“I think it was a gamble to get me on.” – Wiaan Mulder after taking 3/1.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
ONE of your opening bowlers is in the dressingroom, curled around a colicky stomach. Your wicketkeeper is up on blocks with cramp. Good thing mere moments are left in the second session. And yet, rather than trying to run down the clock, you are hustling to squeeze in another over.
The absentees return an hour later. Your ’keeper is moving about as well as C-3PO, all creaks and clacks and awkward angles. But, as he gingerly sinks to his haunches behind the stumps, he yells: “Fuck, it’s great to be back out here!” Your big fast bowler runs in for his first delivery since coming back, his eyes ringed with discomfort — which melts when the batter who has faced twice as many balls as anyone else in the innings at that point splays his back foot, angles his bat, and chops on.
That was the nub of the narrative in St Lucia on Saturday, starring — in order of their appearance above — Lungi Ngidi, Quinton de Kock, and, exiting stage left, Shai Hope. Whatever hole South Africa fell into, they found a way out of it. Whatever advantage West Indies earned, it was nullified.
The South Africans, having scored 203 runs for the loss of their first five wickets on Friday, saw their second five crash for 59 a day later. But the tone of the West Indians’ reply was set when they lost their captain, Kraigg Brathwaite, to the first delivery of the innings. Thereby hangs a sub-plot.
Before Brathwaite gloved Kagiso Rabada down the leg side and was caught behind, Wiaan Mulder had shouted: “Keg ball!” That meant, as a reward for predicting the dismissal, Mulder was duty bound to buy his teammates — all of them — a drink. “That’s unlucky for me, I suppose,” Mulder told an online press conference after stumps. “It’s an expensive ball, but it’s just to create a bit of ‘gees’.”
‘Gees’ is the Afrikaans word for spirit. West Indies could have used more of it. They shambled to 149 all out — exactly as many runs as they are behind — in two sessions on a day’s play that ended in sunshine after it looked like it would be curtailed by bad light and rain.
When the weather was closing in, it said plenty that, unlike the South Africans before tea, the West Indians seemed to be itching to get the hell out of there. Even the head groundskeeper, Kent Crafton, stood holding a corner of a cover on the boundary as the gloom loomed. Who could blame him: it’s difficult to see a way back into the match for the home side. Let’s not forget, too, that the visitors don’t need to win to seal the series.
“It was a pretty average day for us,” Hope offered in his television interview, adding superfluously: “Cricket is one of those games where, whoever plays the best on the day will come out on top.”
Please, West Indians, don’t take these observations as slights. Know that your great teams of the 1980s and ’90s were more responsible than anything else for keeping cricket relevant among a generation in far-flung countries and even hemispheres for whom the game would otherwise have been as uncool as cardigans and camomile tea. Without the example, set by the way those sides played and won, of what was possible in a wider society stuck in one gear, cricket would have been another reason for much of the rest of the world to despise their parents and everything they stood for. Instead the rampant success of people starkly different and from the other side of the world to the rest of Test cricket’s tired crowd gave the young what little else could: hope for the future. And not only for cricket. What ominous figures like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and the hideousness of apartheid, stole from their lives, West Indies cricket helped give back to them.
But that was a long time ago. It hurts to see the Windies play like they have done too often since those bright days, including in this series. And it doesn’t hurt West Indians only. The world needs, now as it did then; maybe more than ever, credible diversity. The game and everything around it suffers when those who claim it for one sect or culture or country or another are enabled in their dirty work. Because they don’t stop at claiming cricket. They want to tell us some people are better, more deserving, more human than others. So the fire in Babylon needs to be rekindled to a blaze, for all of our sakes.
That is not Mulder’s focus. He took 3/1 in four overs to hasten West Indies’ demise: they lost their last four wickets for six runs in 22 deliveries. “I’d been struggling with rhythm, so I was just trying to land the ball in the right area,” he said. “I think it was a gamble to get me on.”
Possibly. But, on a day already dizzy with bilious bowlers, cramping ’keepers and gratuitous groundskeeping, you would have to be daft not to take a punt on a kid who called — clairvoyantly, as it turned out — “keg ball!”
First published by Cricbuzz.
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