“It would have been an interesting one – play stopped because of a hadeda.” – Dwaine Pretorius on Jackson, the bird that spent the day roaming Newlands’ outfield.
TELFORD VICE at Newlands
THE Buttler did it. Jos Buttler, that is. With a ball short of 21 overs left in the day’s play at Newlands on Friday, he pulled out of facing a delivery from Anrich Nortjé to ask for Jackson to be shooed out of his line of vision. Jackson the bird, that is.
Jackson is an ibis. Or, in South Africa, a hadeda. If you’re from anywhere in Africa south of the Sahara, you know its ilk: a jazzy ensemble of curves and angles the size of a large cat, blandly plumed except on its iridescent wings, and possessed of a cry that rips through the air like a razor.
Not that Jackson had much to say, choosing instead to spend the day patrolling the outfield with its scimitar of a beak rooting about for worms and insects. It was at deepish extra cover when Vernon Philander chugged towards Zak Crawley with the first delivery of the second men’s Test, and after tea it had migrated 180 degrees to fine leg with the odd peregrination hither or thither in the hope of better pickings.
Quinton de Kock, Kagiso Rabada, Philander and Nortjé all had a go at persuading Jackson to wing its way elsewhere. But it paid their attempts little heed and seemed impervious to the racket raised by the full house of spectators all around. There were 15,090 in the ground by the end of the first session, at least 7,500 of them England fans. That’s a smidgen less than half of the crowd. Each of them seemed to have brought multiple St George’s flags and displayed them. South African flags were exponentially fewer in evidence. Faf du Plessis may want to revisit his assertion on Thursday that Newlands was “the new home of cricket”. Unless he meant a shared home.
Jackson had wandered into different batters’ view of the bowler several times by the time Buttler held up a hand to halt Nortjé. Seventeen deliveries later Buttler hammered Keshav Maharaj down the ground for six, prompting Jackson to take flight for the first and only time before stumps. Briefly. Once the ball had whistled safely past, feathers were preened to their formerly unruffled splendour and the foraging resumed.
Jackson seems to know its cricket, never putting itself directly in the line of fire. A captain less assured than Du Plessis might have been able to use its instincts to help him set a field — don’t bother putting men wherever the bird goes; it knows what this batter is going to do with that bowler. “I’m just glad it didn’t get hit,” Dwaine Pretorius said after stumps. “It would have been an interesting one — play stopped because of a hadeda. I’m sure adidas would have been happy.” Hadeda … adidas … geddit?
Jackson wouldn’t have got the joke, but you had the feeling Newlands was familiar territory for it. And that it had seen the Ihtishaam Adams’ pitches often enough to trust him not to prepare something that would have the batters ducking or the fielders diving. Adams, a qualified civil and electrical engineer, has been part of the team who tend this patch of turf since October 2012. But he has been the head groundskeeper only since July. So this is his first Test in charge, and if you think a player is nervous on debut what with the world — they assume — watching the first ball they face or bowl, consider how much more true that must be for the creator of the central character in any cricket match. Unlike dismissed batters or bowlers hit out of the attack, there is nowhere for a poor pitch to hide. It is on parade for the duration of the match, and is often more talked about than the feats wrought on it.
So well done, Mr Adams. After too many Tests in South Africa in which the balance has been tilted outrageously far in favour of fast bowlers, this is a proper pitch worthy of the occasion. It doesn’t look much like a South African pitch — yellow and balding, like Homer Simpson’s head — but it has restored the faith of cricket watchers who had grown bored with seeing batters sweat and swat and swear under their breath at the unfairness of it all. Like Du Plessis said on Thursday, good pitches will help rebuild batters’ confidence.
The morning offered the seamers movement off the seam, especially at the Kelvin Grove End, but the pace of the pitch prompted Du Plessis to call on Maharaj as early as the 14th over. He bowled the last ball of the first session, which pitched on middle and ragged past Joe Denly’s off-stump as if it had indeed hit Jackson on the way.
Pretorius summed up South Africa’s attack as “two guys who can bowl 150 [kilometres an hour] and the others are really accurate”. What with Rabada and Nortjé bringing the heat, Pretorius was among the accurate. Their ranks were led by Philander, who swung the first delivery with the second new ball away just enough to find Dom Bess outside edge and have him caught behind. The master of medium pace has made things look easy his whole career. Still, there was nothing wrong with Pretorius’ point that “it was hard work getting wickets”. It was. But Pretorius put in that hard work in 11 overs that cost only 26 runs. He was rewarded with the wickets of Buttler and Sam Curran. And that with the ball 75 and then 79 overs old. Even then, there must have been signs of a smidgen of life. Why else would Curran have shouldered arms to a ball that he clearly thought was going to seam away — only to hear the horror clatter behind him after the delivery held its line and did no such thing.
Had Jackson seen that, instead of being beak down in search of slithering snacks, it might have let out a raucous ring of approval.
First published by Cricbuzz.
Bulletproof Truth 