Darkness descends on Dutch tour, and on South Africa’s season

For the fourth time in less than a year, a tour to South Africa could become a Covid victim. For the Netherlands, a scarce chance to play against major opponents could be lost.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

PRIMROSE yellow polka dots on a cornflower blue background. If the socks David Miller batted in at Centurion on Friday was the sum total of what you knew about the first ODI between South Africa and the Netherlands, you would have assumed all was well. Nothing would have been further from the truth.

The game itself was a nondescript canvas for the Jackson Pollock picture of chaos being painted on and all around it. For the first time in their five ODIs against each other, the Dutch kept South Africa to a total below 300. The home side looked listless against innocuous bowling, and needed a stand of 119 by Zubayr Hamza and Kyle Verreynne, and a late blast of 48 off 22 balls by Andile Phehlukwayo, to reach 277/8.

Two overs into the visitors’ reply, umpires Marais Erasmus and Adrian Holdstock had the good sense to clear the ground. Minutes later the unnerving calm of a steadily leadening sky was cracked by a jagged, blinding light and the fury of a hard-hearted Highveld thunderstorm was unleashed on the scene. Perhaps Pollock, who died in 1956, flings his crazy painting from above these days. Two hours of deluge later, the match was abandoned.

While that was happening, at the other end of the country in Cape Town, thunder rocked Table Mountain itself. Soon the streets were silvery and soaked. It’s not supposed to rain in Cape Town in November, and thunder there at any time of the year is as rare as someone working in the city after 3pm on a Friday. These are interesting times, and far from normal.

By then, the tour itself was in jeopardy. To many of us, B.1.1.529 wouldn’t have meant much before Tuesday, when it was identified as the newest variant of Covid-19. It spreads faster and bristles with more mutations than earlier versions of the virus. It might also dodge the billions of doses of vaccine that have been administered worldwide. And another thing: B.1.1.529 is southern Africa’s early Christmas gift to the stricken planet. Cue the imposition of travel restrictions, and flight cancellations.

The Dutch are due to play again on Sunday and Wednesday and go home next Friday. But, given the circumstances — and the quarantine they are likely to have to serve, and pay for, once they return — you wouldn’t blame them for wanting to take a bus to the airport immediately. Not so fast.

“Both boards can confirm that following updated information, it is highly unlikely that the visiting team will be able to fly out of South Africa over the weekend,” a CSA release said. “The KNCB [Koninklijke Nederlandse Cricket Bond] is reviewing all of its options, while prioritising the physical and mental well-being of its players. A decision on the continuation of the series will follow in the next 24 to 48 hours, while all flight options are being considered.”

This is an awfulness all round. For the fourth time in less than a year, a cricket tour to South Africa could become a victim of coronavirus. For the Netherlands, a scarce chance to play against major opponents could be lost — only 39 of their 169 ODIs and T20Is have involved ICC full members who are not Afghanistan or Ireland. Last year they had a T20I against New Zealand in Rotterdam and three ODIs against Pakistan at Amstelveen cancelled because of the pandemic.

Friday’s result earned each team five points in the World Cup Super League standings; not enough to put either of them in line for direct qualification for the 2023 tournament. A clean sweep of wins for the hosts would have lifted them from ninth to third. Now the best they can hope for is to rise to fourth — if the last two games are played, if the weather doesn’t get in the way, and if they win them.

Would it be fair to expect either team to be able to give anything like their best? The Dutch will wonder when next they will be home. The South Africans will wonder when next they might leave home. Or if even that rug will be pulled from under them — and take with it the floor beneath their feet.

India are due to visit in December and January, and current indications are they will fulfil that commitment. But we can’t be sure, especially as we don’t know how bad this will get. CSA have sold the rights for US$105-million. Last month CSA reported losses of the equivalent of USD$13.5-million for the 2020/21 financial year. That deficit could be wiped out, almost eight times over, by India’s tour. But if India don’t come … you don’t need Jackson Pollock to paint that picture. The canvas will be eerily blank. 

