Michael Holding – Bulletproof Truth

When will Tests return to Wanderers?

“It is still seen as the pinnacle.” – Heinrich Strydom, Dolphins CEO, on hosting Tests.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

THE Wanderers is South Africa’s biggest and premier cricket venue, and among the most storied in the global game. But it will go at least three-and-a-half years without hosting a Test. Although that’s bad news for spectators, it will likely save the stadium a significant amount of money.

South Africa’s match against West Indies in March 2023 is the most recent Wanderers men’s Test. Only two have been played in the country since — against India in Centurion and at Newlands in December 2023 and this January.

CSA released South Africa’s home fixtures on Friday, and the four men’s Tests against Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been scheduled for Kingsmead, St George’s Park, Centurion and Newlands from November until next January. South Africa’s next home men’s Tests are three against Australia in September 2026. Only then can Johannesburg expect to be back on the roster.

Besides the Wanderers’ 44 Tests, which have yielded 60 centuries and 54 five-wicket hauls, it was where the 2003 men’s World Cup final was played and the venue for the decider in the inaugural men’s World T20 in 2007. It will likely host the 2027 men’s World Cup final.

Among the 11 grounds that have seen Test cricket in South Africa, only Newlands and Kingsmead have hosted more matches than the Wanderers. Since readmission in 1991, make that only Newlands.

Besides the facts of the matter, the Wanderers is where Merv Hughes swung a bat at an abusive spectator in March 1994, which prompted the installation of the plexiglass tunnel that still leads from the boundary to the dressingroom. It’s where, in January 1995, the start of the Test was delayed by a day to allow for frantic negotiations to keep Pakistan’s tour on track after Saqlain Mushtaq and Mohammad Akram claimed they had been mugged outside a Johannesburg nightclub. It’s where South Africa won the 438 game against Australia in March 2006. And where as measured and mannered a man as Michael Holding labelled the pitch in the Test against India in January 2018 “shit”.

The Wanderers is a place of beers, braais, boorishness, babelaas — the Afrikaans word for a hangover — and being as brilliantly entertained at a sporting event as it is possible to be. It isn’t the prettiest ground in South Africa, but it is unarguably the most South African of cricket grounds.

Even so, in the real world, none of those facts and figures matter more than the equivalent of USD135,000 South Africa’s grounds spend on hosting a single Test. CSA pay their provincial unions USD19,000 in hosting fees per Test, and the venue keeps 40% of the revenue from the sales of tickets — which go for USD10 each at most — and makes money from selling hospitality suites. But if the opposition are not drawcards like Australia, England or India — and to a lesser extent Pakistan — there is no hope of breaking even, nevermind making a profit. At the Wanderers, which holds 28,000, whether more security guards and food vendors than spectators are present is sometimes a serious conversation.

The equation is exponentially more skewed in domestic cricket. Venues for matches in division one of the CSA T20 Challenge, which was played from March 8 to April 28, earned a hosting fee of USD1,335 per game — each of which cost the Wanderers USD16,200. Crowds were minuscule and there were no takers for hospitality suites, so those factors didn’t put a dent in the losses.

That said, there is disappointment in Gauteng cricket circles that the Pakistanis won’t be coming to town to play a Test next summer. And not only because the locals would like to remind the visitors about that nightclub incident in January 1995. For all its rough edges Johannesburg is a proud place, and being overlooked again after losing out on last season’s India Tests does not sit well.

But Joburg’s loss is Gqeberha’s and Durban’s gain. St George’s Park and Kingsmead haven’t hosted Tests since the series against Bangladesh in March and April 2022. Is a Test series that doesn’t go to St George’s Park, the home of cricket in South Africa in many ways, really a Test series in South Africa? And why shouldn’t the USD1-million worth of improvements made at Kingsmead since Heinrich Strydom was appointed chief executive in July 2017 be recognised?

But, in the modern world, with its evaporating attention span and demand for constant full colour excitement, was hosting a Test worth the asking price? “It is still seen as the pinnacle,” Strydom told Cricbuzz. “Also there’s the value of the TV exposure over five days. If the opposition is high quality and the timing of the hosting makes sense — for example around Boxing Day — then it is definitely still a yes from me.”

The Wanderers would concur, and be quietly grateful to wait for Australia in 2026.

Cricbuzz

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Zondo’s story has many chapters

“I’m always nervous, whether I’m playing a club game or my son is throwing balls at me.” – Khaya Zondo

Telford Vice / London

HYDE Park looked like an African savannah on Thursday. Not that lions or lionesses, or indeed cricketers or footballers of any kind, roamed the vast undulations of London’s usually green and pleasant heart. It was too hot for that. Aside from the baroque splendour of its trees, the parched park was a patchwork swathe of beige.

