The strange and troubling hollowness that has reduced South Africa to rubbish

“It’s becoming a little bit embarrassing.” – Faf du Plessis aims for understatement. 

Firstpost

TELFORD VICE at Lord’s

PLEASE forgive the personal nature of what will come next. But this is personal.

I’ve been reporting on South Africa since 1991 and never have I seen a performance that could fairly be labelled as rubbish.

Until Sunday at Lord’s, that is. South Africa, Imran Tahir excepted, were rubbish with the ball. They were even more rubbish with the bat. They weren’t rubbish in the field — but they were so rubbish at the crease that they couldn’t take advantage of a rubbish Pakistan fielding display in which six catches fell to earth untaken.

As Faf du Plessis said, “It’s becoming a little bit embarrassing.”

A little bit? All this, and understatement too. South Africa have never been better led, and yet there is a strange hollowness at the centre of this team. It goes beyond the injuries that have befallen them, beyond the common or garden things that can go wrong on a cricket ground, and beyond bad luck.

They do not deserve to go any further in this tournament, and now they won’t. And it hurts. Not that they have bombed out of another World Cup, but how.

The gods know that South Africa have been shot in this movie so many times before. From 1992 to 2011 they found all sorts of ways not to play to their potential. But never have they crashed and burned like this. Even in 2003, the only other time they have failed to punch their way out of the wet paper bag of the first round, they had three wins in six games. That those successes were achieved against Kenya, Bangladesh and Canada can’t be scoffed at unreservedly: those were the days when South Africa actually beat teams like Bangladesh. This year they have lost five of their seven matches, including against Bangladesh. And, unlike in 2003 when their fate was sealed by a Duckworth/Lewis tie against Sri Lanka in their last group match, this time they have been removed from the equation with matches still to be played. 

A new low was reached on Sunday when Quinton de Kock appeared to take issue verbally with Kagiso Rabada for not bowling a short ball even though a short leg had been deployed.

Then du Plessis levelled a dim view at de Kock for staying in his follow through instead of running for a stroke that wasn’t going to reach the boundary.

That’s another first for me. South Africa’s players will have a quiet grumble about each other to each other, but they don’t let it get ugly. For instance, during Hashim Amla’s short and unhappy captaincy tenure, the retired Graeme Smith stood on a landing at Kingsmead and caught Dean Elgar’s eye in the slip cordon to gesture, angrily, that the skipper needed to get a spinner on in a hurry. Elgar’s reply was a shrug of frustration.

Smith no doubt hoped he had conveyed his message unseen, but it’s hard to hide someone as big ripping his log of a right arm through the air at speed, his meaty hand curled into an off-spinner’s grip.  

What Amla or South Africa did was no longer Smith’s problem. But that didn’t mean he had stopped caring about how things were done, and so he felt fully entitled to have a what he thought was a stern but quiet word. It was good to see that.

Have this team stopped caring even enough to have their squabbles in private? That would be too harsh a criticism. Rather, there comes a point when you care too much to worry about who is or isn’t watching.

But this team have nonetheless lost an important part of their South Africaness. They have worn their failures at this tournament too casually, and tried to explain them away too glibly. There is value in your team telling themselves that they are not as strong as previous editions and present opposition company, but only if they have the mental skills and the maturity to navigate the pitfalls on that path — the emotional intelligence to understand that there is strength to be mined from seams of what might appear to be weaknesses. We no longer have stars like AB de Villiers? No matter: now we know we have to pull together better than ever. But that thinking has backfired on these South Africans. They now seem to be unsure of how strong they are and it’s damaging them.

Du Plessis spoke of confidence being “chipped away”. How much of that can be put down to his players reminding each other of their frailties, or at least not talking up their strengths, if that’s what they are doing? Whatever else sperm cells do, they don’t stop swimming. And good luck trying to tell them not to.

Rabada is a case in point. The heir apparent to Dale Steyn, Shaun Pollock, Makhaya Ntini and Allan Donald — and everybody else in the annals of those who have had the vim, vigour and violence to lead South Africa’s attack — the kid who bowled his team all the way to glory at the 2014 under-19 World Cup, has taken six wickets at 50.83 in this tournament. He has bowled like a husk of his former, fiery self; a feeble facsimile of the rasping innings wrecker he used to be. 

South Africa sound, mostly, like the team they used to be and to the unaccustomed eye they will appear to be true to their template. But, if you’ve been watching them for a while, you will know that’s not true.

Who are these masked men and what have they done with South Africa’s team? Who told them to stop swimming, and why?

