Where David Gower and Leonardo da Vinci meet: on the left

For Garfield Sobers, the crease was the back seat of a car at a drive-in, steamy windows and all, under the nudging, winking cover of darkness.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

JIMI Hendrix, Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, David Bowie, Oprah Winfrey, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, Aristotle, Annie Lennox, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller, Bart Simpson, and Bills Clinton and Gates. Not forgetting Chewbacca the Wookie.

But, eish, also Napoleon, Jack the Ripper, Osama bin Laden, George HW Bush (W’s dad), FW de Klerk, the Boston Strangler. And Celine Dion.

They were and are left-handers all, people who would struggle to use a pair of scissors or a pen tethered to a bank counter. But they could do a stupendous paint job on your chapel’s ceiling, fight you a damn fine war, slit your throat in an eyeblink, be elected president, including apartheid’s last, make us laugh, make us cry, make us think, make us better human beings, and play a mean guitar. 

Left-handers have also been 19.37% of all 2 932 men who have batted in test cricket. More than half of them, 57.57%, have taken guard in the top four — 37.85% as openers, 32.04% as No. 3s and 30.99% as No. 4s.

Considering us of the sinister hand (aweh: this reporter, too) amount to only 10% of the global population, we are outrageously over-represented in cricket.

We’re also full of left field logic. Here’s David Gower: “The fact is both [left-handers and right-handers] have been horribly misnamed because the left-hander is really a right-hander and the right-hander is really a left-hander — if you work out which hand is doing most of the work.

“My right arm is my strongest. And therefore it’s the right hand, right eye and generally the right side which is doing all the work.

“So, if there is anything about this, then the left-handers, as such, should be called right-handers.”

Weirder still, not all cack-handers are created equal, and some of them are made not born. The Graemes, Pollock and Smith, bowled leg spin and off-spin: so, using their right arms. Smith plays golf left-handed but writes with his right.

Sourav Ganguly batted from the left side of the crease because he grew up using his left-handed brother’s gloves. Snehasish played 59 first-class matches but never cracked the nod for India. Sourav played 113 tests, scored 16 centuries and averaged 42.17. Thanks for the gloves, boet, he might say.

Hanif Mohammad told the youngest of his four, also right-handed brothers, Sadiq, to bat left-handed to help his chances of selection for Pakistan. Sadiq’s 41 tests and five centuries later, having opened in 41 of his 74 innings, that proved to be sound advice.    

There are less subtle difference between some left-handers and others. Dean Elgar comes to the crease mean as a junkyard dog awoken by a howling drunk in the miserable blackness of a wet winter’s night. For Garfield Sobers, the crease was the back seat of a car at a drive-in, steamy windows and all, under the nudging, winking cover of darkness.

Sobers always drew a crowd, and who wouldn’t want to watch his genius dazzle in the sun. But who wouldn’t want to see the consummately cussed Elgar dare the world, or that part of it tasked with bowling to him that day, to do its worst.

Cricket has changed since Sobers strode the world’s ovals like the god he was. Rather than wonder how he might have taken white-ball cricket by storm — he made nought in his only ODI — we should be relieved that the red-ball arena had him to itself. Elgar doesn’t play the game Sobers did, but a version that has had parts of its soul excised and sold off to the highest bidder like muti.

Hiding in plain sight, too, are the facts that Elgar opens the batting and Sobers spent most of his career in the middle order.

As anyone from Kepler Wessels to Geoffrey Boycott will attest, there is no harder job in cricket than what you must do after you dare to walk to the middle when the pitch, the ball and the bowlers are all rudely fresh and new.

So there should be another level of understanding for Alastair Cook and his technique; a haphazard collection of moving bits and pieces, none of them in the same direction. Also for Gower, whose elegance would have convinced you he could make flossing his teeth look as if he was playing the violin. Vivaldi, of course.

Gower also had a thing for teaming his whites with pink socks. In good company, or what: Da Vinci always painted his mountains blue.

Leo and Mo: What the Renaissance means for the World Cup

“Ramos! Bastardo!” – a Florence gelato seller on Sergio Ramos after his tackle on Mohamed Salah.

TELFORD VICE in Florence

ONE fine day in 1505 a genius and his assistant climbed Monte Ceceri, then an unwooded hill in Fiesole, a town outside Florence as beautiful as it is ancient, and tried to fly.

In fact only the assistant tried to fly. He was, according to some, Zoroastro da Peretola, the illegitimate son of Bernardo Rucellai, part of a rich and powerful family of Florentine wool merchants.