The UK’s most intense summer since 1976 will do that to even the most lush spaces. Like Lord’s, less than three kilometres to the north, where the Test series between England and South Africa starts on Wednesday. What has the heat done to pitches at cricket’s grandest ground?

Not the obvious and helped the spinners, it seems. They have claimed only 18 of the 186 wickets to fall there in first-class matches this season. That includes the Test against New Zealand in the first week of June, when Lancashire leg spinner Matt Parkinson had to come haring down the highway to make his debut as a concussion substitute for Jack Leach.

Parkinson had Tim Southee caught at slip in New Zealand’s second innings — the only wicket of the 35 that fell in the match that belonged to a slow bowler. No spin was bowled in either team’s first innings, and only 18.3 overs in the 170.2 overs bowled in the second innings. In the most recent first-class match at Lord’s, between Middlesex and Sussex three weeks ago, spin accounted for three of the 29 wickets and 54 of the 365.1 overs. If mad dogs and Englishmen really do go out in 2022’s midday sun, not many of them are spinners.

According to Southern Water, this region of England had less than two-thirds of its average rainfall for the first six months of 2022 and only four millimetres in July — when the long-term average is 50.3 millimetres. Temperatures have hovered around 30 degrees Celsius for weeks, and the rain that has been forecast for next week will come — if it comes — as a relief to everyone except cricket aficionados who have turned their attention to Lord’s.

Doubtless Khaya Zondo isn’t thinking about any of the above. For one thing, he’s not in London. For another, he can’t do anything about the weather. For still another, he is focused on staying in the selection frame for the first Test. He did that on Tuesday and Wednesday by batting for more than three hours for his 86 in a tour match against England Lions in Canterbury. It was the South Africans’ biggest innings in terms of runs and deliveries. Importantly, Zondo showed a level of patience that earned 130 dot balls from the 166 he faced. He was undone on the second morning without adding to his overnight score, when he left an inswinger from Sam Cook and had his off stump rattled.

“I’ve accepted my limitations,” Zondo said in an audio file released by CSA after the close on Tuesday. “I’ve also accepted where I am good and I’ve just kept working, trying to get better with each ball I face, just keep adding building blocks on top of each other.”

The first of those blocks was laid during practice — “I went into the nets and worked on my balance, worked on playing the ball late” — to help him adjust to the conditions: “It’s definitely different to South Africa. The ball nips a lot more, and you never really feel like you’re in; you’ve got to make sure you’re always awake. As soon as you think you’re comfortable, that’s when the ball does something you don’t expect it to do and that’s when it catches you off guard.”

After 213 first-class innings, he was not immune to anxiety: “I’m always nervous, whether I’m playing a club game or whether my son is throwing balls at me. So I’m always nervous when I pick up a bat. That’s good nerves.”

Zondo scored two half-centuries and a century in nine innings for Darwen in the 2015 editions of the Northern Premier League and the Lancashire Cricket Board Cup. He last played in England on South Africa A’s tour in May and June 2017, when he made 66 runs in four 50-over innings and a single in each trip to the crease in a four-day match. His effort this week is his best anywhere since he reached a career-high 203 not out in a domestic first-class match in October 2021. In eight subsequent innings in the format he has twice passed 50.

Zondo’s latest effort has complicated South Africa’s selection deliberations. He batted at No. 7 with Ryan Rickleton, Rassie van der Dussen and Aiden Markram above him. All could be competing for one place in the Test XI. Markram made 10 and Van der Dussen 75 in the first innings, and they were 20 and eight not out at stumps on Thursday. Rickleton suffered a first-baller on Tuesday.

The naked numbers say Zondo has done the most among them to crack the nod, but rarely are these matters so simple. Markram played himself back into confidence and form at the IPL, and just more than three weeks ago Van der Dussen, a reassuring presence in South Africa’s line-up, scored a yeoman 134 in extreme heat in the first ODI in Chester-le-Street. Rickleton reeled off two centuries, a 95 and three half-centuries in eight first-class innings for Northamptonshire in June and July.

You might have heard Zondo’s name mentioned for reasons other than his achievements on a cricket ground. In October 2015 he was, at then captain AB de Villiers’ insistence — and with the acquiescence of Hussein Manack, the selector on tour — left out for the deciding match of an ODI series at the Wankhede. CSA investigated and decided his omission was wrong, and Zondo’s testimony to the Social Justice and Nation Building project in August last year revealed how deeply affected he had been by his treatment.

