Kepler Wessels – Bulletproof Truth

Meet Keegan Petersen: Mr Modernism, the Bauhaus batter

“South Africans don’t just go away and die. We fight for what we believe in and we are very strong.” – Keegan Petersen

Telford Vice | Cape Town

IF you watched Keegan Petersen in the Test series against India, you know he’s a serious man. The diligence, the stickability, the unflusterability, the beautiful care he showed marked him out as someone not to be dismissed as a lightweight.

Or someone to dismiss easily. He faced more than 100 balls in half of his six innings, and never fewer than 22. He batted for at least an hour four times, and for 59 minutes in the second innings at Centurion. He was at the crease for more than four hours in the first innings at Newlands, and for more than three hours in the second dig. In the first innings at the Wanderers, he was there for three minutes short of three hours.

He was much more than there. Petersen scored important runs in a team not expected to score many. He did so on pitches that did not favour batters, and against a gun attack. He scored his runs unvarnished: see the ball, hit the ball, run, rinse, repeat.

Precocious players pose for pictures after they have crafted a noteworthy stroke. Petersen is many things, but he is not precocious. He plays a shot, takes the runs he has earned, and plays another. Or defends and defends and defends until there is an opportunity to pierce the field. There is nothing ornamental about his batting. If Jacques Kallis was Baroque, Petersen is Mr Modernism: the Bauhaus batter. Everything needed is in its right place, for as long as it’s needed. Then it isn’t and we start again. It is a perfect economy of requirement, intent and movement.

“It keeps me switched on somehow,” Petersen told Cricbuzz about his approach to batting. “It’s nice … well, not nice. But it does make me feel that I have to be there all the time, in the present. And I have to work for everything. That makes you appreciate it more.”

That’s not to say watching Petersen bat is dull. Anything but, because there’s a lot going on. It takes flinty intelligence to play like he does and not only survive but prosper. If you think properly about what you’re doing it will look easy. Even, or especially, when it isn’t. You can see Petersen’s smarts not only in the choices he makes, but in the modesty of his movements. He’s got this. The emotion comes after he has finally been dismissed. He and Bjorn Borg would have plenty to talk about.

This comes from having played 97 first-class matches before you crack the nod. And from making your debut, in St Lucia in June, three months before your 28th birthday. It comes from having lived some life, and taking it to the middle with you. It’s the knowledge of what matters, and what doesn’t. And it never stops evolving.

“In the first Test [against India at Centurion, where he scored 15 and 17], I batted like I would in domestic cricket, and I thought success is just going to come. After that Test I knew I had to work harder than I usually do to get the runs. It made me realise that it’s a step up. You are playing against the best team in the world, and they don’t give you much. I had to work for every run.” If that makes it seem Petersen learnt a lot about his game during the series, prepare to be surprised: “Not really. I’m always going to be the same.”

He is no stranger to hard work. Since readmission in 1991, only seven players have waited longer — in terms of first-class caps — to earn a Test call-up for South Africa. Stephen Cook is at the top of the list with 165, and Stiaan van Zyl just behind Petersen with 96.

“I was fortunate to start playing first-class cricket when I was still a kid, fresh out of school [at 18, in February 2012],” Petersen said. “So there were guys ahead of me. I played with the previous generation and I played with a lot of guys. Like Jacques Kallis. His last game for the Cobras [in February 2014], I was part of that squad. It’s been a long time, but I wouldn’t have done it any differently. My journey has been my journey and it’s unique. Even though I had to learn my trade for longer, that’s fine. I’m happy it came when it came.”

The all-time record for a South African late bloomer is held by Peter Kirsten, who had played 270 first-class games by the time he walked onto Kensington Oval in Bridgetown on April 18, 1992 — less than a month before he turned 37 — as one of 10 debutants. The exception was the captain, Kepler Wessels, who had 24 Test caps for another team whose colours are green and gold. But that was, of course, different: apartheid, isolation, and all that. Speaking of that other green and gold side, Mike Hussey was 176 matches and 15,313 runs into his first-class career when he made his Test debut for Australia.

Some of Test cricket’s belated beginners stick it out at the top. Some who haven’t had to pay as many dues do not. Petersen is only five Tests in, and has scored three half-centuries, but it’s difficult to believe he will not be among those who last. He’s the business. It shows in the way he hasn’t been satisfied with being given his chance — he has taken it, too. That hasn’t been true for Zubayr Hamza, for instance, who has class to burn but was able to score only 181 runs in 10 Test innings in 2019 and 2020, and was dropped. Aiden Markram, too, plays like a dream. But he made just 76 in six innings against India and can consider himself fortunate to have been retained for next month’s series in New Zealand.

