Gordon Greenidge – Bulletproof Truth

Zondo’s story has many chapters

“I’m always nervous, whether I’m playing a club game or my son is throwing balls at me.” – Khaya Zondo

Telford Vice / London

HYDE Park looked like an African savannah on Thursday. Not that lions or lionesses, or indeed cricketers or footballers of any kind, roamed the vast undulations of London’s usually green and pleasant heart. It was too hot for that. Aside from the baroque splendour of its trees, the parched park was a patchwork swathe of beige.

The UK’s most intense summer since 1976 will do that to even the most lush spaces. Like Lord’s, less than three kilometres to the north, where the Test series between England and South Africa starts on Wednesday. What has the heat done to pitches at cricket’s grandest ground?

Not the obvious and helped the spinners, it seems. They have claimed only 18 of the 186 wickets to fall there in first-class matches this season. That includes the Test against New Zealand in the first week of June, when Lancashire leg spinner Matt Parkinson had to come haring down the highway to make his debut as a concussion substitute for Jack Leach.

Parkinson had Tim Southee caught at slip in New Zealand’s second innings — the only wicket of the 35 that fell in the match that belonged to a slow bowler. No spin was bowled in either team’s first innings, and only 18.3 overs in the 170.2 overs bowled in the second innings. In the most recent first-class match at Lord’s, between Middlesex and Sussex three weeks ago, spin accounted for three of the 29 wickets and 54 of the 365.1 overs. If mad dogs and Englishmen really do go out in 2022’s midday sun, not many of them are spinners.

According to Southern Water, this region of England had less than two-thirds of its average rainfall for the first six months of 2022 and only four millimetres in July — when the long-term average is 50.3 millimetres. Temperatures have hovered around 30 degrees Celsius for weeks, and the rain that has been forecast for next week will come — if it comes — as a relief to everyone except cricket aficionados who have turned their attention to Lord’s.

Doubtless Khaya Zondo isn’t thinking about any of the above. For one thing, he’s not in London. For another, he can’t do anything about the weather. For still another, he is focused on staying in the selection frame for the first Test. He did that on Tuesday and Wednesday by batting for more than three hours for his 86 in a tour match against England Lions in Canterbury. It was the South Africans’ biggest innings in terms of runs and deliveries. Importantly, Zondo showed a level of patience that earned 130 dot balls from the 166 he faced. He was undone on the second morning without adding to his overnight score, when he left an inswinger from Sam Cook and had his off stump rattled.

“I’ve accepted my limitations,” Zondo said in an audio file released by CSA after the close on Tuesday. “I’ve also accepted where I am good and I’ve just kept working, trying to get better with each ball I face, just keep adding building blocks on top of each other.”

The first of those blocks was laid during practice — “I went into the nets and worked on my balance, worked on playing the ball late” — to help him adjust to the conditions: “It’s definitely different to South Africa. The ball nips a lot more, and you never really feel like you’re in; you’ve got to make sure you’re always awake. As soon as you think you’re comfortable, that’s when the ball does something you don’t expect it to do and that’s when it catches you off guard.”

After 213 first-class innings, he was not immune to anxiety: “I’m always nervous, whether I’m playing a club game or whether my son is throwing balls at me. So I’m always nervous when I pick up a bat. That’s good nerves.”

Zondo scored two half-centuries and a century in nine innings for Darwen in the 2015 editions of the Northern Premier League and the Lancashire Cricket Board Cup. He last played in England on South Africa A’s tour in May and June 2017, when he made 66 runs in four 50-over innings and a single in each trip to the crease in a four-day match. His effort this week is his best anywhere since he reached a career-high 203 not out in a domestic first-class match in October 2021. In eight subsequent innings in the format he has twice passed 50.

Zondo’s latest effort has complicated South Africa’s selection deliberations. He batted at No. 7 with Ryan Rickleton, Rassie van der Dussen and Aiden Markram above him. All could be competing for one place in the Test XI. Markram made 10 and Van der Dussen 75 in the first innings, and they were 20 and eight not out at stumps on Thursday. Rickleton suffered a first-baller on Tuesday.