Leading Edge: Field of dreams, haven of hope, den of disappointment

The Oval has loomed large in South Africa’s history. It will do so again on Thursday.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

MANY plastic pint glasses, the beer still in them unhappy and apologetic at not having found its way down a throat. Champagne flutes, also plastic but fewer and carrying less discarded drink.

Strawberries sagging in their punnets. Half-eaten canapés, stiff with rejection. Naked, vulnerable chicken bones.

Umbrellas, furled, forgotten and fed up. Newspapers, rumpled, their pages drowning, not waving, in the evening breeze. A book: “A Horse Walks into a Bar”, David Grossman’s black comedy about a caustic stand-up performer.

The Oval is among the many cricket grounds where the pressbox and the dressingrooms are opposite each other. Rare is it for players to come to us after a day’s play. More usually, reporters cross the ground or go around the boundary for the press conference.

All of the above, and much more, have been seen by this reporter and others at the Oval on our walk from the pressbox at the Vauxhall End to the indoor nets at the Pavilion End, where the pressers are.

That’s not to cast aspersions on the efficiency of the ground’s cleaners — we make that trip with the day’s drama still shimmering in the shadows — although why so many don’t clean up after themselves is, sadly, a relevant question.

Something less tangible but more important shares space, unfairly and unfortunately, with the detritus: the hopes and dreams of the teams who have come there that day and been sent away with nothing.

South Africa know what that feels like. It took them 91 years in which they played 11 tests at the Oval before they won a game there — a one-day international in May 1998, when England were undone by three runouts and Jacques Kallis somnambulated elegantly for 91 balls to score 62.

The Oval is also where, in June 2012, Hashim Amla fashioned the defining innings in South Africa’s history, a monument big and important enough to relegate Graeme Smith’s slickly branded 100th test, in which he become only the seventh player to mark the milestone with a century, to just another smudge of marketing. Make 311 not out, batting on three consecutive days during ramadan, for a team who have never had a triple centurion, and that will happen.

Of course, it isn’t all good. After a disastrous 2017 Champions League semi-final against India, in which South Africa batted like a team of tailenders and bowled like a rabble of part-timers, Gary Kirsten came to those indoor nets at the Pavilion End and called his team chokers in his parting shot as their coach.

And it’s at the Oval where South Africa will, on Thursday, step once more unto the breach. There is no better place in England for them to begin their World Cup campaign. Lord’s reeks with ritual pomposity, Headingley is proud of its harsh ugliness, Trent Bridge has been cannibalised by a space ship masquerading as a soullessly modern stand — see the giant teeth cut into its rear wall — Old Trafford isn’t bad, just ordinary, and Edgbaston … no way in hell.

There are also no better opponents for South Africa to begin their World Cup against than a home side so obviously uncomfortable with being the favourites. India, the next most fancied team, have the confidence to blow anyone away, never to be seen again. Australia and New Zealand would have brought too many bad memories with them.

England at the Oval. The words ring with promise and potential. Amid these redbrick walls and sweeping stands, with the gasholders looking on, silent and skeletal, the pavilion an ancient uncle’s favourite fishing hat, hopes are hoped and dreams dreamt.

And not all of them end up in a half-empty plastic cup.

Ponting sets example for World Cup captains

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in London

THAT Ricky Ponting is the most successful captain among the 48 men who have led teams at the World Cup is no surprise.

So much so that those with whom the buck stops at next year’s tournament could do worse than follow his example.

Ponting was a straight A skipper, winning 89.66% of his record 29 games in charge and he took Australia to the title in 2003 and 2007.

Only Clive Lloyd, who led West Indies to glory in 1975 and 1979, has also been there, done that more than once.

What made Ponting so good? That he had a hell of a team at his disposal for much of his tenure didn’t hurt.

Neither that he spent most of his career as the best, or nearly the best, batter in the game — especially in a team culture that demands you play at least as good a game as you talk.

Ponting was an unvarnished talker, saying things like, “We’ll be able to put a stronger team on the ground and we can hopefully get back to playing the way we have been over the past few weeks. If we do, we’ll be very hard to beat.”

No bullshit there, and it helps when you can weld that kind of clarity to a killer pull shot, among an array of dazzling strokes, and walk out for the toss holding a team sheet listing a dozen gun cricketers who could stroll into any other team.

South Africa’s best World Cup captain has been Hansie Cronjé, who presided over 11 victories in 15 matches; all played, you would hope, before he succumbed to matchfixing.

Graeme Smith also won 11, but of 17. His six losses are twice as many as Cronjé’s defeats.