“I switched off mentally for the rest of the day and I detached myself from the team because it was clear I was not wanted,” Zondo said. “Switching off helped me cope with everything that was happening. The hardest part was watching players who were selected ahead of me having the opportunity to shine for South Africa on a world stage, in India, and having a chance to play and potentially impress and get future IPL opportunities.”

Dean Elgar’s flight to India for the subsequent Test series was brought forward to enable him, rather than Zondo, to feature in the white-ball decider. It is not often remembered that South Africa piled up 438/4 in that match, with Quinton de Kock, Faf du Plessis and De Villiers all scoring centuries, and also largely unhighlighted that the visitors won by 214 runs. Neither is it recalled that Elgar took guard at No. 7 with four balls left in the innings, faced only two of them and finished five not out. Was Zondo, albeit then uncapped, honestly not trusted to do something similar, or better?

If you’ve heard Zondo’s name for still another reason, it might be because his father, Raymond Zondo, was appointed South Africa’s chief justice in March. In June 2017 Zondo senior was named as the presiding high court judge in an inquiry into allegations of state capture and corruption during Jacob Zuma’s tenure as president from May 2009 to February 2018. In a damning and shocking report that runs to more than 5,000 pages, Zondo found that “the [ruling party] ANC under Zuma permitted, supported and enabled corruption”.

Zondo junior and the rest of South Africa’s squad have found in England circumstances that will feel oddly familiar to them. They are no strangers to the water restrictions that are being implemented here, and the planned power outages that loom because of the surge in energy prices — prompted by Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine — are common on the sharp tip of Africa.

Then there are the dots connected by history. When the English refer to 1976 as their last properly hot summer, they’re not only talking about the weather. In the build-up to a Test series that year, Tony Greig said of his team’s imminent opponents: “You must remember that the West Indians, these guys, if they get on top are magnificent cricketers. But if they’re down, they grovel, and I intend to make them grovel.”

Greig’s words, spoken in the thick, rough accent of the Eastern Cape of his birth, where he had leaned on his privilege and the luck of having a Scottish father to make the leap to England, did not land well. A white South African who had failed to denounce apartheid or racism telling black people he wanted to make them grovel?

Michael Holding and Andy Roberts answered the question on behalf of millions worldwide by taking 28 wickets each in the series, and Viv Richards and Gordon Greenidge by scoring three centuries each. And they were only the brightest stars in West Indies’ 3-0 triumph.

Also in 1976, indeed during that series, South Africa’s winter was turned white hot by government’s insistence that Afrikaans — the language of the country’s oppressors — be used in black schools. The reaction was what became known as the Soweto Uprising, which killed between 176 and 700 mostly young people and lit the touchpaper for what became, in 1994, the defeat at the ballot box of apartheid.

Raymond Zondo was 16 when Soweto’s flames were lit, and almost 34 when Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first rightfully elected president. Khaya Zondo is 32 and still fighting for fairness. Will he get it on Wednesday? And, if he does, will it rain? In Africa, that would be a blessing. But not at Lord’s.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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How Wanderers helped make Kohli’s India

Whether South Africa have learnt their lessons from the bruising 2018 Joburg Test will be gleaned when the teams clash on the Highveld again this month.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

INDIA’S most recent Test in South Africa, at the Wanderers in January 2018, did not go gentle into that good night that falls softly when, finally, the sprinklers soak the stretch of uncovered earth that is spent and striated after serving us as many as five days of keenly contested cricket. Instead a pitch of payback for a nasty Nagpur surface during South Africa’s series in India in November 2015 dominated proceedings, and the headlines.

Michael Holding, then more a commentator on the game than its social justice conscience, held the front page: “Two out of a hundred; it’s a shit pitch. This is not a cricket pitch, this is dangerous. Call it off. Forget it. You can’t play cricket on that. I have no idea what has gone wrong but I know it’s not a good cricket pitch.” Something’s up when a fast bowler complains about a pitch that aids and abets fast bowling.

Play was suspended late on the third day, so that umpires Ian Gould and Aleem Dar could consult match referee Andy Pycroft on what to do, after Jasprit Bumrah had nailed Dean Elgar on the helmet. It was the first time in the match a batter had taken a blow to the head, but the ninth time in not quite nine sessions that the medics had been called onto the field to deal with the results of the ball thudding into various parts — mostly the hands — of different bodies. The man who then ran the Wanderers, Greg Fredericks, the chief executive of the Gauteng Cricket Board and someone rendered unafraid by his long years spent fighting apartheid, including from inside a jail cell, paid a cautious visit to the pressbox to gauge the media mood.

