s rare to hear men express themselves with such care and goodness, more so on a prominent mainstream platform and even more so by such unvarnished examples of the species.

They were beautiful, and it rubbed off: unusually, it was uplifting to be a man listening to other men talk about women.

But the bubble has burst.

Geoffrey Boycott is an unpleasant old man. He is possessed of an ego monstrously bigger than anything he ever did as a player, which took him — willingly and profitably — to apartheid South Africa. He is a caricature of someone the world should have left behind by now; an unreconstructed bigot. He has somehow made a second career spouting clichés as profundities. He adds nothing to TMS except a rich Yorkshire accent.

None of which is news. Neither is it a secret that, in 1998, he was found guilty of the vicious assault of his then partner, Margaret Moore, in France. Moore testified that Boycott pinned her to a hotel room floor using his legs and unleashed 20 or more punches into her face, body and limbs. The photographic and medical evidence concurred. Boycott said she had injured herself in a fall.

The judge believed that evidence, as well as Moore and her blackened eyes and swollen face, and convicted Boycott — who appealled. And lost. He was given a suspended sentence of three months and fined £5 000.

It was also unsurprising that, in one of the last failures of her calamitous tenure as the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Theresa May decided to give Boycott a knighthood in her resignation honours list, which was announced on Tuesday.

Adina Claire, the co-acting chief executive of Women’s Aid, said: “Celebrating a man who was convicted for assaulting his partner sends a dangerous message that domestic abuse is not taken seriously as a crime.

“With increasing awareness of domestic abuse, and a domestic abuse bill ready to be taken forward by government, it is extremely disappointing that a knighthood has been recommended for Geoffrey Boycott, who is a convicted perpetrator of domestic abuse.”

Neither did it raise eyebrows that Boycott’s tone turned menacing when he was asked, elsewhere on the BBC, by Today’s Martha Kearney, whether the honour had taken so long to come his way because of his crime.

“I don’t care a toss about her [Claire], love. It was 25 years ago. You can take your political nature and do whatever you want with it. You want to talk to me about my knighthood. It’s very nice of you to have me, but I couldn’t give a toss.

“This is just recognition of my cricket. Very nice, very honoured, thankful to Theresa May, and I thank all the people that supported me and cared for me throughout my cricketing career.”

He claimed, wrongly, that in France “you’re guilty until you’re proved innocent” and listed that as “one of the reasons I [didn’t] vote to remain in Europe”.

So far, so Boycott. The only unanswered question in all that is why the BBC continue to employ him.

And this: what would the good men of TMS — who had at Lord’s used their platform to raise matters vastly more important than cricket — do about Boycott’s unrepentant, outrageous, disgusting answer to fair questions about his criminal past?

The question loomed when Boycott took his spot behind the microphone on the first day of the fifth Test at the Oval on Thursday. Would it be asked, nevermind answered?

That duty fell to Agnew, who greeted Boycott with: “Clanking in in his suit of armour, sword dangling by his side, visor down — I’ve called you ‘Sir Geoffrey’ for so many years, it’s ridiculous — but, Sir Geoffrey Boycott. Congratulations from all of us. Good man.”

Rain, cricket, England. And extreme disappointment.

First published by Times SELECT.

Justin Langer is Australia’s new coach. Oh dear …

Once he glued his gloves to his bat handle to sort out grip problems, now he spends a month a year bearded and barefoot.

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Bangalore

SOUTH Africans know all about Justin Langer, some from having had the unpleasant experience of playing against him.

Langer, who has replaced Darren Lehmann as Australia’s coach in the ongoing fallout from the ball-tampering debacle, won 11 of his 105 Test caps against the South Africans — some of whom remember him for his incessant and unimaginatively ugly sledging more than his fiercely determined batting.

But all cricketminded South Africans will remember Langer more favourably for what he didn’t do at the Wanderers in April 2006: bat.

Reports from Australia say Langer’s teammates would avoid him if he they thought he was about to ask them to join him for additional training because he would keep going until they were close to exhaustion, but also in light of the relentless seriousness he brought to everything he did.

His obsessive approach led him to glue his gloves to his bat handle to sort out problems with his grip.

Apparently, Langer has calmed down since taking to heart the advice given him late in his playing career by one of the most laid back men ever to pick up a bat, New Zealand’s John Wright: “Young man, you need to chill out.”

But he has interpreted even that to within an inch of its sensibility: Langer now prefers to spend one full month of every year bearded and barefoot.

Good luck getting into the insufferably conservative member’s enclosure at most of Australia’s grounds like that, nevermind at Lord’s.

There was no lack of seriousness at the Wanderers a dozen years ago, when Langer’s involvement in his 100th Test appeared over after he ducked into the first ball of the innings — a Makhaya Ntini bouncer that felled and concussed him.

Days of headaches, vomiting and general frailty followed, but against the advice of doctors who told him he could die if he was hit again in the match and unbeknown to his captain, Ricky Ponting, Langer was padded up and good to go on the fifth morning when Australia’s eighth wicket fell with 17 runs needed for victory.

Happily for all concerned Nos. 8 and 10, Brett Lee and Michael Kasprowicz, took the Aussies home and the threat to Langer’s life averted.

In less than six years as coach of Western Australia, where he lives by mantras like “no assholes” and “character over cover drives”, Langer has engineered five white-ball titles and trips to two Sheffield Shield finals.

There are thus reasons to applaud as well as be appalled that he is again part of international cricket.

But will Langer help the Australians learn the lesson that their compatriots, who have driven the backlash against ball-tamperers and conspirators Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft, will not put up with a team who won’t stop at destroying their integrity by trying to cheat their way to victory?

“What I know is we should be very, very proud of our history of Australian cricket,” Langer told reporters at his unveiling on Thursday. “We’ve been not only good cricketers but generally good people.

“It’s not just about how we play our cricket, it’s also about being good citizens and good Australians.”

Oh dear.

So the same old misplaced nationalism, too easily conflated with patriotism — which has no place in sport — will continue.

“The public will be disappointed if we don’t play hard competitive cricket. That said, we can also modify our behaviours.

“I was lucky to play with great competitors. We talk about Allan Border, Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Adam Gilchrist and Steve Waugh. They played hard but they were also outstanding people.

“We modify our behaviours a bit so that it’s not angry or not over aggressive but we’re still aggressive in the mindset that we play with the bat and the ball.”

Change “a bit”? Border and McGrath — among the most miserable bastards as players — are “outstanding people”? 

Oh dear.

“We know all know what the acceptable behaviours are. There’s a difference between the competitiveness and aggression and we have to be careful with that.”

Oh dear.

“Everyone knows the difference between right and wrong, that’s simple. We get taught that from when you’re a little kid from your parents, through school.

“If our players literally stick to that, right or wrong, they’ll be OK, I think.”

The Australians have no clue what “the acceptable behaviours” are, neither on their most recent tour to South Africa nor — if you ask his opponents — when Langer played.

As for “everyone” knowing what’s right and wrong, you might have thought that included their former captain and vice-captain.

Oh dear.

Think again Cricket Australia.