Again, so far so predictable. But who would have thought Brendon McCullum is the second-most successful World Cup captain, and easily in Ponting’s league with a winning percentage of 88.89 — better than Lloyd, Kapil Dev, Allan Border, Imran Khan, Arjuna Ranatunga, Steve Waugh, MS Dhoni and Michael Clarke.

All have, of course, bested McCullum by winning the damn thing. All of his nine games at the helm where at the 2015 edition of the tournament, when he took New Zealand to the final, where they crashed to Clarke’s Australians — the only match he lost.

The thread connecting McCullum to Ponting is their peerless batting ability. Both were outrageously aggressive, admirably brave, superbly skilled hitters of a cricket ball.

It’s worth remembering that only batters have captained sides to World Cup glory. The closest there have been to exceptions are allrounders Dev and Khan. 

That’s true because not only because most skippers are batters, but also because it’s difficult to lead by example as a bowler. Everybody bats. Not everybody bowls.

For all its modernisation and rapid change in the T20 era, cricket remains a game that runs on human nature.

Like all of us, players give of their best when they are inspired, and that won’t change before the 2019 World Cup.

Good thing for South Africa, then, that they will be led by someone who understands captaincy and inspiration as well as, if not better than, anyone in sport.

The burden is yours, Faf du Plessis. South Africans know you’ll welcome it.

Warne to world: buy my book

“I’m not friends with Daryll Cullinan, but I am great friends with Graeme Smith and Jacques Kallis and Jonty [Rhodes] and ‘Bouch’ [Mark Boucher] … all the guys and Graeme Smith. We hang out all the time.” – Shane Warne, who’s friendship with Smith is so good he names it twice.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

SHANE Warne has a face for radio. At least, he does on the dust jacket of his new autobiography, where he appears crags, wrinkles, sunspots and all, and looking older than his 49 years.

That’s not uncommon for those who have made their money under a blazing sun. But the photograph is all the more striking because Warne has become, in his retirement, an awkwardly gleaming example of what plastic surgery, botox, hair implants, tooth-whitening and the like can do for middle-aged men.

He has steadfastly denied having stooped to such levels of vanity. We will take that from whence it comes: someone who was sent home in disgrace from the 2003 World Cup for failing a drug test after ingesting a banned substance that lurked in a slimming agent. Fatboy not so slim, né?

Anyway. There Warne and his face for radio were on Jacaranda FM this week on selling books. Actually, only his voice — he was on the phone. 

“It’s really important, if you’re going to do something like this, to be completely honest; upfront,” he said. “I’ve never pretended to be something I’m not.”

Hence the crags, wrinkles and sunspots …

“There’s lots in the book that has never been in a public place.”

And a good thing, too, considering we are dealing with someone who has appeared in the thoroughly public place of the front page of The News of the World wearing little more than a pair of Playboy-branded underpants in photographs taken behind closed doors that also feature a comically large inflatable plastic penis and two giddily giggling women, both less dressed than Warne.

The book is pocked with, Warne said, “pitfalls, failures and mistakes” along with tales of the triumphs that earned him 708 wickets in 145 Tests.

People still, he said, tell him: “We miss you in the game, we love you. You’re a character.”

Among these adorers are South Africans, one of whom apparently “calls himself the chairman of the Shane Warne fan club”.

In fact, it would not be stretching the point to say some of Warne’s best friends are Saffers. And one of them not.

“I’m not friends with Daryll Cullinan, but I am great friends with Graeme Smith and Jacques Kallis and Jonty [Rhodes] and ‘Bouch’ [Mark Boucher] … all the guys and Graeme Smith. We hang out all the time.”

There are couple of things off kilter with all that.

Most obviously, however well Warne gets on with Smith does he really need to say so twice in the same sentence?

And how sad can the man be to have to hark back, with a juvenile snigger, to his one-sided battles with Cullinan, who could probably match him for raw cricketing genius but always seemed to come second to him on the field?

Living in the past much, Shane? And dining out on alternative facts, no less.

Warne dismissed Cullinan 12 times in the 29 Tests and one-day internationals they played against each other, and more often than not he made the South African look like a poor facsimile of the fine batsman he was.

Thing is, you don’t hear Warne taunting Nasser Hussain despite that fact that he took the Englishman’s wicket more times in fewer matches compared to his record against Cullinan.

Perhaps that’s because Warne knows better than to undermine a heavyweight in his current profession of television punditry — a deeply weird world that Australian writer Geoff Lemon skewered brilliantly in The Guardian in February 2015: “It’s all about being the matiest mates who ever mated.”  

Just then, ‘Biff’ himself popped up in a recorded message.