More than three hours later, the ICC explained: “The on-field umpires will continue to monitor the pitch, and consult the match referee should the pitch deteriorate further. The welfare of the players is paramount and two of the most experienced match officials are in charge of the game and will take appropriate decisions.” Play resumed on the fourth morning, after a delay while the maligned groundstaff dealt with a wet outfield. Parthiv Patel’s broken finger — he was replaced by Dinesh Karthik — was the closest we came to serious injury. Life went on.

Less often recalled than all that is the result and its context. India won, by 63 runs with a day and a bit to spare, on the most un-Asian pitch imaginable. Asked to meet a challenge the South Africans had calculated was beyond them, they did. And more: that was India’s first success outside Asia and the similar surfaces of the Caribbean since July 2014, when they won at Lord’s. Before that they went 14 Tests outside of their comfort zone without winning, 10 of them lost. That lean run started after they were victorious at Kingsmead in December 2010. But the Wanderers win marked the start of a happier part of the journey for Virat Kohli’s team. They have since played 20 Tests in England, Australia and New Zealand, winning seven and drawing three. Was the relative allround sledgehammer India have become, regardless of conditions, forged in the molten heat of four days in Joburg in January 2018?

The way Kohli saluted the end of the game and the series, by taking a deeply cynical bow, a veritable physical sneer, a bombastic cameo, offered strong evidence in favour of that argument. India’s captain, as tall a totem as any team have ever had, was viscerally angry, and just as clearly incandescent with pride, and as close to the edge of the cliff of unacceptable behaviour as even he could dare to go, and also defiant in the face of the arrogance of opponents who thought they could dictate terms in their own backyard. He was magnificent.

Whether South Africa have learnt their lessons from that bruising, in every sense, match will be gleaned when the teams clash on the Highveld again later this month. They were to have resumed hostilities where they left off, but practicality has trumped poetry and the series will start in Centurion on December 26 before returning to the scene of 2018’s passion on January 3 and moving to Newlands on January 11.

Of South Africa’s XI at the Wanderers almost four years ago, Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers, Faf du Plessis, Vernon Philander and Morné Morkel have retired. That’s damn near half a damn fine team. India will return with four of their five stars from that gnarly encounter: Cheteshwar Pujara and Kohli, who scored a gritty half-century each, and Bumrah and Mohammed Shami, who claimed five-wicket hauls. Shami’s 5/28 in the second innings — centred on a 10-ball burst of naked aggression that earned him three wickets for a single run — was a thing of shimmering beauty, the equal of the best fast bowling yet seen in a country not short of quality quick stuff.

The missing piece of the puzzle is Bhuvneshwar Kumar, who gutsed out 125 balls at the batting crease, was last out and ninth out for his 63 runs, took four wickets and limited the damage to 2.24 an over, and was named the player of what has turned out to be the last Test in which he has appeared.

And so that good night came and the sprinklers soaked the now cursed uncovered earth that was spent and striated after a contest that veered beyond keen into dangerous territory. It is one of the secret pleasures of cricket writers to be there when that happens, to see the pitch and the outfield take their rest and reward in respectful silence and splendid isolation unsullied by trespassers like spectators, players and umpires. As the water flows onto the ground below, so the ideas and the words they generate flow into keyboards, and from there into the ether itself, in the pressbox above. Everything about the scene changes. Coolth wafts over, the sun bids a spectacular adieu, the light fades to velvet, insects spike the sky. There is magic.

Covid has taken that from us: we will have to be out of the ground an hour after play ends. But we will, like all who see it, take the cricket with us. It is ours to keep.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Where to next for cricket’s race conversation?

“I don’t think we’re ever going to be done speaking to each other on this topic.” – Anrich Nortjé

Telford Vice | Cape Town

“SEE that gas station,” a cab driver quipped with a rightward cue of his head as he guided his taxi down a street in Kingston, Jamaica. “It belongs to Michael Holding.” It was April 7, 1992, and we were on our way to Sabina Park, where South Africa’s inaugural series in a majority black country — besides the one they considered their own — was about to start.

South Africa had broken their brown duck on their tour to India five months earlier, their first official international cricket since 1970, and their first ever against opposition who did not field an all-white XI. Shockingly, and even though Kepler Wessels’ team had, by the time they arrived in the Caribbean, been to a World Cup — another first for South Africa — apartheid was still the law of their land.

