Leading Edge: One more time with feeling

South African cricket needs a strong press now more than ever. Happily, we are stronger now than ever.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

THIS column first appeared seven years and a month ago. Twenty-seven men’s South Africa Test players, among them wonders of world cricket like Kagiso Rabada and Quinton de Kock, have been minted in that time.

Others — not least Faf du Plessis, Dean Elgar and Temba Bavuma — have carved places in the memory and indeed the heart.

Twenty-two have, in the past seven years and a month, gone quietly into that good night of Test retirement.

Along with the triumphant triumvirate of Graeme Smith, Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher, their number includes AB de Villiers, Morné Morkel, Dale Steyn and Hashim Amla.

That’s a bloody good squad of 12, a dazzling dozen, even if it is lopsided with three wicketkeepers and nary a spinner.

So much for the heroes.

This column has outlived the tenures of two Cricket South Africa (CSA) chief executives, but not the organisation’s current president. Originally elected more than six years ago, he has found a way to cling on despite having served both his allotted terms. As for the incumbent chief executive, may the cricketing gods watch over him. Closely.

The incumbent CSA board? Not worth feeding. For them to countenance the desperation that cricket in South Africa has sunk into and not be seen to do a damn thing about it makes them, at best, uncaring and, at worst, complicit. 

Consider yourselves named and shamed Chris Nenzani, Beresford Williams, Zola Thamae, Tebogo Siko, Donovan May, Jack Madiseng, Angelo Carolissen, Mohamed Iqbal Khan, Dawn Mokhobo, Shirley Zinn, Steve Cornelius and Marius Schoeman.

So much for the suits.

South African cricket needs a strong press now more than ever. Happily, we are stronger now than ever. Note: press. Not media. The electronic section of the industry is either compromised by the need to hang onto rights, or hamstrung by the subjects of their brief interviews having too much control over what is broadcast. In cricket, as in so much else, journalism is written. Not broadcast. 

It’s been a hell of a ride coming up, before the 10am diary meeting on Tuesday, with a decent enough pitch for a piece to be filed on Friday — near as can be to a prescribed length, which this week is 670 words, if you want to know — and published — still relevant, come what may — on Sunday.

By this columnist’s reckoning, that’s happened around 300 times.

But now it’s over. Almost. One more time. With feeling.

It has been a singular privilege and, mostly, a pleasure to sit down once a week and try to compose something about this richly writable game that might make you smile, care or think a little more. Sometimes it’s pissed you off properly? Thank you.

Be assured that your attention has never been taken for granted, and that the most important factor in this finely balanced equation is not the players, the suits, the editor, the publisher, the paper itself nor even the game. It certainly isn’t me. It’s you.

“Why should anyone bother reading this?” 

That’s me quoting myself, and it’s the question I ask before I begin every story I write. It isn’t always answered as well as I would like, but that’s part of the challenge: to try to keep doing it better.

“You must love cricket,” I’m often told. I don’t — do crime reporters love crime? But I do love writing about cricket.

On Thursday I had occasion to be in the same room where the King commission hearings were conducted in 2000, and for the first time since then. I looked at the same doorway we all stared at waiting for Hansie Cronjé to arrive, and shivered. The feeling was the same 19 years on. It was, still, like waiting for JFK to get shot.

Columnists come and columnists go, but cricket remains. It is the most cherished constant for those of a particular disposition.

Where is this columnist going? Not far. And he remains committed to finding out why the lying bastards are lying.

That’s 669 words. Close enough.

First published by the Sunday Times.

Leading Edge: However they walk the walk, SA talk the talk

Only in South Africa would a player be happy to be quoted saying, more or less, that the citizenry of a particular place in their country drinks too much and travels too little.   

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

HAVE I told you lately, South Africa, that I love you? Not for winning more than you lose. Truth is, I don’t care who wins or loses as long as they do it quickly — at worst before deadline, at best before restaurant kitchens close.

And nothing is as miserable as a reporter who is detained in the pressbox until after the pubs close. It happens: journalists work long hours after the last ball is bowled.

Besides, defeats usually make for more compelling stories than victories. Which do you remember more clearly, South Africa surging to the top of the test rankings by beating England at Lord’s in 2012, or them crashing out of the 2015 World Cup by losing to New Zealand at Eden Park? Yup, me too. 

Here’s why I count myself luckier than most in my profession to do much of my reporting on South Africa’s team rather than others.

“As a team and as a leadership group it’s about always being composed, no matter what. To look calm when the storm is there or when it’s not.”

That was Faf du Plessis the other day, talking about how the Australians are getting on post the ball-tampering scandal.

Here’s Dean Elgar on the faith he had in Centurion’s crowd to turn up for the first test against Pakistan, nevermind that it was played at a time of year when tumbleweeds outnumber trucks on the N1: “In Pretoria people might not have money to go away on holiday but they definitely have money for beer.”

So, what’s this all about? That in no other cricketing country would a player, much less as guarded a figure as a captain, throw talk of calm and storms into the easily twistable context of a press conference.

And that only in South Africa would a player be happy to be quoted saying, more or less, that the citizenry of a particular place in their country drinks too much and travels too little.   

It’s lines like those that keep people like me from going quietly crazy with the banality of having to take seriously irrelevancies like who should bat at No. 4. Here’s my take, for now and forever more: I bloodywell don’t give a damn. Shut up and wait for the second wicket to fall and see who walks out.

South Africa haven’t been much good at winning the World Cup on the field, but put them behind the microphones and they’re champions every time.

Most of them, that is. Du Plessis is a particular delight, and that despite the fact that almost all of his interaction with the press is conducted in his second language. So it’s perversely unfair that he is often asked to provide answers in Afrikaans to questions asked in English.

Also unfairly, but in a better sense for Du Plessis, the invariably articulate and intelligent way he expresses his insights no doubt stops reporters criticising him for decisions that would have them baying for the heads of less engaging captains. Not that Du Plessis gets too much wrong on the field.

Elgar is another hit, as much for his almost cartoon toughness as for his habit of lapsing into a dialect that’s neither English nor Afrikaans but is perhaps best described as a particular shade of Welkom, his hometown.   

But wait. There’s more. Temba Bavuma gobsmacked India’s press in Delhi in 2015 when he was asked about batting amid the madness Virat Kohli’s men create on the field: “They’re known for their theatre around the bat.”

Gotta love that. I don’t say it enough: thanks okes.