Of course Petersen isn’t immune to dips in performance. It took him only 10 innings to score a first-class century, but he needed another 19 trips to the crease to make his second. Four innings later, he scored an undefeated 225 — which he followed with centuries in his next two games. First, he had to find his way again; like he did after he came back from the West Indies series with 44 runs in three innings. How do struggling players return to form?

“You’ve just got to go back to what what you learned when you were a kid, go back to the basics and hope that it will come right. Eventually it does. But you are going to fail. There’s no two ways about it.” How did he know when he was on song? “I don’t know. The scoreboard will tell me.”

There was no flippancy in that answer, just a sobering seriousness that was apparent in a different way when he joined the Zoom call for this interview: he did so three minutes earlier than the appointed time. Up popped an image far removed from the cauldron of Test cricket. Casually clad, he sat on a couch. Family photographs were on the wall behind him. Happily, the bio-bubble had burst and something like real life had flooded into the void. “It’s what we long for, just a bit of normality.” It’s never that simple for people in the news. We spoke three days after the end of the Test series. How many interviews had he given? “Since then? I’ve lost count.”

So he would be forgiven fuzziness on how he came to be stationed at leg slip after one delivery of the third day’s play at Newlands. Not a chance: “Dean [Elgar] is going to hate me for saying this, but it was my idea. I told him the ball before that. I’m like, maybe we should just have a leg slip. He thought about it and said, ‘Okay go.’ And then the very next ball it happened.”

Marco Jansen pitched the delivery on leg stump. Cheteshwar Pujara tried to deflect it downward, but the bounce undid him. Still, it needed a lightning dive and a stabbing right hand for the airborne, horizontal Petersen to take the catch. That’s what experience does: it reminds you, sometimes subliminally, about what has worked in the past.

Pujara and Virat Kohli had come together the previous evening after India had slipped to 24/2 in their second innings. They had added 33, and built the lead to 70, when Petersen, sensing the import of the moment, pounced. “The game was in the balance at that time because we knew that they were the big wickets. We had to make a play somehow, and I just felt at the time, with Marco bowling … he’s uncomfortable to face for anyone. He’s tall, lanky, and he unsettles a lot of guys. So I just had a feeling that I had to be there at the time.”

Trusting that feeling is another matter, particularly in a match against the No. 1 ranked team with the series on the line. And it can’t be easy finding the confidence to speak up when you’re a junior member of the side. It good to know, then, that the seniors are listening. “We try and help out Dean wherever, because he can’t captain every point of the game. He’s a really open guy and he won’t just shrug you off. He takes all of our suggestions on board. So when someone has a gut feel, they speak out about it.”

Could that be happening at least partly because a team shorn of all of their established batting stars have internalised that the buck stops with whoever is at the crease? The last of the big names, Quinton de Kock, retired from Tests after Centurion. It’s as if those he left behind are playing for each other more than they did when they could rely on De Kock, Faf du Plessis, Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers, Graeme Smith or Kallis to do more than their share of the heavy lifting. South Africa proved to themselves that they are more than the sum of their comparatively modest parts by rallying to win at the Wanderers and at Newlands. “The odds were against us, so that makes the victory taste more sweet. When ‘Quinny’ retired nobody expected it. We will miss him, but cricket goes on.”

It helps, no doubt, that what might be termed a likebloodymindedness prevails among the frontline batters. So it isn’t difficult to connect the dots between Elgar, Petersen, Rassie van der Dussen and Temba Bavuma. They share a brand of defiance that puts lumps in even the most jaded throats, and that doesn’t have to spark centuries to get the job done. This is as close to socialism as cricket gets, as epitomised by Van der Dussen grinding out an unbeaten 41 off 95 balls and in two-and-a-half hours to steer South Africa home in the deciding Test. “The 20s, 30s and 40s Rassie scored were massive for us,” Petersen said. “I think he’ll remember those innings better than his hundreds by the end of his career.”

There was more where that came from: “We’ve got strong characters in our changeroom. South Africans don’t just go away and die. We fight for what we believe in and we are very strong. Our captain is an extremely strong character and is the perfect guy to lead this group right now because it’s what this team and this country longs for. And we needed this win, to be dead honest.”

Petersen spoke from his father’s house in Paarl, where he spent a few days after the series. Dirkie Petersen, no mean player himself, was his son’s most important coach during his formative years and remains a valued source of advice and encouragement. But he has yet to see his prized pupil play a Test first-hand, what with the first two in the Caribbean and, because of the BCCI’s pandemic fears, spectators not being allowed during the India series. That had an upside.

“My dad is a nervous character, so he doesn’t really want to come watch. Because he goes crazy. But I’m glad I haven’t score a hundred yet because I’d like him to be there when it does happen.”