The naked numbers say Zondo has done the most among them to crack the nod, but rarely are these matters so simple. Markram played himself back into confidence and form at the IPL, and just more than three weeks ago Van der Dussen, a reassuring presence in South Africa’s line-up, scored a yeoman 134 in extreme heat in the first ODI in Chester-le-Street. Rickleton reeled off two centuries, a 95 and three half-centuries in eight first-class innings for Northamptonshire in June and July.

You might have heard Zondo’s name mentioned for reasons other than his achievements on a cricket ground. In October 2015 he was, at then captain AB de Villiers’ insistence — and with the acquiescence of Hussein Manack, the selector on tour — left out for the deciding match of an ODI series at the Wankhede. CSA investigated and decided his omission was wrong, and Zondo’s testimony to the Social Justice and Nation Building project in August last year revealed how deeply affected he had been by his treatment.

“I switched off mentally for the rest of the day and I detached myself from the team because it was clear I was not wanted,” Zondo said. “Switching off helped me cope with everything that was happening. The hardest part was watching players who were selected ahead of me having the opportunity to shine for South Africa on a world stage, in India, and having a chance to play and potentially impress and get future IPL opportunities.”

Dean Elgar’s flight to India for the subsequent Test series was brought forward to enable him, rather than Zondo, to feature in the white-ball decider. It is not often remembered that South Africa piled up 438/4 in that match, with Quinton de Kock, Faf du Plessis and De Villiers all scoring centuries, and also largely unhighlighted that the visitors won by 214 runs. Neither is it recalled that Elgar took guard at No. 7 with four balls left in the innings, faced only two of them and finished five not out. Was Zondo, albeit then uncapped, honestly not trusted to do something similar, or better?

If you’ve heard Zondo’s name for still another reason, it might be because his father, Raymond Zondo, was appointed South Africa’s chief justice in March. In June 2017 Zondo senior was named as the presiding high court judge in an inquiry into allegations of state capture and corruption during Jacob Zuma’s tenure as president from May 2009 to February 2018. In a damning and shocking report that runs to more than 5,000 pages, Zondo found that “the [ruling party] ANC under Zuma permitted, supported and enabled corruption”.

Zondo junior and the rest of South Africa’s squad have found in England circumstances that will feel oddly familiar to them. They are no strangers to the water restrictions that are being implemented here, and the planned power outages that loom because of the surge in energy prices — prompted by Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine — are common on the sharp tip of Africa.

Then there are the dots connected by history. When the English refer to 1976 as their last properly hot summer, they’re not only talking about the weather. In the build-up to a Test series that year, Tony Greig said of his team’s imminent opponents: “You must remember that the West Indians, these guys, if they get on top are magnificent cricketers. But if they’re down, they grovel, and I intend to make them grovel.”

Greig’s words, spoken in the thick, rough accent of the Eastern Cape of his birth, where he had leaned on his privilege and the luck of having a Scottish father to make the leap to England, did not land well. A white South African who had failed to denounce apartheid or racism telling black people he wanted to make them grovel?

Michael Holding and Andy Roberts answered the question on behalf of millions worldwide by taking 28 wickets each in the series, and Viv Richards and Gordon Greenidge by scoring three centuries each. And they were only the brightest stars in West Indies’ 3-0 triumph.

Also in 1976, indeed during that series, South Africa’s winter was turned white hot by government’s insistence that Afrikaans — the language of the country’s oppressors — be used in black schools. The reaction was what became known as the Soweto Uprising, which killed between 176 and 700 mostly young people and lit the touchpaper for what became, in 1994, the defeat at the ballot box of apartheid.

Raymond Zondo was 16 when Soweto’s flames were lit, and almost 34 when Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first rightfully elected president. Khaya Zondo is 32 and still fighting for fairness. Will he get it on Wednesday? And, if he does, will it rain? In Africa, that would be a blessing. But not at Lord’s.