“Hey SK,” Smith said with a smile in his voice. “Great to hear you back on South African radio, buddy.

“It’s great that you’ve managed to put out such a great spin on your life.”

Whether he was trying to be punny wasn’t apparent, but he left no room for doubt that he considered Warne “one of the great characters and people of our game”.

“I was around at times when you were working on the book,” Smith said, “and I could see the time and effort that you put in.

“I look forward to reading one myself. See you in Aus shortly.”

Watcha think of that then, Warnie baby? 

“Nah, that’s lovely, isn’t it,” Warne said, emotion no doubt welling up where his tear ducts once were.

You can’t fault Warne for knowing what will make people buy his book: “My father; what he had to do to put milk and bread on the table. My journey; the struggles at times, also the loneliness.

“I saw a sports psychologist for a while, which I’ve never really put out there. The first question he asked me in our sessions was, ‘Mr and Mrs Jones and Mr and Mrs Smith are on a flight, and Shane Warne. And the plane crashed. Write your own obituary’.

“That was quite confronting, and that was the tone of the sessions.

“I’ve had two relationships: I was married once and engaged once. I let my children down over the journey.

“But in a funny sort of a way that’s led to some great communication with my kids. They’re my No. 1 priority.”

Hold that thought, Shane. Heeeeeere’s AB …

“Shane Warne, in my opinion, is the best bowler to ever play cricket,” AB de Villiers said in another on-air tribute.

“Not only is he the greatest bowler, he’s most probably the greatest mind in cricket as well.

“As a 21, 22-year-old it was certainly very intimidating walking out to bat against him.

“Shane’s mind is so strong he’s even made people believe he’s a 10 or an 11 handicap.

“Please do not believe that: he’s a thief on the golf course.”

A scratching sound comes out of the speakers. Radio static? The curdling of wrinkles around the mouth? The sound of a skin finally got under? All of the above?

“I’m not a thief — I’m [playing] off nine, thank you.” 

Where David Gower and Leonardo da Vinci meet: on the left

For Garfield Sobers, the crease was the back seat of a car at a drive-in, steamy windows and all, under the nudging, winking cover of darkness.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

JIMI Hendrix, Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, David Bowie, Oprah Winfrey, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, Aristotle, Annie Lennox, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller, Bart Simpson, and Bills Clinton and Gates. Not forgetting Chewbacca the Wookie.

But, eish, also Napoleon, Jack the Ripper, Osama bin Laden, George HW Bush (W’s dad), FW de Klerk, the Boston Strangler. And Celine Dion.

They were and are left-handers all, people who would struggle to use a pair of scissors or a pen tethered to a bank counter. But they could do a stupendous paint job on your chapel’s ceiling, fight you a damn fine war, slit your throat in an eyeblink, be elected president, including apartheid’s last, make us laugh, make us cry, make us think, make us better human beings, and play a mean guitar. 

Left-handers have also been 19.37% of all 2 932 men who have batted in test cricket. More than half of them, 57.57%, have taken guard in the top four — 37.85% as openers, 32.04% as No. 3s and 30.99% as No. 4s.

Considering us of the sinister hand (aweh: this reporter, too) amount to only 10% of the global population, we are outrageously over-represented in cricket.

We’re also full of left field logic. Here’s David Gower: “The fact is both [left-handers and right-handers] have been horribly misnamed because the left-hander is really a right-hander and the right-hander is really a left-hander — if you work out which hand is doing most of the work.

“My right arm is my strongest. And therefore it’s the right hand, right eye and generally the right side which is doing all the work.

“So, if there is anything about this, then the left-handers, as such, should be called right-handers.”

Weirder still, not all cack-handers are created equal, and some of them are made not born. The Graemes, Pollock and Smith, bowled leg spin and off-spin: so, using their right arms. Smith plays golf left-handed but writes with his right.

Sourav Ganguly batted from the left side of the crease because he grew up using his left-handed brother’s gloves. Snehasish played 59 first-class matches but never cracked the nod for India. Sourav played 113 tests, scored 16 centuries and averaged 42.17. Thanks for the gloves, boet, he might say.

Hanif Mohammad told the youngest of his four, also right-handed brothers, Sadiq, to bat left-handed to help his chances of selection for Pakistan. Sadiq’s 41 tests and five centuries later, having opened in 41 of his 74 innings, that proved to be sound advice.    

There are less subtle difference between some left-handers and others. Dean Elgar comes to the crease mean as a junkyard dog awoken by a howling drunk in the miserable blackness of a wet winter’s night. For Garfield Sobers, the crease was the back seat of a car at a drive-in, steamy windows and all, under the nudging, winking cover of darkness.