According to others Zoroastro’s real name was Tommaso di Giovanni Masini, and he was a common gardener’s son who cooked up his story of more exciting origins to ease access to the great and the good of Renaissance Florence.  

That seems closer to the truth: Rucellai was 13 when Zoroastro was born. What is not in dispute is that Rucellai was among the genius’ pupils.

The genius was Leonardo da Vinci, at the time of that day at Monte Ceceri in his 50s and with 20 years of interest and research into the mystery of flight smouldering in his mind.

The assistant, then, was expendable; a minion in the march towards the magnificence of a man whose ideas continue to capture the world’s imagination some 499 years after his death.

To Zoroastro was strapped a frame of lightweight wood covered in feathers, and of Leonardo’s design. Then the human-fuelled experiment stepped off the side of the hill. The spot he did so is marked today by a puzzlingly shaped cement bench: is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a feather? Is it even a bench? 

Remarkably, Zoroastro did not perish. He even flew — towards Florence for a kilometre, which was more than twice as far as the Wright brothers in a total of four attempts adding up to 411 metres 398 years later in what has come to be known as the first powered flight.

A happy ending? Not quite. Zoroastro broke both legs when he hit the ground.

That brings us to another, more modern genius. This one does his own flying. But he was also injured when he crashed to earth.

His name is Mohamed Salah, and he is in a race against time and the rapidly beating hearts of all 99-million Egyptians in Egypt — and the millions more around the world — to play in the World Cup in Russia. Salah’s team’s first game is against Uruguay in Yekaterinburg on June 15.

Egypt are in the tournament for only the third time and not since 1990. They are there not least because of Salah, who scored five of their eight goals in their six qualifiers.

Salah’s 32 goals for Liverpool led the English Premier League this season, and he was in those colours in the 30th minute of the Champions League final against Real Madrid in Kiev on Saturday when Sergio Ramos cut him down with a cynical challenge that resulted in a shoulder injury.

“Sometimes football shows you its good side and other times the bad,” Ramos tweeted on Sunday. “Above all, we are fellow pros. #GetWellSoon #MoSalah.”

That didn’t wash with an Egyptian-born gelato seller in Florence on Wednesday. At the empathetic mention of Salah’s injury he roared, “Ramos! Bastardo!”

He is not alone. A petition demanding Uefa take action against Ramos has garnered more than 500 000 signatures, and now the bloody lawyers are trying to make an offer that can’t be refused.

“Ramos intentionally injured Mo Salah and should be punished about his actions,” the suit behind the suit, Bassem Wahba, said on Egyptian television.

“I’ve filed a lawsuit and a complaint to Fifa. I’ll ask for compensation, which could exceed €1-billion (R14.6-billion), for the physical and psychological harm that Ramos gave Salah and the Egyptian people.”

Good luck, Mr Wahba. The world, including the non-Egyptian part of it — Spain and their fans excepted — no doubt wish you success.

If Wahba or indeed Salah need inspiration they could find it in other aspects of Zoroastro’s remarkable life.

He knew Leonardo since at least the 1490s, and besides grinding colours for some of his paintings he left a lasting impression in bizarre ways.

Nicknamed “Indovino”, or fortune teller, Zoroastro was considered by some an alchemist and a magician, and by others a mere blacksmith.

Leonardo wasn’t Zoroastro’s only fan. Dom Miguel da Silva, the Bishop of Viseo, wrote in a letter dated February 21, 1520, of a laboratory he had set up with “Indovino”:

“We make spheres which shine brilliantly and in which appear strange human figures with horns on their heads and crabs’ legs and a nose like a prawn.

“In an old fireplace we have made a furnace, built up with bricks, and here we distill and separate the elements of everything; and with these we extract the fire from a marine monster which forever burns and shines.

“In the middle of the room there is a large table cluttered with pots and flasks of all sorts, and paste and clay and Greek pitch and cinnabar, and the teeth of hanged men, and roots.

“There is a plinth made of sulphur polished up on a lathe, and on this stands a vessel of yellow amber, empty except for a serpent with four legs, which we take for a miracle.

“Zoroastro believes that some gryphon [a mythical dragon-like creature] carried it through the air from Libya and dropped it at the Mamolo bridge, where it was found and tamed by him.

“The walls of this room are all daubed with weird faces and drawings on paper, among which is one of a monkey who is telling stories to a crowd of rats who are attentively listening, and a thousand other things full of mystery.”

Good drugs? Maybe. Salah could use some to make it to Russia.