Matthew Wade – Bulletproof Truth

The IPL’s dawdling, dazzling dozen foreign stars

Unlike the English Premier League, the Indian Premier League actually is Indian.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

WHAT could you do with USD2.5-million? A lot, no doubt. But we live in the real world — not the strange and magical bubble of unreality called the IPL, where money doesn’t seem to mean much unless it comes in numbers that have more zeroes attached than the rest of us have pairs of socks.

So many zeroes that a dozen foreign players fetched from afar and paid a total of INR205,500,000 — or USD2,574,563 at Thursday’s exchange rate — have yet to play a single match in this year’s tournament. A tournament, mind, which will be almost two-thirds complete after Thursday’s game between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Kolkata Knight Riders.

These arguably overpaid, unarguably underworked players range from Quinton de Kock, who has been earned USD825,638 sitting on the bench for Lucknow Super Giants, to Dasun Shanaka, who made USD61,154 from Gujarat Titans as a replacement for Kane Williamson. The New Zealander ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in the field during the tournament opener against Chennai Super Kings in Ahmedabad on March 31.

The others are Joe Root, Matthew Wade, Dewald Brevis, Chris Jordan — albeit his signing by Mumbai Indians as a replacement was announced as recently Sunday — Daniel Sams, Odean Smith, Finn Allen, Obed McCoy, Donovan Ferreira and Lungi Ngidi. Were it not for the fact that their ranks do not include a specialist spinner, that would be a decent squad of 12.

That none of them has been granted a single game seems outrageous considering the investment involved. Or maybe not. The most expensive player in IPL history, Sam Curran, was bought for this year’s edition by Punjab Kings for USD2,262,441 — a relatively marginal USD312,122 less than the combined fees of the dazzling but dawdling dozen.

Rajasthan Royals — Root, Ferreira and McCoy — and Gujarat — Shanaka, Smith and Wade — harbour half of these well-rested internationals between them. Lucknow have De Kock and Sams, and Brevis and Jordan are attached to Mumbai Indians. Allen is on Royal Challengers Bangalore’s books. Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Punjab Kings would seem to have made better use of their resources: they have no foreign bench-sitters. Again, maybe not — Punjab, KKR and SRH are all in the bottom half of the standings.

There’s another class of lesser spotted big-name internationals in the IPL. Glenn Phillips, one of only two century-makers at the T20 World Cup in Australia in October and November, has cracked the nod for Hyderabad just once. The other player to score a century on that stage, Rilee Rossouw, has played in four of Delhi Capitals’ nine games. Ben Stokes and Adil Rashid, key members of England’s triumph in that tournament, have featured in two matches each for Chennai and Hyderabad.

That every XI in the IPL cannot contain more than four foreigners is an obvious factor in this equation. But that is how it should be. There’s a clue in the first word of the league’s name. It is, after all, India’s own Premier League. It’s also Indian owned and, usually, played solely in India, the world’s biggest market for cricket. Accordingly of the 243 players currently in IPL squads 164 — 67.49% — are Indian.

Football’s English Premier League offers a cautionary tale of what happens when the numbers don’t make sense. English players account for 245 of the 680 names on the rosters of the 20 clubs. That’s little more than a third: 36.03%. It is also riddled with foreign ownership, much of it despised by supporters. The competition is England’s Premier League in name only.

The IPL’s foreign quota and what that does to the make-up and balance of the teams picked offer many reasons why some of the game’s most prominent international players are spectators at the tournament. So we study every line-up, just in case today is the day. Some, in those players’ home countries, will do so in the hopes that their compatriots’ names stay off the team sheet. Rather they come back fresh, that argument goes.

How many reasons are there to keep an eye on who plays, and who does not play, in the IPL? Not as many as 2.5-million, but enough to make it a compulsory exercise for cricket fans the world over.

Cricbuzz

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Aussies disregard SA for T20I World Cup

“Anytime we play England is exciting, and we know how tough West Indies can be.” – Alex Carey forgets South Africa are among Australia’s T20I World Cup opponents.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

SOMETIMES what is said matters less than what is not. That might have happened on Tuesday, after the ICC announced the schedule for the men’s T20I World Cup in the UAE and Oman in October and November.

Asked which of Australia’s matches he was anticipating the most, Alex Carey said in a video released by the ICC: “Anytime we get to play against England is exciting; we know how dominant they have been in the white ball format over the last few years. Coming up against the West Indies recently, we know how tough that can also be.”

