Guyana – Bulletproof Truth

Unseen, unheard, unknown: South Africa’s secret final

“I’ve always said that if South Africa reach a final they will win it.” – Herschelle Gibbs

Telford Vice / Cape Town

THE four people in a Cape Town barbershop didn’t betray any sign of knowing. Neither did a crew of around 20 roadworkers down the street contemplating a large hole where the pavement might have been. No-one behind the counter at a buzzing café, nor the clientele, further along the drag were any the wiser.

The staff at a gym didn’t know, perhaps because all of the seven televisions in the place were tuned to reruns of the previous night’s matches in the men’s European football championships.

Had you not known better, you would have thought South Africa’s men’s team hadn’t reached the final of a World Cup, the T20 version, for the first time not many hours earlier.

If any of those working out in the gym as Thursday morning turned towards afternoon knew, they didn’t let on. Most of them, anyway. Among the latter was Herschelle Gibbs, who held a series of frenetic conversations that must be what nuclear reactions made flesh would look like.

It was in the midst of these exchanges that Gibbs’ eyes caught those of someone he has known since his playing days. The two men stared silently at each other across the gym floor, and for some strange reason each held up an index finger. The expression on both of their faces was that of someone who had been kissed for the first time.

Gibbs admitted to Cricbuzz that he was “happy, excited and nervous all at the same time; it feels lovely”. He noted that, “I’ve always said that if South Africa reach a final they will win it.” Indeed, Gibbs made that assertion on radio as recently as Wednesday, when he also said he hoped Saturday’s final in Barbados would feature South Africa and India.

He was granted half that wish at 4.37am on Thursday, South Africa time, when Aiden Markram’s team completed a nine-wicket thrashing of Afghanistan in their semifinal in Trinidad. Had Gibbs watched the game? “Nah. When I checked the score Afghanistan were 23/5. There was no point, so I went back to sleep.”

England and India met in the other semi, in Guyana, later on Thursday. Were India still Gibbs’ favoured opponents? It was agreed that “once the Indians get going they’re difficult to stop”, but also that while England have quality spinners in Adil Rashid, Liam Livingstone and Moeen Ali, “Kensington Oval doesn’t turn”.

While he was talking, a woman old enough to be Gibbs’ mother — he is 50 — approached and interrupted the discussion. “Excuse me,” she said. Gibbs: “Yes madam?” She explained that she was struggling to adjust a nearby piece of weight training equipment. Could he help?

Without another word Gibbs accompanied her to the machine, repositioned a cable that had lost its way, set the weight to her desired level, watched her perform the exercise, and offered her tips on how to do so safely and optimally. Clearly clueless about who he was, she thanked him. He smiled and returned to his conversation companion.

Gibbs duly earned his reputation as a rock star cricketer who was never too far from trouble off the field. But, away from all that, he is steeped in basic human decency. His greatest gift isn’t that he played the game better than most people on the planet, and doubtless would have done in any sport of his choosing. Instead it is that he is the most unfamous famous person you could meet. Greet him once and the next time he sees you he treats you as a friend. When you do see him again and you ask how he is his answer is invariably a booming, “Tremendous!”

His good manners were on display on the night of March 16 2007, the day he hit every ball of Dutch leg spinner Daan van Bunge’s fourth over for six in a World Cup match in St Kitts. Gibbs stood dapperly at the counter of a beach bar, a veritable off-duty James Bond. He bought drinks for others and accepted drinks from others, all the while maintaining impeccable behaviour, until at least 2am. Four hours later he strode purposefully up a fairway on a nearby golf course, five-iron in hand.

Was David Miller’s constitution that strong? Just more than 10 hours after the semifinal ended he beamed out of a screen at an online press conference wearing team travelling gear and looking at least as dapper as Gibbs did all those years ago. It was 8.30am in Trinidad. How much sleep had he had?

“Three or four hours,” Miller said. “It’s early, but that’s pretty standard. We’ve had some weird timings. Fortunately, we steamrolled them and finished the game earlier than expected, which was a good result.”

Complaints over the hectic schedule teams have had to keep to make it to the six Caribbean grounds that hosted 36 of the 52 group and Super Eight games and will stage all three of the knockout matches have been rife.

“We haven’t really spoken about it as such,” Miller said. “There have been murmurs here and there, but if I told you exactly how our travel in the last couple of weeks has gone you would be shocked. So it’s been a monumental effort from the management and players to buy into where we are right now.

“It blows my mind that it felt like the tournament dragged on in the beginning, and then we played the Super Eights pretty much back-to-back on different islands. It doesn’t make sense. I think it could have been structured better. But it is what it is, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. We certainly are stronger for it.”

South Africa’s four group games were spread over a dozen days, and the first three were played in Nassau County. Their three Super Eights matches were crammed into five days, and they had to go from Antigua to St Lucia and back to Antigua to play them.

But Miller was correct — South Africa were stronger for the experience. All that time on Nassau’s nasty pitch prepared them well for a similar surface in the semifinal.