There is, as there is in everything Petersen does on a cricket ground, plenty in those few words: honesty about his father’s disposition, but a desire to please him nonetheless. And there’s this — when Petersen scores a century. Not if. Seriously.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Conway goes a long way to find a place he can trust

“He looked at me with those steely eyes of his and he said, ‘I want to play cricket for South Africa and I want to get good marks.’” – Devon Conway’s high school coach, Adrian Norris.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

A superbly fit, overtly competitive, ultimately ordinary off-spinner leaves Pietermaritzburg for Nottingham and becomes Kevin Pietersen. An unflashy allrounder goes from Johannesburg to Wellington and turns into Grant Elliott. They are among a slew of examples where those came from: South Africa. Devon Conway added his name to the list this week.

Conway’s 200 at Lord’s made him the 111th man to reach a century on Test debut and the 12th from South Africa. Sort of. Andrew Hudson, Jacques Rudolph, Alviro Petersen, Faf du Plessis, Stiaan van Zyl and Stephen Cook know the feeling of making a hundred in their first Test. So do Kepler Wessels and Keaton Jennings.

But Wessels’ 162 at the Gabba in November 1982 was scored from under a not exactly baggy green helmet, while Jennings made his 112 at Wankhede in December 2016 wearing three lions rampant. As did Andrew Strauss for his 112 against New Zealand in May 2004 at Lord’s, Matt Prior for his unbeaten 126 against West Indies in May 2007 also at Lord’s, and Jonathan Trott for his 119 against Australia at the Oval in August 2009.

Conway’s headgear is black and emblazoned with a silver fern. At his high school, St John’s College in Johannesburg, it didn’t matter much on Wednesday that he does not don the protea badge. “We watched bits and pieces [on television] between classes,” Adrian Norris, the master in charge of cricket and a major influence on the player Conway has become, told Cricbuzz on Thursday. “He got to 30, and then we had load-shedding for three hours. So we kept track online from 30 until he was about 105, when we were able to watch again.”

Norris’ words help explain why Conway moved from Joburg to Wellington in August 2017. South Africa’s poorly maintained infrastructure means there isn’t enough electricity to keep all of the country’s lights on all of the time. So, sporadically since January 2008 and sometimes for days and weeks on end, scheduled rolling blackouts share the darkness. Sometimes your lights are off while your friends’ kilometres away are on. Sometimes it’s the other way around. You know when you will be able to cook dinner by consulting an app — several are readily available — on your smartphone.

Load-shedding has become emblematic of a South Africa that is failing to meet the expectations of a nation that, by defeating apartheid at the ballot box in April 1994, thought its worst days were behind it. Twenty-seven years on, we know our trust was misplaced.

“Devon was always the type of person who wanted trust,” Norris said. “We made sure we looked after him — we would get him something to eat, because sometimes he would skip the boarding school breakfast — and then he produced the goods and scored hundreds. He’s a very loyal person. It’s difficult to get into his trust, but once you’re in there you will be for life. He’ll do anything for you.”

Maybe Conway couldn’t trust South Africa enough to want to continue to make a life and a career there. Aged 26, he sold his home, his car and much of the rest of his material possessions and, with his partner, headed for New Zealand.

He had had a solid junior career — he made two half-centuries for Gauteng’s under-13 side, a hundred for the under-15s, and two centuries and a double ton for the under-19s. He scored 13 centuries in provincial first-class cricket. But at the higher franchise level, where he played only 21 matches in more than six years, Conway never reached three figures in 36 innings. So how big a role did cricket play in his decision?

It’s a worn trope that South Africa chases away some of its best and brightest in the cause of trying to make its national teams look more like the nation they represent. Did Conway feel hard done by because he is white? “Absolutely not,” Norris said. “In all our conversations we’ve had, he has never brought that up. He and his partner just wanted a different life experience, and that’s what they’ve got.”

Norris spoke of an apartment near the Wanderers, paid for by Gauteng cricket, that housed some of the province’s most promising players. Conway was among them. “In that flat lived five or six black African guys who were his mates. At times he would get picked ahead of them, and at times one of them would get picked ahead of him. I think he would have said, ‘These are my mates. How can I say I’m not getting picked because of the colour of my skin? They’re getting picked because they’re good enough.’”

A less often acknowledged aspect of the race dynamic is that, were it not for South Africa’s efforts to equalise opportunities across the game, world cricket would likely never have heard of Makhaya Ntini, Hashim Amla, Vernon Philander or Kagiso Rabada. Their talent and skill was undoubted and they worked hard for the success they earned. But talent, skill and hard work aren’t enough in a society more cruelly skewed in favour of the affluent than any other. The affluent are disproportionately white.