First published by Cricbuzz.

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

Robin Jackman: A life in much more than cricket

Decent, loved, complex. Jackman was, like all of us, someone of light and shade.

Telford Vice | Centurion

ROBIN Jackman smiled as easily as he made others smile. He knew how to tell ordinary stories in extraordinary ways and in a warm, welcoming voice that helped him earn another career in the game. He could bowl a bit, talk a bit, and sing a bit: “Jessie, paint a picture about how it’s going to be. By now I should know better, your dreams are never free.”

Few of the evenings on which South Africa’s cricket media gathered didn’t feature Jackman crooning soulfully through Joshua Kadison’s 1993 song. Those happy times are no more. Jackman died on Friday. He was 75.

He lived a life that seemed to have spilled from the pages of a novel. His father was a one-legged officer with the Second Gurkha Rifles, which is why he was born in the Indian hill station of Shimla. His uncle was Patrick Cargill, a noted actor, who one day invited his nephew, then 15, to lunch. Also there were Charlie Chaplin and Sophia Loren — who arrived in a Rolls Royce and elegantly swept into the kitchen, carrying her own pots and pans, to do the cooking.

“She was drop dead gorgeous, sitting in a chair, a bit like royalty … I wish I could claim that I dazzled her with my scintillating conversation and rapier wit but I don’t think I said anything to her other than ‘Good afternoon’,” Jackman wrote, with the help of cricket journalist Colin Bryden in “Jackers: A Life In Cricket”, of his encounter with perhaps the most famous woman in the world at the time.

Despite the title of that 2012 book, Jackman’s life involved so much more than cricket. Even his playing career collided with the real world. His record lists four tests and 15 ODIs for England, but the truth is he was as much South African as he was English. His widow, Yvonne Jackman, is a nurse originally from Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. His home was in the Newlands area of Cape Town. Along with Surrey, he played for Western Province — and managed and coached them — and what was then called Rhodesia. All that connection to pariah states like South Africa and Rhodesia was bound to raise red flags.

So what were England thinking when they picked Jackman for their tour to West Indies in 1981, considering by then his ties to South Africa stretched back 11 years? Guyana revoked his visa, England refused to back down, and consequently the second Test at the Bourda in Georgetown was cancelled. Barbados let Jackman in, and on debut at Kensington Oval he had Gordon Greenidge and Clive Lloyd caught at slip and Desmond Hayes taken behind.

No-one who knew Jackman was surprised by those polar opposites. He was made for drama, or comedy-drama. His uncle was the thespian in the family, but one of Jackman’s early ambitions was to follow him to the footlights. Instead he developed one of the most theatrical appeals of his era, which upset with Ian Botham. “When I first played against him I wanted to knock his head off because he really antagonised me; I thought you arrogant, strutting gnome,” Botham wrote in his autobiography.

Jackman was proud of being able to bowl fast despite, as he described it, being “five-foot fuck-all” and built like an old-fashioned rugby scrumhalf. In the Times, Alan Gibson dubbed him the “Shoreditch Sparrow”. He was a workhorse for Surrey, sending down 71,094 deliveries in the 611 matches he played for the county from June 1966 to September 1982. He took 1,206 first-class wickets at 22.36 for them, and 399 at 20.73 in list A games.

His eyes shone like medals when he was told, in 2010, that he had dismissed Barry Richards more times — 16 — than anyone else who dared bowl to him in first-class cricket. That was no doubt influenced by the fact that Jackman had more chances than others to get Richards out because both played in England and South Africa, but it tells the story of Jackman’s class nonetheless. As did his decision not to use that truth to talk himself up, but to paint a picture of Richards’ greatness: “When the fixtures came out at the beginning of the season, one thing we always used to look at was whether we were playing Hampshire over the Wimbledon fortnight. Because if we were, there was very little chance that Barry would be playing. He managed to find a groin injury when Wimbledon was on.”