Sobers always drew a crowd, and who wouldn’t want to watch his genius dazzle in the sun. But who wouldn’t want to see the consummately cussed Elgar dare the world, or that part of it tasked with bowling to him that day, to do its worst.

Cricket has changed since Sobers strode the world’s ovals like the god he was. Rather than wonder how he might have taken white-ball cricket by storm — he made nought in his only ODI — we should be relieved that the red-ball arena had him to itself. Elgar doesn’t play the game Sobers did, but a version that has had parts of its soul excised and sold off to the highest bidder like muti.

Hiding in plain sight, too, are the facts that Elgar opens the batting and Sobers spent most of his career in the middle order.

As anyone from Kepler Wessels to Geoffrey Boycott will attest, there is no harder job in cricket than what you must do after you dare to walk to the middle when the pitch, the ball and the bowlers are all rudely fresh and new.

So there should be another level of understanding for Alastair Cook and his technique; a haphazard collection of moving bits and pieces, none of them in the same direction. Also for Gower, whose elegance would have convinced you he could make flossing his teeth look as if he was playing the violin. Vivaldi, of course.

Gower also had a thing for teaming his whites with pink socks. In good company, or what: Da Vinci always painted his mountains blue.

What Bradman can teach SA about batting

“We definitely need a new generation of batsmen. Who are they going to be?” – Jimmy Cook

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

ON December 10, 1928 Donald Bradman wrote, signed and dated a note in an autograph book: “If it’s difficult I’ll do it now. If it’s impossible I’ll do it presently.”

His test debut, in Brisbane, had ended five days earlier. Four days later in Sydney he would be Australia’s 12th-man. Bradman’s demotion might have had less to do with him having scored 18 and one than the fact that England won by 675 runs.

It was the only time he was dropped in what, until Asia’s ascendency gained momentum, was the most storied career in the game.

Almost 90 years on Bradman’s 14 simple, powerful words hold valuable lessons for a South Africa team who find themselves between generations — particularly battingwise.

Young bowlers have they many. Or at least enough to balance the loss to retirement of Morné Morkel and the diminishing presence of Dale Steyn and Vernon Philander. 

Kagiso Rabada and Lungi Ngidi take the edge off the anxiety South Africans will feel at the dismantling of an attack that sent the national team soaring.

In Keshav Maharaj and Tabraiz Shamsi there are options for replacing Imran Tahir, who will turn 40 two months before South Africa play England at The Oval in the opening match of the 2019 World Cup.

Finding bowlers to step into boots that have been so ably filled for so long is undoubtedly difficult, but it’s happening and sensibly. South Africa are doing that now.

Matters look more like impossible on the other side of equation. AB de Villiers has packed his kit and gone, and only four years after Graeme Smith’s retirement followed that of Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher.

Hashim Amla is a shadow of the player he used to be, an impression only made more stark by the fact that he was so excellent for so long.

Aiden Markram, Temba Bavuma, Reeza Hendricks and Wiaan Mulder are fine young batsmen. But are they good enough to step into what looms as a yawning breach?

“AB was always going to be very difficult to replace, like Kallis,” former test opener Jimmy Cook said. “In fact I don’t think we’ve properly replaced Kallis yet.

“We definitely need a new generation of batsmen. Who are they going to be? Markram is a quality player … who after that? That’s what South African officials need to be looking at.”

Prompted, Mulder earned Cook’s vote: “He’s got a lovely temperament. He’s a nice, down to earth character. I think he can go far.”

But it was difficult not to feel and indeed share Cook’s concern at the scarcity of viable candidates to step in for, for instance, Amla. How might anyone take over from a player who has, for more than 10 years, been central to South Africa’s team and the way they play?

“The short answer is you don’t replace him,” Cook said. “Not only is it that he is a class batsman, it’s the experience that someone like that has gained over all the years which is hard to just pass on to a new player.

“Somebody like Markram is an outstanding young batsman but, without the experience, he’s found it difficult in Sri Lanka. Even Hashim, with all his experience, has struggled in Sri Lanka.

“Guys get used to making runs; they know how to go about it. Good young players do emerge but the experience of knowing what to do in different situations takes a while to come through.”

Among the many good things Quinton de Kock has done in his 158 games in all three South Africa shirts is not indulge in the kind of cliché-mongering that makes some players difficult to take seriously. 

“It’s just nice to finally bat a game with ‘Hash’,” De Kock said after he and Amla had shared an opening stand of 91 in the second one-day international in Dambulla on Wednesday.