All but one of the South Africans who have won Test caps playing for other countries have come from relatively affluent whiteness. They, or their families, have had access to means to change their realities. Those means have been purposefully denied others. At 26, Conway owned property and a car and other stuff worth buying. Millions of his comparatively less well-off compatriots, almost all of them black and brown, their prospects for a decent life stolen from them by substandard education, low level jobs — if they have work at all — and life in a tin shack — if they are not surviving on the street — have nothing to sell and no hope of starting over somewhere else. That is by design, not accident. The single exception proves the rule: Basil D’Oliveira had to rescue himself, with John Arlott’s assistance, from just such an existence to show the world how well he could play cricket. The world outside South Africa, that is.

Even so, Conway is not a cookie-cutter example of privilege — he needed a bursary to gain entry to one of the country’s most elite schools. “I remember that interview,” Norris said. “I asked him why he wanted to come to St John’s, and he looked at me with those steely eyes of his and he said, ‘I want to play cricket for South Africa and I want to get good marks.’”

Did it sadden Norris that New Zealand, not South Africa, is reaping the benefits of the first half of that ambition? “Kids who come through our hands, we obviously want them to represent their country of birth. But the reality of the situation is that he is representing himself and challenging himself at the highest possible level. The world has become so small. Sportsmen will go overseas because that’s where the money is.”

Umpteen cricketminded reactionaries have been spewing ill-considered race politics on social media since about the time the power went out at St John’s on Wednesday. That professional sport in South Africa is too small and impoverished to contain all the talent the country produces is not a truth often aired there. Conway himself was in the same dormitory at St John’s boarding facility as Scott Spedding, who captained the first XV and went on to play 23 Tests for France, and Kenyan-born Brit Chris Froome, the four-time Tour de France champion.

“We’ve got a kid at St John’s now who’s just been signed by [top French rugby club] La Rochelle,” Norris said. “And he’s black African. The professional systems overseas are just so much more established. There’s money there. You can go and play [rugby] in the third league in France and you can do very well [financially]. You can play [cricket] for a second-tier county in England and do pretty well for six or seven months of the year.”

Conway has raised himself above and beyond that level, but Norris said he hadn’t forgotten what mattered: “He’s very humble and calm. He never got too hard on himself at school, or too excited. He’s very balanced. Sometimes I’ll send him a message, and it comes back with, ‘Thank you, Sir.’ The ups and downs of cricket over the years have been his classroom. He’s taken all those lessons on board and he’s now producing the goods.”

Not that Norris was trying to hog Conway’s limelight: “It’s madness to claim an individual.” He listed Jimmy Cook, Graham Ford, Grant Morgan as instrumental in moulding the new toast of New Zealand — the seventh man to score a double century on Test debut and the first debutant foreign opener to get to three figures on England’s seaming pitches.

Norris also made a case for schools like St John’s no longer existing chiefly to prop up privilege, even if from outside their tall walls it can look like that is still their mission: “We’re here to expose kids to different aspects of life and to turn them into good human beings.”

By the look and sound of him these past two days, and quite apart from his brilliant batting, Conway would seem to have added his name to that list, too.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Some of South Africa’s players are from Mars, others from Venus

An Ivy League of about 25 schools have, still do, and are likely to continue to supply the bulk of South Africa’s male players.

TELFORD VICE in Paarl

STRANGE symmetry struck across the Indian Ocean last Sunday. Within the same minute, Quinton de Kock hoisted Adam Zampa to Mitchell Starc at mid-off and Dané van Niekerk slapped Sophie Ecclestone to Tammy Beaumont at point. Both De Kock and Van Niekerk were captaining South Africa in a T20 and both were opening the batting. But they were more than 22 yards apart. South Africa’s men’s team were playing Australia at St George’s Park. The women’s side were up against England at the WACA. Port Elizabeth and Perth are 8,112 kilometres from each other. So South Africa’s teams might as well have been on Mars and Venus. But that’s the case even when they’re in the same city.

King Edward VII School — otherwise known as KES — Afrikaanse Höer Seunskool — or Affies — Maritzburg College, Grey College, St Stithians and Hilton were the schools attended by De Kock, Faf du Plessis, David Miller, Pite van Biljon, Kagiso Rabada and Lungi Ngidi, who were all members of Sunday’s XI. Those institutions are likely to feature in the past of any South Africa men’s XI. As well as De Kock, KES has given cricket Ali Bacher and Graeme Smith: one school, three South Africa captains. And a host of mere internationals aside. Along with Du Plessis, Affies has produced AB de Villiers, Kruger van Wyk and Neil Wagner, among many others. The school’s website doesn’t bother listing alumni among first-class players: “Scores of Affies old boys currently play for senior provincial teams.” Graham Ford, Jonty Rhodes and Kevin Pietersen went to Maritzburg College, and Kepler Wessels, Hansie Cronjé and Ryan McLaren to Grey College. As did too many other prominent players to mention. The same is true of the rest of an Ivy League of about 25 schools that have, still do, and are likely to continue to supply the bulk of South Africa’s male players.