CSA’s interim board captured something of what Jackman meant to cricket in a statement on Saturday: “His passing … leaves a void in the cricketing world but particularly in South African cricketing life. We mourn the loss of a fine man, a lover of life, a cricket aficionado and a commentator who became part of the fabric of South African cricket in so many ways.”

A little later came confirmation that South Africa would wear black armbands on the second day of the first Test against Sri Lanka at Centurion on Sunday. But that wasn’t soon enough for Jacques Kallis, who tweeted on Saturday: “Sad to see no black armbands worn by Proteas for Robin Jackman today. A man that gave so much to SA cricket at all levels and all walks of life. RIP Jackers.” That would be same Kallis who has said nothing for all the months that the fraught conversation about racial injustice in cricket has ripped through the game in his country, and who has shown that he is not above using sport to talk abut politics by calling for the return of the death penalty in South Africa.

Ben Dladla, the president of the KwaZulu-Natal Cricket Union, a candidate for the vacant CSA presidency, and one of the few figures on the members council who commanded respect, died in the early hours of Sunday morning. Nobody said a word about him until a CSA statement landed at the stroke of lunch on Sunday. There was no mention of black armbands, although the team has been asked to state their position.

Even in death, Jackman can’t avoid the real world. The fact that he was fathered by a member of a colonising army in a brutally colonised country is in itself worthy of honest examination. Jackman wasn’t responsible for that, of course. But it was his decision to associate himself so closely with apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, where a war between a minority white regime and a subjugated black majority raged even as cricket continued regardless.

And yet, it was impossible not to like Jackman. He neither suffered fools nor put himself on a pedestal. He afforded all he encountered a level of respect that, were it more widespread, would make today’s social media poisoned world exponentially more kind. It was as much a pleasure to talk to him as it was to listen to him. “Howzit Jackers,” was among the most common things you could hear in South Africa’s press boxes. As was: “Fine, thank you, mate. And how are you?”

Jackman’s life teaches us what we should know already: that no-one is entirely good nor entirely bad, and that most of us — if we’ve lived decently — will be closer to the former than the latter when we die. Jackman, who spent his evenings drinking and smoking but always looked good as new in the morning, who could crackle with swearwords and cackle with joy all in the same sentence, was decent. And complex. And loved. He will be missed, including by those who question aspects of his life and times.

An hour before the resumption at Centurion on Sunday morning, with the players warming up and the press filtering in for work, the strains of Joshua Kadison’s “Jessie” echoed around the ground, courtesy of the public address announcer. Few seemed to understand the significance, but those who did allowed their eyes to shine like medals.

Jackers, paint a picture about how it’s going to be. By now we should know better, our dreams are never free.

First published by Cricbuzz.

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

Baboo Ebrahim: Smiling through the sadness

Through lack of opportunity, not talent or skill, Ebrahim had just 48 chances to shine at first-class level.

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

HAD life, cricket and everything else been more just, this piece would have been much richer in detail and description of great feats. Instead, the cricket life of Ismail “Baboo” Ebrahim, who has died in Durban at 73, will be known as well as it should be only to those who played with and against him, or watched him play.

His passing is a tragedy to those who loved him. Another tragedy is that many more who would surely have come to love him, or at least have recognised him as the pre-eminent South Africa spinner of the age, were denied that joy by the laws of the day. Apartheid barred sport that was not organised racially, simultaneously elevating white sport — and everything else that was white — above all else and subjugating, brutally, the rest. That meant the lives of more than 90% of South Africans were viciously stunted.

As a South African of Asian descent, Ebrahim was among them. And so his potential went unrealised, as did that of so many others. But his legend is as large as it could be.

He resolved to become a left-arm spinner after seeing, from the “non-white” pen in the stands at Kingsmead, England’s Johnny Wardle cleanbowl Roy McLean, a dashing South African, through the gate in January 1957. Wardle was unusually creative for a spinner of the time — not to mention for a Yorkshireman — because he bowled wrist spin as well as the orthodox variety. As did Ebrahim, who became a wizard of flight as well as turn: still a rarity for a South African spinner.