“I can’t remember the last time we batted together [for a significant period]. It’s just nice to score some runs together.”

De Kock doesn’t say much. But, as with Bradman, there’s more than meets the eye to his words.

Amla has been first out in all four ODI innings he and De Kock have opened this year, not counting today’s third match of the series against Sri Lanka, and only once in the eight matches in the format he has played in 2018 has he passed 50 — although his 43 on Wednesday promised a return to form.

But, at 35 and creakier than ever, indeed looking older than his years when sharpness is required in the field, he is clearly staring into the sunset of a wonderful career.

There are probably a fair few kilometres left in Amla’s tank, but as he showed when he quit the test captaincy in January 2016 in the middle of South Africa’s series against England he makes his own decisions.    

But, with or without Amla, futureproofing their batting is something South Africa are going to able to do presently rather than now.

Why the IPL is falling out of love with South Africa’s players

“How Ben Cutting can be better than Vernon Philander I just don’t know.” – Francois Brink, player agent

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

THE nine South Africans in this year’s Indian Premier League (IPL) might have filled 83 player berths in the 13 games played until Monday.

Instead they’ve made only 13 appearances and just three of them have played in all of their team’s games.

That will please those South Africans who regard the IPL and the rest of its ilk as a dangerous aberration in a game that should be all about the international arena and the domestic scene.

But others might wonder if cricket’s most high-profile event is falling out of love with players from this country.

South Africa’s IPL class of 2018 comprises Faf du Plessis, Imran Tahir, Chris Morris, David Miller, Cameron Delport, JP Duminy, Heinrich Klaasen, Quinton de Kock and AB de Villiers.

The list would have included Dale Steyn — probably — and Kagiso Rabada, who have been sidelined by injury, and Lungi Ngidi, who has returned home after the death of his father.

That would have brought the size of the South African contingent to 12: three more than last year’s number before Duminy withdrew to work on his game.

So, perhaps the IPL wants South Africans as much as it ever did. Or not.

In 2016 the tournament had 16 players from these shores, the same number as in 2015, and in 2014 there were 15. From 2009 to 2012 there were at least 19 Saffers and as many as 23, twice, on franchises’ books.

Francois Brink, an agent at One World of Sport, has an idea why South Africans and the IPL are becoming estranged bedfellows.

“The Australasian influence at the IPL is massive if you look at the coaches and the backroom staff,” Brink said, and he has a point in that Stephen Fleming, Tom Moody, Daniel Vettori, Ricky Ponting and Brad Hodge are head coaches at five of the eight franchises.

The only South Africans at that level are Jacques Kallis and Paddy Upton, who are in charge at Kolkata Knight Riders and Rajasthan Royals.

That lack of balance could, however unconsciously, influence which players franchises acquire.    

Or, as Brink said: “How Ben Cutting can be better than Vernon Philander I just don’t know.”

Cutting, a 31-year-old Queenslander who has played four one-dayers and seven T20s for Australia, averages less than 25 in all three formats with the bat and more than 25 with the ball.

Philander, the owner of 204 Test wickets at 21.46, hasn’t been as successful in the other formats at international level. And it bears pointing out that he is represented by Brink’s agency.

But there is no argument that he is a better player, and should be a more valuable signing in the IPL, even if Asian conditions often don’t allow him to bring out his best, than Cutting.

The IPL has indeed favoured Australians over South Africans: 85 of them have been contracted over the years compared to 49 of ours.

Part of why that’s happening, Brink said, could be because foreigners just don’t get transformation: “I don’t think they understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.

“They’re saying, ‘Can we trust what’s coming through [South Africa’s] system?’.

“It’s a skewed perception but perception has a funny way of becoming reality.”

Another theory is that South Africans’ marketability as white-ball players diminished after the 1999 World Cup, which they looked on course to win before coming unstuck spectacularly in the tied semi-final against Australia at Edgbaston.

Compared to the five years before that match, South Africa won almost 10% fewer one-day internationals in the five years after the fateful day.  

Some South Africans have done exceptionally well out of the IPL and other T20 tournaments.

Albie Morkel is one of only seven cricketers to have played more than 300 matches in the format for South Africa and nine franchises in this country, England, India and West Indies.

Insiders estimate Morkel has made more than R50-million from all that T20ing, which they say is more than Graeme Smith earned over the course of his playing career.

Morkel is now 36 and hasn’t picked up a bat in anger since January. His younger version may be Delport, 28, who aside from the Dolphins has played T20s for Sydney Thunder, Trinidad and Tobago Red Steel, Leicestershire, Lahore Qualandars, Dhaka Dynamites, Boost Defenders, and Galaxy Gladiators Lantau.