Those schools used to be reserved exclusively not only for whites but for the most privileged among them, and their status as cricketer factories is undiminished even in the modern, racially more equitable era. Soon after Makhaya Ntini was discovered in the impoverished village of Mdingi he was packed off to Dale College in King William’s Town. Geographically, that’s a journey of eight kilometres. In every other sense, it’s as far as Venus is from Mars. Ngidi followed a similar path to Hilton, and Andile Phehlukwayo to Glenwood High. So the school sport system has, in a handful of cases, proved a more effective mechanism for pulling blacks out of the economic and social deprivation they were assigned by dint of their race than almost 26 years of post-apartheid life. Cricket has helped propel them into the middle class.

But the homogeneity of that process means men who play cricket at a high level in South Africa have grown up with largely the same set of values and a similar regard for discipline and tradition, which would be recognisable to anyone who has been to an elite alma mater of the British or colonial sort. Apartheid tried to ensure that Mark Boucher and Ntini would live in starkly different worlds. But, thanks to cricket and the schools, that is not the case. Much of Boucher’s worldview would have been formed while he was still at Selborne College. So the authority he wielded, both as a senior player and now as South Africa’s coach, was and is readily understood and accepted.

That is not the reality in the South Africa women’s team. Sport is a major factor in maintaining the prestige of boys’ and co-ed schools. But in girls’ institutions academic performance matters far more than anything else. Hence no girls’ schools have a track record for producing top class cricketers. Rather, girls have to work their way into the game, vaulting prejudice as they go. They were accepted into the boys’ soft-ball cricket programme at a particular Cape Town co-ed junior school. But only for training: they weren’t allowed to play matches. Their parents objected, and won the right for their daughters to appear in games. When the players progressed to hard-ball cricket, the girls were again excluded. Another argument ensued, another victory was won. Cricket South Africa have made moves towards gender parity, but cricket as played by girls and women struggles to be taken anywhere near as seriously as that played by boys and men. Below international level women’s cricket structures are not as established as they need to be, and unlike on the male side of the divide the only women paid to play cricket in South Africa are in the national set-up. Consequently, in another departure from the men’s game, women’s teams are collections of contrasts. They haven’t been inculcated with uniform values that cut across race, class and religious lines. So Mars and Venus are in the same dressingroom.

The least conventional aspect of Mignon du Preez’ life would appear to be that she plays cricket for a living. She is married. To a man: Tony van der Merwe. Who is an urban planner. Without trying to be snide about Du Preez or Van der Merwe, that’s about as mainstream as modern life gets. Van Niekerk and Marizanne Kapp are also married — to each other. Shabnim Ismail and Trisha Chetty are in a long-term relationship. Sometimes. Laura Wolvaardt has put a career in medicine on hold to see how this cricket gig works out. Some of the players don’t need to know the price of a pair of batting gloves. Others wish they didn’t know. Still another knows the price of illicit drugs well enough to have fallen prey to substance abuse. None of the above would be accepted in a prominent men’s team in South Africa, much less the national side.

Imagine Rabada marrying Keshav Maharaj. That would be unfathomable to some, even those who know it would be legal and that they wouldn’t blink should two men whose names they didn’t know announce their engagement. They would also acknowledge that, statistically, some male players have to be gay. Steven Davies, who played 13 white-ball games for England between March 2009 and February 2011 and 225 first-class matches, most of them for Worcestershire and Surrey from May 2005 to September last year, came out as homosexual in February 2011. But there are none in his league of bravery in South Africa and few in the wider world, as there are in other sports considered central to sadly conventional ideas of masculine identity.

Are lesbians in sports like cricket tolerated by the majority of game’s traditional audience because the assumption is they are trying to be like men, and are thus hopelessly harmless to what is considered the norm? Would that ilk of cricket follower denigrate male gay players if they knew of them, because they would threaten the perceived manliness of the status quo? Does that traditional audience not give a damn about women’s cricket anyway, so they don’t care who plays it? The answer to all of these questions is, probably, yes.

For a minute last Sunday, none of this mattered nearly as much as De Kock and Van Niekerk getting out at awkward stages. Both their teams recovered well enough to win narrowly. While the joy was shortlived for De Kock’s lot — their loss at Newlands on Wednesday confirmed their fourth consecutive series defeat — the women have secured a place in the T20 World Cup semi-finals.