Here’s another salient number to highlight: 476. That’s how many spectators were at Centurion on Friday. It wasn’t much of a crowd, but it was the first time South Africa have played in front of their home supporters since March 7, 2020. That’s 629 days without feeling the warmth of their own fans. And 629 days without those fans feeling the presence of their heroes. Who knows when they will feel it again, and what colour socks David Miller will wear to mark the occasion.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Why the Ashes isn’t about cricket

A team loosely drawn from a country that used to be great and mistakingly believes it still is shares a field with a team from a country that proclaims its assumed exceptionalism in rude and reckless ways.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

THE Ashes is about many things. Cricket is among them only in the sense that Jackson Pollock’s pictures are about paint. What Pollock’s paintings are about can be difficult to nail down. Ditto the Ashes.

Whether Frank O’Hara, the poet, knew much about the Ashes isn’t known. But he knew Pollock: “There has never been enough said about Pollock’s draughtsmanship, that amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the line — to change, to reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass of drawing alone.”

Substitute Pollock with Shane Warne, draughtsmanship with technique, and drawing with bowling, and tell me that doesn’t fit.    

You know a Pollock when you see one — a mad, mess of manic, magnificently male energy poured, dripped, puddled, swirled, flicked, smeared and, yes, sometimes even painted onto a canvas bigger than any wall in the average house. Not that the owner of the average house could afford anything as outrageously expensive as a Pollock.

The same doesn’t go for the Ashes. It looks, sounds and seems like any other game of first-class cricket. In a word, average.

We know it isn’t, just like we know the nonsense of the assertion that any eight-year-old armed with a leaky tin of paint and left alone for a few minutes could deliver something Pollock might have rendered as a masterpiece of modern art.

Stand in front of Pollock’s Number 8, for instance, for as long as it takes your breath to flood back from wherever it was taken by your first sight of this frozen fireworks display in oil, enamel and aluminium, and know that you are in the presence of greatness. It’s not about the paint.

Neither was it about cricket at Old Trafford on June 4, 1993, when Warne, looking like a podgy refugee from a surfers-only boyband sponsored by peroxide and sunblock manufacturers, delivered his first ball in an Ashes Test. Facing it was a gormless, girthfull greybeard of an uncle who thought he had seen it all.

Not that you could blame Mike Gatting for not having seen, particularly in that lean time for leg spin, too many deliveries that hooked wickedly away from their leg stump line through the air, pitched well outside leg, and came roaring back off the spitting, snarling seam to hit off-stump three-quarters of the way up.

When the clatter was complete, Gatting wore a look of blanched bewilderment not dissimilar to how he had countenanced, three years previously, the terrible but undeniable truth writ large on streets teeming with angry black South Africans mobilised by the presence of him and his rebels and their well-paid role in helping to normalise a distinctly abnormal society.

Arresting deliveries are, of course, bowled in matches that don’t involve England or Australia. And often when a game features England the margins framing the picture of the contest are coloured darkly by the knowledge that, were it not for slavery and colonialism, far fewer of us would call cricket our game.

The Ashes isn’t about that. Australians no longer try to prove that the colonised can beat the colonisers. They have done it so often it no longer exists as a point worth proving. The English no longer consider themselves colonisers, which is a copout considering the vast swathes of the world they stole in the name of monarch and money are still suffering the consequences.

Indeed, Australianess can be said to have colonised modern England to a significant degree — from the style of espresso and origin of much of the wine in the better cafés and restaurants to the hankering of English employers after Australian employees, to the easy, shorts-and-shirt Aussie casualness that pervades a society once constructed along rigidly buttoned-down lines of class and rules.

Elementally, the Ashes is about a team loosely drawn from a country that used to be great and mistakingly believes it still is, sharing a field with a team from a country that proclaims its assumed exceptionalism in rude and reckless ways.

Three of England’s squad for the first Test are from the colonies, another part of a community victimised daily by racism visited on them by those who consider themselves more English than thou.

Three of the Australians are freshly returned from bans earned in the cause of a still septic culture that puts winning above all else, including cheating and behaviour that would score a beating from a pub bouncer.

A fourth is from Klerksdorp. His surname, dear Aussies, is pronounced labooskaghknee — not labooshane — and you need to consult that bit of your throat that meets the back of your mouth to get out a properly guttural “kagh”.  

Five Ashes paintings will be made these next few weeks, each on a different canvas. They will be definitively similar and starkly different, and they will be slapped thick with history, hagiography, and heroes old and new.

Who, what, when, where, why and how we can’t yet say. But we can be sure that cricket will be only the paint in these pictures. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more.