In February 1970, When Ebrahim was 24, Bill Lawry’s Australians came to Durban to play a Test in what would be South Africa’s last series before the were banished for 22 years because of apartheid. Ebrahim went to the nets to watch them practice. And to ask if he could have a bowl. A brown man? Bowling to white foreigners? In South Africa in 1970? Who did he think he was? But the Australians shooed away the security vultures, and Ebrahim was given a crack. He bowled Ian Redpath, caught the eye of Ashley Mallett, who stayed in touch for years afterwards, and reportedly earned Ian Chappell’s opinion of him as the best spinner in the country.

Six years later he played for a South African Invitation XI against the composite International Wanderers on a Kingsmead pitch so typically green and nasty that Vince van der Bijl, Clive Rice and Eddie Barlow took all 10 wickets inside 40 overs, or before Ebrahim could be tossed the ball. He made up for that in the second innings, bowling 29.1 overs and taking 6/66. Mike Denness, Greg Chappell and Bob Taylor were among his victims.

By then white clubs were making efforts to sign up members of other races, and Ebrahim was among those who did so — to the chagrin of his more politically minded peers, who held to the line that there could be “no normal sport in an abnormal society” like South Africa’s. But his best days were behind him by the time he played his first match for the white Natal side: he turned 32 on the second day of that game, against Rhodesia in Bulawayo in November 1978.

White contemporaries like Alan Kourie, a slow left-armer of flight and guile but not much turn and four-and-a-half years Ebrahim’s junior, played 127 first-class matches. Ebrahim, through lack of opportunity, not talent or skill, had just 48 chances to shine at that level. The Transvaal team Kourie played for called the Wanderers home, and appeared on television wherever they went. Ebrahim and his black and brown comrades toiled away in relative obscurity on ill-appointed grounds, their exploits covered only by reporters from newspapers that had exclusively black and brown readerships.

And yet it could have been so different. Kourie is of Lebanese heritage. So, unlike Ebrahim, he was adjudged white enough to escape the stroke of an apartheid aparatchick’s pen that would have condemned him as too dark to play with those of paler skin.

Ebrahim sought solace from his reality, and took the chance to earn some decent money, by playing in the Lancashire Leagues. But sometimes reality came to him. In the summer of 1974-75 the great Rohan Kanhai was in South Africa to play four matches for the non-racial Transvaal team. He scored three centuries in five innings, one of them against Ebrahim’s Natal. Ebrahim didn’t dismiss the West Indian in the two innings in which he bowled to him, but he took 2/18 from 21 overs in one and 2/90 from 41 in the other. What might have been had they tussled in Test cricket?

We can never know, although we do know that Ebrahim dismissed Gordon Greenidge and Viv Richards — as well as Collis King and Carlisle Best — in the twilight zone of a Masters Cup semi-final at the beautiful Brabourne in Mumbai in March 1995, when he was four months past his 50th birthday.

Another victim of era of Ebrahim’s prime, newspaper editor Donald Woods, whose association with activist Steve Biko cost him some of his white privilege and forced him into exile, wrote in the 1993 edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack that Ebrahim would have been a star in “any first-class arena”. Biko paid a far higher price than Woods for being loudly, proudly, thoughtfully black: he was murdered by the state in 1977.

Such were the horrors of the time in which Ebrahim forged his career. But, to see him in his later years in the president’s suite at Kingsmead, where he became something of an éminence grise, you would never have guessed. A twinkle danced in his eye. His smile was as warm as Durban’s summer sun. He had retained his impish, fluid slightness. His hair, by then thoroughly grey, slumped lankly over his head, lending him the louche look of a rock star freshly tumbled out of bed. He had presence. You knew, without knowing, that this man had done great things.

First published by Cricbuzz.

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.