Did their sudden status as finalists mean a more relaxed programme leading into Saturday’s decider? The question wasn’t asked, nevermind answered. “Apologies, but we have to check out in seven minutes to catch the bus,” the media manager said as she called a halt to proceedings.

Cricket is a major sport in South Africa, but far from the obsession it is in south Asia. Football is to South Africa what cricket is to India, even though the national football teams don’t often get far on the world stage. The Springboks have kept rugby’s profile high by winning a record four men’s World Cups since claiming their first title in 1995.

Cricket hasn’t helped itself by winning only two of their 11 men’s knockout games at World Cups. But, win or lose and particularly should they win, the game’s place in the public consciousness will be elevated on Saturday. Maybe then people will know.

Cricbuzz

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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.

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From Maradona, maybe, to Jagger, definitely, to Mugabe, unfortunately

Some writers on sport can no longer take in a game without also taking notes. Others have forgotten the simple joy of being part of a crowd.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

IS that Maradona? There! Leaning out of that balcony and thrashing his arms at the players down on the field like a crazy crackerjack. Is it him? Could be. But it’s difficult to be sure here in the cheap seats behind the goal.

Which is where I was a few years ago, at La Bombonera watching Boca Juniors play Independiente. It was hard to know whether you were less safe inside the stadium or immediately outside it, in some of Buenos Aires’ meanest streets.

To be there was impressive enough. To survive the experience was a triumph. I celebrated the fact the next afternoon by going across town to watch a quarter-final in the Argentinian polo championship, where the only clear and present danger was in failing to recognise the designer draped celebrities in the stands. At least, they behaved like celebrities. I can confirm that Maradona was not in attendance.

To go, inside a few hours, from average beer and a burger of uncertain provenance to chilled champagne and classy canapés was only part of the story of the journey. Unlike at the football, at the polo there were no flags, no flares, and no chanting, bristling, duelling sections of the crowd.

At the old Yankee Stadium in New York — they’ve since built a new one next door — I watched Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera from high above the third base foul line. To know that Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe diMaggio played on the same field still gives me goosebumps.

The queue to get into Wimbledon; ah, I know it well. It takes so long that once you’re finally in you don’t care who is playing on the courts available to plebs like you. Any pair, or quartet, of racqueteers will do.

I’ve seen bullfighting in Seville — where exponentially more sunflower seeds were chewed by spectators and their husks spat onto the floor than bulls were brutally if artfully killed — ocean yacht racing in Auckland, and hurling played by a bunch of homesick Irish in a park in London.

And that’s all apart from my improper job of writing about, and sometimes talking about, sport.

The closest I’ve come to blurring the line is when I found myself aboard an ocean racing yacht outside Cape Town harbour, trying to work out which way was up while also hanging onto my already eaten lunch and taking enough mental notes to be able to put together a half-decent feature.

That and facing Ottis Gibson, then Border’s big fast bowler, in the nets at Buffalo Park to write what my editor called a “participation piece”. I’m not sure how many times my helpless swishing at deliveries Gibson bowled at significantly less than his full pace could be termed participating.

Watching sport and reporting it are starkly different. Some of us can no longer take in a game for the hell of it without also taking notes. Others, grown far too used to the free food, free drink, free wifi and free desk space in ever more comfortable pressboxes, have forgotten the simple joy of sitting in the stands and being part of a crowd.

For several years until a year or so ago, reporters covering Test cricket in England would have the services of a masseuse. Yes, in the pressbox. All jokes about happy endings have fallen foul of the sub-editors.

Civilians of a sport-loving inclination tend to ask us two questions: “Do you have any spare tickets?” and “Can I hide in your luggage?”. We do not have tickets: our access is strictly by accreditation. We never see a ticket. And, no, you can’t hide in my luggage: I need all the space and weight allowance I have for hats, running gear and spare notebooks and pencils.

And the presence of a masseuse isn’t the joke it might seem. At games at this year’s men’s World Cup, some of us would live blog the match, a job that stretches into many thousands of hurriedly thought and typed words on its own, write two match reports — one for print, the other for digital, both to be filed the instant the last ball was bowled — attend the press conferences and the mixed zones, write up quotes pieces from the press conferences and mixed zones, and whip up a fresh quotes piece for the morning’s online offering.

That done, we would sink back into a metaphoric leather chair with an even more metaphoric whisky to hand, to essay an entirely metaphoric piece to be published by the future of serious cricket writing itself.

By which I mean one of the slew of Indian websites for whom, essentially, you explode a mustard seed of an idea into a fully fledged faith of how that aspect of the game should be played. And adored, of course.

That all added up to days that started at around 9am with the trip to ground — the toss was at 10am — and ended just in time to sink a pint or three before the pubs closed at 11pm. We could have used a massage after all that, even if only to ensure the elbows of our drinking arms hadn’t seized in typing mode.

But there are perks. Once, while covering a Test at the Bourda in Georgetown, I saw Mick Jagger looming whitely out of the deep verandah of the stand opposite. I still have an unpaid phone bill in Barbados, circa 1992, and I was thrown out of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

So, was that Maradona at La Bombonera. Dunno. But I hope it was.