Infamously, South Africa have yet to win a World Cup. Deep inside every cricketminded South African a small thought is growing: what if the women get there first? For some, that comes from a place of fear and insecurity. For many more others, it is a spark of wonder waiting to catch fire. If that happens, cricket in South Africa — regardless of who plays it — will never be the same.

First published by Cricbuzz.

For SA, Ellroy is still here

Cricketminded South Africans are like James Ellroy, who has an unhealthy obsession with his mother – who was murdered when he was 10. We relive the horror of 1999 every four years, and will continue to fixate on Klusener, Donald and all that. It’s that simple and that messed up.

TELFORD VICE in London

JUNE 17, 1999 is melting into evening around a packed Edgbaston. David Shepherd peaks out from under his cap, mouth agape, like a man looking for a place to have a pint in a village not of his ken.

Thump. That’s Lance Klusener’s bat on the pitch. Thump. It’s less a sporting implement than something Bruce Wayne might have welded and rivetted into rude being deep in the dark of a Gotham City night on time off from Batman duty. Thump.

Nine down. One to win. Three balls to get it. A place in the World Cup final to refuse to think about, for the next minute or so, anyway.

Klusener has been what he has been for much of the tournament: South Africa’s cocaine, a rush of runs snorted on a page of the scorebook. Only nine of his 31 have not been reaped in fours and a six — which would have been the end of him had Paul Reiffel not palmed the ball over the boundary.

Here comes Damien Fleming, gliding over the wicket with … a yorker that hooks away from Klusener, who pickaxes an ugly pull and spends a splinter of that mighty bat on a bottom edge that sends the ball squiggling past Fleming, who looks back in panic …

Klusener is a pale pink ghost as he flies down the pitch, eyes hard black, blood frozen in his veins. Allan Donald doesn’t see him because, having come close to being run out the ball before, he’s held his ground and, damn the man, turned around.

The awful apparition of Klusener’s unheralded presence jolts Donald with fright, which makes him drop his puny bat. He stares at it flaccidly for the longest instant in the history of everything, and turns, batless, witless but not heartless — you can see it thumping through his Y-front shirt (whose idea were they? Homer Simpson’s?) — to meet his destiny at the far end of the pitch. He’s dead and, like an exhausted but still running antelope about to be hauled in by a marauding lion, he knows it.

Mark Waugh, half running, half falling his way round the back of the non-striker’s end from mid-off, gathers the ball and flips it gracelessly but effectively to Fleming, who seems shocked to have to catch the thing as he stands midpitch, apparently dazed and confused by the traffic. A primordial yawp escape’s Adam Gilchrist’s throat: “FLEM!!!!!!!!!!!” Fleming gets a childlike underarm lob to Gilchrist, who accepts it on the bounce and does the needful. Tied. Australia are going to the final. South Africa are going home.

The free-from-anything-that-tastes-like-something custard yellow the Australians’ kit had faded to seconds earlier bounces back to its usual evil glow of nuclear butter as they celebrate coming back from Klusener’s blizzard of blows like antelope who have outrun the lion.

Donald knows nothing except that he has to shake hands with the other non-winners on the field. Klusener hasn’t stopped moving since trying to take the single that never was. His run slows to a walk in the depths of the outfield, and he seems aghast when the Aussies catch up with him to offer their hands. He shakes them. The surrender is complete.

It’s a cruel scene; a look into the souls of men resigned to failure only be reprieved by the failure of other men. Nobody has won. Nobody has lost. Nobody knows quite what the hell has just happened.

Unless, that is, you’re a South African and watching from across the equator. You stare at your television knowing that that can’t be it. That any second now Raman Subba Row, the match referee, will appear on the boundary and wave the players back onto the field. You know “Shep” will smile and cock his head sideways in wonder at it all as he makes his way, slowly but deliberately, towards the middle, and that his colleague, “Venkat”, will follow, looking lost in languid thought.

You know Fleming will bowl that ball again and that Klusener will face it again, and that he will crack it through the covers and all the way to the fence, and that that will be that. So you wait …

I’ve been waiting for almost 20 years now, living with my still searing memory of the moment — it’s agonisingly accurate; yes, I had the guts to check the footage — and wondering when it might be soothed. Or at least when it might have the poison drawn from it by subsequent success.

Until that happens, cricketminded South Africans cannot move on. The past is the past, but the present is also the past. Might the future also be the past? For us, it’s been late on the afternoon or early in the evening of June 17, 1999 at Edgbaston for too long. And we don’t know how much longer we will be trapped in this purgatory. We know what it means to wait for Godot.

We’re cricket’s version of James Ellroy, the self-styled “Demon Dog of American Literature himself”, author of “LA Confidential”, “The Black Dahlia”, and “American Tabloid”, and who has an unhealthy obsession with his mother — who was murdered when he was 10. Ellroy has spent his next 62 years marooned in the madness of that moment, recreating it in his disturbingly violent but worryingly readable books and even seeking relationships with women who physically resemble his mother.