South Africa didn’t rate a mention from Carey — despite the fact that they play Australia in the tournament’s opening Super 12 match in Abu Dhabi on October 23.

Carey is, of course, entitled to his opinion. But here’s Matthew Wade answering the same question: “The West Indies is one match-up I’m looking forward to. They’re a really powerful team. They’ve got three or four greats of T20 cricket, so they’re always really tough. I played them in 2012 and they beat us. So they’re always a really tough team to come up against. If we can beat them we’ll be well on our way to going deep.”

And here’s Mitchell Marsh: “You look forward to every game you play for Australia, but coming up against England’s always a great test. I’m sure we’ll be up for that one.”

Have the Australians written South Africa off? Temba Bavuma’s team are the only side currently in Group 1 — which will be completed by the addition of two qualifiers from the first round — who did not feature in anything Carey, Wade or Marsh said in seven minutes of footage on Tuesday.

That’s despite the fact that South Africa hung tough to win a T20I series 3-2 in the Caribbean in June and July. Six days after that rubber Australia suffered the first of three consecutive losses in a T20I series in St Lucia, where West Indies won 4-1.

Maybe South Africa’s subsequent performance in Ireland, where they lost an ODI and were less than convincing in the T20Is even though they won all three, has made the Australians regard them as lightweights. Or perhaps that peculiarity of Aussie machismo — lusting after another go at opponents who have recently beaten them properly, as West Indies did — is at play. Or, some South Africans will think, this is another example of Australia’s habit of trying to play cricket in the mind as well as on the field: if they tell South Africa they’re not worth thinking about, the South Africans might wonder why. And undermine themselves.

Certainly, Australia have had the wood over South Africa in tournaments. Of their seven meetings the men in yellow have won five. Infamously, from a South African perspective, one match — the 1999 World Cup semi-final at Edgbaston — was tied. In another semi, in St Lucia at the 2007 World Cup, South Africa crashed to 27/5 inside 10 overs. One of their victories, at Old Trafford in the 2019 World Cup, was in a dead rubber. But the other shines in the annals.

It began with a thick edge seen and heard around the planet, except where it mattered: in the eyes and ears of umpire Brian Aldridge, who somehow missed the clear deflection and sharp sound made by Geoff Marsh’s bat as he flapped at a boomeranging away swinger from Allan Donald at the SCG in the 1992 World Cup.

“I was just hoping that one thing would happen — for us to bowl first, because the nervousness needed to get out of my system,” Donald told SuperSport in 2019. “To bowl that first ball and have Geoff Marsh smash the white leather off it, and to have Dave Richardson catching him behind, it could not be more wrong than that. The disappointment was there for everyone to see.”

But not for too long. Australia were held to 170/9 and Kepler Wessels dinked a signature single to third to reach 81 not out and seal a nine-wicket victory with 13 balls to spare. South Africa forged all the way to the semi-finals, where they were undone by England and by the crude rain rules in those pre-Duckworth/Lewis days. Twenty-nine years on, that performance, even though it ended unhappily, remains the World Cup South Africans remember most fondly. Too often since they have played below themselves, or choked, or not known how to handle going in as favourites.

Why does it keep going wrong for them? Perhaps because of the disunity caused by the instances of racism perpetrated and suffered in their dressingroom, as alleged in claims made to CSA’s Social Justice and Nation-building project in the past weeks. Or maybe because too many South Africans — including the players — have taken as truth the fiction that their Test team was the best in the game when they were thrown out of world cricket because of apartheid.

South Africa won a series in England in 1965, and beat Australia in South Africa in 1966/67 and 1969/70. How competitive were they in the subcontinent and the Caribbean? We will never know, because their government — which the majority of white South Africans, the only part of the population that had the vote, kept re-electing — didn’t allow the country’s all-white teams to share a field with anyone except all-white opposition. So to insist they were cricket’s best XI is a farce.

The myth of South Africa’s superiority was writ large at the SCG on February 26, 1992, just more than three months after their isolation ended with an inaugural tour to India. A banner in the crowd that day in Sydney read: “South Africa World Champs 1970-1992 (unbeaten)”.