You won’t struggle to work out where most of those teams play, but you might need to be told that the last two are part of the Shpageeza tournament in Afghanistan and the Hong Kong T20 Blitz. 

Delport’s a long way behind Morkel and his 307 caps. If he ever gets a game for Kallis’ KKR, it will be his 140th in the format.

But Delport has done what even Morkel hasn’t and played in a T10 tournament — four matches for Bengal Tigers in Sharjah in December.

Yes, T10. It’s a thing.

Play with passion, but also with respect

Does cricket have a disciplinary problem, or does discipline have a problem with cricket?

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

RESPECT. The world could do with a lot more of the stuff — between countries and cultures, between races, between men, women and children, and between cricketers.

Respect is what keeps confrontational sports like cricket civilised. Most of the time. When it is lost in a moment of madness, the void is quickly seen, heard and felt.

Like it has been too often on Australia’s tour of South Africa, what with five players falling foul of the code of conduct in just more than eight days of play.

As much as it’s up to captains, match officials and the International Cricket Council (ICC) to maintain the balance between passion and petulance, the first arbiter in this tussle should also be the last: the individual.

“You want to play the game hard but there’s got to be respect,” Graeme Smith said. “A lot’s been made of this ‘line’, but to make anything personal is not on. I’ve always really been against that.

“But it is competitive sport and there are high emotions and heated moments, so things are going to happen.

“You also don’t want to take that out of the game. It needs to be managed and it must be kept respectful, but people want to see that — the passion and the want to win and the big competition.

“When ‘KG’ [Kagiso Rabada] was bowling at [David] Warner [in the second innings at St George’s Park], that was magnificent to watch and you don’t want to lose that fire in a series. It’s a fine line to manage.

“I get really frustrated with the inconsistencies of the management of these things. I think too much is being managed from [ICC headquarters in] Dubai, and that needs to be reassessed.

“To appeal [a verdict] generally means you get a harsher punishment, so in some ways they’re not allowing people to state their case.

“I think there are people sitting in Dubai, who are long way from the context of the situation, and they maybe need to put more trust in the people they appoint to do their jobs.”

So does cricket have a disciplinary problem, or does discipline have a problem with cricket?

Or is the way the ICC wants to enforce its demerit system confusing players and inflaming tensions between teams?

“The players know all about the code of conduct because it has been in place for more than 10 years and this is the framework in which they ply their trade,” an ICC spokesperson said.

“Many countries have an almost identical list of offences in their code of conduct for domestic competitions. “Professional players generally operate under the framework of the same behavioural offences in whichever competition they play.

“When the demerit points system was introduced [in September 2016] there was no change to the offences in the code of conduct and no change to the sanctions for each individual offence, so what players can and can’t do on the field remains as it has done for a number of years.

“The demerit points just formalised the way in which a breach was recorded against a player, and laid out the consequences if the player repeatedly breached the code.”

That brings us to Rabada, who will put his case for an appeal against his two-test ban to ICC judicial commissioner Michael Heron tomorrow.

Rabada’s ban was enforced when he reached eight demerit points after being punished for the fifth time in 13 months.

If Rabada’s appeal is successful, he will play in the third test at Newlands on Thursday. If he isn’t, he won’t.

“There are plenty of players who play the game with passion who don’t come close to breaching the code,” the ICC spokesperson said.

“Passion is part of the game, indiscipline and disrespecting your opponents is not.

“Most of the code of conduct is about respect — respect for your own team, your opponents, the match officials and the game.

“That respect does not equate to a lack of passion.”

Phat Philander answers fitness critics

I took it personally but you try to get over it, get better, do some work behind the scenes and come back stronger.” – Vernon Philander

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

OTHER fast bowlers would feel disrespected had their captain told the wicketkeeper to stand up to the stumps.

Other fast bowlers are not Vernon Philander, who owns new career-best figures after spearheading South Africa’s victory in the first test against India at Newlands on Monday.

Philander took 6/42 to play the starring role in the Indians — who were chasing only 209 to win — being dismissed for 135, which sealed South Africa’s 72-run victory.

His key wicket was that of Virat Kohli, trapped in front for 28 by an inswinger after being gradually drawn across the crease by a steady diet of outswingers.

Another of Philander’s big scalps belonged to Ravichandran Ashwin, who stood firm with Bhuvneshwar Kumar in a stand of 49 for the eighth wicket, India’s biggest of the innings.

It was ended immediately after Quinton de Kock crouched snugly behind the stumps to Philander.

Standing up to a new-ball quick? Who’s idea was that?