So it is with South Africans, who relive the horror of 1999 every four years and at frequent intervals inbetween, and will continue to fixate on Klusener, Donald and all that until their team win the World Cup. It’s that simple and that messed up.

And it wasn’t always thus. In 1992, when Kepler Wessels was only 412 and Jonty Rhodes was a boy and Peter Kirsten was reborn, South Africa were heroes undone in their semi-final by outrageous rain rules and Neil Fairbrother, who managed to turn the sexiness of batting left-handed look like he was brushing his teeth at the crease. Four years later on the subcontinent, where they had no business reaching the knockout rounds, a properly sexy left-hander, Brian Lara, yanked them back to reality with a shimmering century in a Karachi quarter-final. And then came 199 bloody 9. Nothing has mattered nearly as much since. Ellroy is here and is showing no signs of leaving anytime soon.

In 2003, there was a soggy mess when Mark Boucher bunted for none instead of belting for at least one what became the last ball of the game against Sri Lanka at Kingsmead because he thought South Africa were ahead of the Duckworth/Lewis target. The scores were, in fact, level. Another tie and another exit — this time in the first round. Shaun Pollock’s tenure as captain disappeared into a puddle in the aftermath.

Four years later, in a semi-final in St Lucia, South Africa were 27/5 inside 10 overs bowled by Nathan Bracken, Glenn McGrath and Shaun Tait. Headlights would have batted better, nevermind rabbits. Australia sailed into another final, and to a hattrick of titles.

New Zealand, invariably as clever as they are not overpowering, found a way into the South Africans’ heads in their Dhaka quarter-final in 2011, and what should have been a straightforward chase to 222 crashed and burned to 172 all out. How Graeme Smith walked into the press conference that followed in a more or less straight line, and how he didn’t throw his chair at a reporter who said South Africa had gone from “chokers to jokers”, was singularly impressive.

In 2015 South Africa finally won a World Cup knockout match, sweeping aside Sri Lanka in their quarter-final in Sydney with nary a blip of their heart-rate monitors and, in the process, snuffing out Kumar Sangakkara’s record century streak at four. Might that have been the year they could exorcise their Ellroy? It might, until the suits insisted on the inclusion in the XI for the semi-final against New Zealand in Auckland of Vernon Philander and his dodgy hamstring and ambivalent tournament form at the expense of Kyle Abbott — their best-performing seamer in the competition — on racial grounds. The diktat was especially cynical and stupid considering Farhaan Behardien, who would have the same effect on the colour quotient, would have fitted well enough into the mix.

In his most accomplished game as a captain, AB de Villiers managed through canny bowling changes and field placings to limit the damage the brave but bruised Philander might have allowed to be caused. But there was little de Villiers could do about the mental meltdown the administrators’ disastrously timed interference had set in motion. That South Africa took the game as deep as they did is a monument to their fortitude: the contest had been decided long before Grant Elliott ripped the chilled velvet of the night sky with a straight six off Dale Steyn that settled the issue with a ball to spare. de Villiers either spat with rage or retched with sadness at the press conference. It was difficult to tell which through eyes that no longer believed what they saw.

So here we are, in 2019, with no AB, who has retired from the international stage but can easily be seen visiting his genius on a T20 tournament near you, half a ‘Hash’, whose beard is almost all that remains of the player he used to be, and a dwindling Dale, who at the time of writing was battling another shoulder injury. Things are bad enough for South Africans to have made something like peace with the probability that this will, again, not be their year; that after the final at Lord’s on July 14, 2019 it will still be June 17, 1999 for at least another four years.

This tournament will likely be even more difficult for the sacred in a South African society where the profane — rugby — has already won the World Cup twice and cricket is still thrashing about trying to get to the church with its head on the right way round. So you can’t blame some of us for wondering whether a first-round exit would be the least painful: get in, don’t get far enough to stoke hopes, get out, and get going on building the generation who will have to carry the burden onward, what with several senior players ready to call it a career.

Because that’s what it could take to heal this hurt, to make 1999 just another crazy year in history; a reason to remember, not a fear to forget. Aiden Markram was born in 1994 and Kagiso Rabada a year after him. With luck and good parenting — which they seem to have been fortunate enough to enjoy — what happened at Edgbaston will be more like a scratched knee in their consciousness, and for others of their vintage, than the hole in the heart it is for older South Africans, players and civilians alike.

That Markram captained South Africa to triumph at the 2014 under-19 World Cup in the United Arab Emirates, where Rabada was rampant in the same cause, can only fuel this narrative. It’s going to be up to today’s kids to grow up into the world beaters of tomorrow. Not only are they too young to have fully felt the shock of 1999, they also don’t know what it means to have been raised during the apartheid years — which has saddled those of us who were with a shadow of denial that dogs every facet of our lives.