Not a lot has changed. There are two types of cricket person in South Africa. One is convinced the 1970 Test side was the finest in the world and that the race-based selection targets presently employed to try and correct the injustices of the past have, are and will continue to lower standards and lead to poor results. The other believes whites have never stopped trying to claim cricket, along with so much of everything else, for themselves in the face of all the evidence that it is just as black and brown a game as it is white.

The facts of the matter favour the latter position, not least because the former’s argument doesn’t add up. If racially coded selection is wrong, how could the 1970 team be regarded as the best South Africa could pick, nevermind the strongest in the world? That side, too, was picked according to a quota: 11 white players for every match.

South Africans don’t expect Australians, or anyone else, to understand these complexities. But they do expect to be part of the conversation when a World Cup looms.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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South Africa’s emotional rescue

Welcome to captaincy, Quinton de Kock. It might be more affecting than you had assumed.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

QUINTON de Kock keeps his emotions far from where he plays cricket. But they were in the same place on Sunday. And St George’s Park wasn’t big enough for the both of them. Twice De Kock’s anger steamed through his famously solid exoskeleton. When he swished at and missed a wide delivery from Ashton Agar, a bellow ripped up from his gut and through the stump microphone. When he was struggling to find a way to stop the bleeding in the power play at the start of Australia’s reply, he threw the ball into the ground in rage. But De Kock also emoted for more positive reasons. When Kagiso Rabada limited the damage to three, including a wide, in his last over, the 19th, which included a return catch to dismiss Matthew Wade, De Kock flew towards his fast bowler on the wings of a joyous roar. When Anrich Nortjé went for four off the last to confirm South Africa’s win and level the T20I series with one to play, he looked up from his homage to Dale Steyn’s chainsaw celebration to see De Kock striding towards him and applauding, his wicketkeeping gloves slapping cartoonishly, and smiling a smile so wide that, if it stretched just a smidgen more, would have tweaked the corners of his moustache upward.

Welcome to captaincy, skipper. It might be more affecting than you had assumed. Eight games into his tenure as South Africa’s appointed white-ball leader, De Kock’s team have won only three matches and lost four, and in the process gone down in two rubbers with the other now in the balance pending Wednesday’s game at Newlands. They’ve given their captain plenty of justification for losing control of his emotions, mostly not in a good way.

The accountants among us will say South Africa made progress on Sunday because they finally won the second match of a series this summer: against England they prevailed in the opener in all three formats, and not once thereafter. Now that they have rallied to stay alive, the scripts laced with sad endings might just be torn up. But to leave it there that would be to deny De Kock and his team their due. The alarm raised by being bullied on Friday at the Wanderers, where they were dismissed for their lowest T20I total and suffered their biggest defeat in all their 120 games in the format, did not bode well. What were their chances of escaping another encounter with the same opponents less than 48 hours later with what was left of their self-esteem intact? Port Elizabeth is a happier place than Johannesburg in many ways, but relocating to the slower, simpler, friendlier Eastern Cape can’t solve problems as serious as South Africa’s. They would have to play their way to a better reality.

And they did. Not always convincingly, as De Kock would attest. They were 59 without loss after their first six overs and scored only 99 in the other 14. They conceded more than a run a ball in 13 of Australia’s overs, and two runs a ball or more in three of them. A couple of spectacular catches involving Faf du Plessis aside, their fielding was too sloppy too often. So the smile had faded from De Kock’s face by the time he explained it all to Shaun Pollock in his post-match television interview. He seemed relieved in the knowledge that, unlike recent evidence to the contrary suggested, the team could fight back under his hand. He could go once more unto the breach and make it to the other side. Despite his unordinary personality, he could lead a bunch of mainstreamers just fine. Not that his predecessor wasn’t instrumental — aside from catching the uncatchable, Du Plessis spent a significant chunk of his afternoon in conversation with the bowlers.

Few teams are not captained by committee to some extent, anyway. And it’s not only the captain who feels the pain when they don’t do well. When victory was clinched and St George’s Park erupted with pent up passion, South Africa’s dressingroom celebrated as giddily as the civilians on all sides. But the reaction of a significant figure on the players’ balcony was to clench both hands where he sat, tugging his fists shortly and sharply downward as his chin jerked towards his chest. It wasn’t what it looked like: a prayer of thanks. But it was striking nonetheless. Mark Boucher, for it was he, has seen a bit of cricket and lived a bit of life, and he knows the value of putting one foot in front of the other. That’s what progress looks like.

First published by Cricbuzz.