“You have to be open to those suggestions, but I’ll have to give to give this one to ‘Faffie’ [Faf du Plessis],” Philander said.

“Ashwin, at the time, was batting quite far out of his crease, and the wicket was a touch on the slow side and the ball was a bit older.

“I also felt that by pushing him back we could get all three dismissals into play.”

Ashwin slashed wildly at Philander’s first delivery of that over, and De Kock held a fine catch.

Three balls later, in which Philander had Mohammed Shami and Jasprit Bumrah caught at second slip with consecutive deliveries, the match had been won.

Almost as importantly, Philander sent down more overs across India’s two innings than any other South Africa bowler for his match figures of 9/75.

His workload was noteworthy considering that in August, during the tour to England, his conditioning was questioned by former South Africa captain Graeme Smith after Philander pulled out of the fourth test at Old Trafford with a back strain.

He went into that series on his way back from an ankle injury, suffered a hand injury in the first test at Lord’s and came down with a stomach virus that limited his contribution in the third test at The Oval.

But there was no doubting his commitment to to cause at Newlands.

“Coming out after tea I was a bit on the stiff side and I had to bowl two or three overs to get myself going,” Philander said.

“Just before that last over I bowled ‘Faffie’ was going to bowl Morne [Morkel], and I said to him, ‘Listen, I’m actually warm now, so just give me one more’. Luckily it paid off.”

So, was Smith’s admonishment a wake-up call?

“I like people to be constructive and open and honest with us as players,” Philander said.

“You can take it personally and fade away or you can take it on board and make a play.

“I took it personally up front — we’re all human — but you try to get over it as quickly as possible, get better, do some work behind the scenes and come back stronger.”

Job done, and well done.

Pitch pressure builds on sharp tip of Africa

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

YOU had to feel sorry for Murali Vijay and Vernon Philander at Newlands on Wednesday.

Between them they have played exactly a century of tests, scored 4 896 runs — among them 11 centuries and 22 half-centuries — taken 174 wickets, featuring two 10-wicket-hauls and 11 five-wicket bags.

Philander has been ranked the top bowler in the game, Vijay as high as 11th among batsmen.

Despite all that hard-earned achievement, just about all a roomful of reporters wanted to talk to them about was something that won’t answer any questions until the first ball of the series is bowled at 10.30am on Friday.

It’s the pitch, stupid.

Much has been made of South Africa wanting to avenge the defeats they suffered on the shocking surfaces prepared on their tour to India in November 2011.

And the fact that India have brought five fast bowlers and an allrounder to South Africa to try and fight the anticipated fire with fire.

And the presumption that India’s batsmen are much improved against quality quicks, although that doesn’t stand up next to the truth that India haven’t played any of their last 31 tests — which takes us back to Sydney almost two years — on anything that could be called a fast bowler’s pitch.

Such was the press’ obsession with the state of the pitch that Wednesday’s only real news, that Ravindra Jadeja — the third-highest ranked bowler in cricket — had been hospitalised with a viral infection, went unmentioned.

Then again, Jadeja is a left-arm spinner. That, by the logic of much of the above, will make him a pitiful non-entity on the Pitch From Hell. Better for him that he stays in bed until the game ends.

To be fair to the obsessives the surface did glint greenly from under its cover, and the grass was longer than has been seen on a surface here for many a test.

Longer than in November 2011, when Philander made his debut against Australia and took 5/15 in their second innings of 47 — which followed South Africa’s first innings of 96?

“That wicket was probably a little bit different to this one,” Philander said. “That wicket looked a lot more flat.”

Vijay was reminded of Graeme Smith’s dictum that South Africa was the most difficult place in the world in which to open the batting, and that Smith said that, many times, despite not having to face his own attack in match situations.

“My learning is better than his,” Vijay shot back with a smile.

Philander has dismissed Vijay once in the three tests they have played against each other, at Kingsmead in December 2013 when Smith snaffled him at first slip.

Dale Steyn has got the Indian opener three times in six tests, but Steyn’s selection for Friday’s match is not assured.

But another, more likely, member of South Africa’s attack has dismissed Vijay more than anyone: six times in eight games.

Better yet, he’s done it in varying conditions — twice in Nagpur and once each in Kolkata, Dehli, Durban and Johannesburg.

His name is Morne Morkel, and he’s in the form of his life.

However much — or if — the Indians are better at dealing with fast bowling, they’re going to have their work cut out against the Vereeniging Viper.

Not to mention Kagiso Rabada, the Joburg Jet.

Welcome, Mr Vijay, to the sharp tip of Africa.