We were told that what was called South Africa’s team in 1970 was the best in the game. Nevermind that they were drawn exclusively from the ranks of the tiny white minority and did not play against opponents who weren’t anything but white. The fakery was plain, and it gave rise to a crippling doubt — if the team weren’t as good as they were said to be, how good were they? And how could we know if the side who came back into the fold almost 22 years later were anywhere near as good? Or better?

To be a South African who carries these questions within them in an exponentially smaller but not dissimilar way to those who never get over the long ago death of a parent, is to lug a special load through life. There was no white-ball cricket before the separation, and Test cricket has become its own shining thing that has separated itself from the relentless comparing that happens lower down the game’s food-for-thought chain. So South Africa’s experiences at the World Cup are the closest we can come to knowing answers that will forever be unknowable, and it’s driving us mad.

We can only hatch theories or, equally as damaging, pretend none of what went before ever happened. And try to believe that the history of South African cricket as an entity on the international scene began when Jimmy Cook and Andrew Hudson were hit hard by the reality of walking out to open the batting in front of 91 000 in a one-day international against India at Eden Gardens on November 10, 1991.

It didn’t, of course. It started and ended where and when it remains today: at Edgbaston on June 17, 1999. Ellroy is here.

First published, before the 2019 World Cup, by the Nightwatchman.

Hamza is No. 335, not No. 100

Only 11.8% of the players picked since 1994 to represent a nation that is almost 80% black African have been of that race.

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in London

ZUBAYR Hamza, who is in the XI to play Pakistan at the Wanderers on Friday, is not be the 100th man to play Test cricket for South Africa.

No. 100 was Norman Reid, a Western Province allrounder and an Oxford rugby blue who scored 11 and six and took 2/63 against Australia at Newlands in November 1921 — his only Test. Hamza is No. 335.

“When I look up to someone it’s not necessarily the person they are,” Hamza told reporters on Wednesday. “It’s a combination of a whole lot of people and what they bring to the game.”

He described his own game as “at times free-flowing but also willing to graft — never looking the prettiest but I take pride out of the innings where there’s a lot of struggle”.

By the sound of him Hamza is as South African as koesisters. Or koeksisters. South Africans who harbour a sweet tooth will tell you those are not nearly the same thing. But they are part of the same fractured national culture.

Hamza is the 100th Test player capped by something called the Proteas, which is what Cricket South Africa’s marketing department would prefer you to call what you might prefer to think of as the national team.

Both are flawed concepts. The Proteas are little beyond logos and lip service, and no mere sports team could possibly represent a nation. That’s all war is good for.

But the idea that the next oke who makes his Test debut for Faf du Plessis’ side will be the 100th something or other fits neatly with the sorry state of public discourse in South Africa, where the slaughtering of a sheep on a beach becomes more prominent than people on the same beach being treated like animals by hired goons.

Instead of learning from the list of first 334 men who have played Test cricket for a team that, rightly or not, call themselves South Africa, we try to fiddle the numbers. The lessons are there for all to see, if we would only look.

The first 247 were white, an indelible stain on our history and a fact that still gets in the way of cricket being recognised for what it is: a sport played by South Africans of all flavours.

No. 248 was Omar Henry but another 20 would be picked before Makhaya Ntini became the first black African selected.

Seventy-six players have been blooded since the end of white rule in 1994. Fifty of them — 65.8% — have been of the same race as an estimated 7.8% of South Africa’s population: white.

Only nine, or 11.8%, have been black Africans — who make up almost 80% of the population.

Whichever way you spin it the nonsense that the integrity of South Africa’s team is being undermined by racially skewed selection remains nonsense.

Some of the 334’s stories are more complicated than others’. No. 235, Egyptian-born Athanasios Traicos, better known by his second name, John, had three Tests for South Africa in 1970 and four for Zimbabwe in 1992 and 1993. Bloemfontein-born Kepler Wessels, No. 246, earned 24 caps for Australia before playing 16 for South Africa.

No. 308 is Alviro Petersen, who has returned to commentary after serving a two-year ban for his role in the spot-fixing scandal that blighted the 2015 franchise T20 competition.

The fact that he’s back in the game will curdle the blood of some cricket people. But he’s done the time for his crime. How would it be fair to punish him further?

Petersen is doing better than Norman Reid, who, according to his Wisden obituary, “died at Cape Town in tragic circumstances in June [1947], aged 56”.

Closer to the truth is that Reid was shot through the head in his bed by his wife, who then killed herself.

Clearly, No. 100’s time was up.