Twenty-nine years on that is no longer the case. But Holding is still fuelling things. In 1992, five years after he had retired as a member of the game’s pre-eminent attack, he was firing up engines. In 2021, he is helping to power the global conversation on racism. And anti-racism. His book, “Why We Kneel, How We Rise”, was published in June — 11 months after he had spoken, live on television in Southampton during what has become cricket’s most important rain delay, through hot tears: “I remember my school days. I was never taught anything good about black people.”

Holding no longer owns a garage and he announced his retirement from commentary in September. But he was on screen again on Friday as the last speaker in the 35 days of the CSA’s Social Justice and Nation-Building (SJN) hearings: “The quota system … I have heard that used on so many occasions when referring to South African cricketers of colour; that they are only there because the regulations say they have to be there. They are never given full credit for their abilities.”

Holding spoke to Dumisa Ntsebeza, the SJN ombud. Some will struggle to see the point of two black people talking to each other about being black in a world held hostage by whiteness. But these are not any two people.

Ntsebeza is due to submit his report, which will likely include recommendations on what to do about racism in the game in South Africa, by the end of November. A veteran senior counsel who worked on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he is in a unique position to change cricket’s relationship with issues of race, which it clearly needs to do.

Holding is a 1.92-metre tall tower of integrity. What he says carries great power, but how he says it is important. As is the fact of who is doing the saying. For the unfortunates who claim not to see colour, Holding is an example of excellence. In the real world, he is an example of black excellence. He is his own best argument against the ancient myth that black and brown people are inferior to whites. And, with the rise and spread of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, he is hopeful that the evil lie is on its way to becoming a shibboleth. “People are coming together and recognising that the world needs fixing,” he told Ntsebeza.

That was three days after Quinton de Kock refused to play in South Africa’s T20 World Cup match against West Indies in Dubai rather than take a knee, as the players had been instructed to do by CSA. And a day after De Kock apologised and changed his mind: he would kneel, after all.

You wonder what Holding would make of all that. In June he told the UK Press Association: “If you don’t support it, if you don’t kneel, I know where you stand. You can’t just sit back and say ‘I’m not racist’. You have to point out racism and speak up against it.”

That players from, of all countries, South Africa should have to be compelled to take a knee — that some of them won’t embrace the globally recognised symbol of opposition to racism voluntarily — is a national embarrassment. It should be a source of shame among those players.

“Taking the knee and BLM is not supposed to separate people; it is supposed to bring people together,” Dale Steyn said on Tuesday. “Quinton de Kock missing a game not just through his own mindset but through a kind of forced way of doing things is not what we want in world cricket. That’s not what we want in the world. We don’t want to see people missing out on things. This movement is not about that. This movement is about bringing people together and having a better understanding of things, not pushing people away and ridiculing them.”

Some will say Steyn is trying to whitesplain BLM, including to people who are black and brown. But at least there is nuance in his view, an attempt to consider the bigger picture and not focus on isolated, partisan shards of the whole. Others will wonder why Steyn’s comment — made to a group of Sri Lankan reporters at the T20 World Cup, where he is commentating — hasn’t been published until now. Maybe, in a largely homogenous society like Sri Lanka’s, race is not news.

But it would seem to be in India, where one website posited the theory that De Kock “didn’t take a knee because a majority of whites in South Africa, half-a-million, are dispossessed. In Pretoria alone, there are 80 white squatter camps. In today’s South Africa, whites are the blacks of yesterday, hidden from our view.” None of this is true anywhere near true. Worse, it is damagingly wrong and fuels a dangerous narrative.

“Someone has to draw a line somewhere — there’s so much crime, there have been so many farm murders,” was the meaning that a white trader at a market in Cape Town gave to De Kock’s refusal. That, mind, after De Kock had kneeled in the match against Sri Lanka in Sharjah on Saturday. And after he had said he felt taking a knee was an empty gesture that he hadn’t thought he needed to perform because: “For me, black lives have mattered since I was born. Not just because there was an international movement.” As for the truth about homicide, 21,022 people were murdered in South Africa from April 2018 to March 2019. Only 57 of all South Africa’s murder victims in 2019 were farmers.

But, in the internet age, untruth and ugliness is more easily spread than ever before. Last month, fast food giants Nando’s cancelled their five-year sponsorship of an online radio show hosted by Gareth Cliff, a South African self-confessed “shock jock”, in the wake of the outrage that followed him telling a black guest on the programme that her experiences of racism were “anecdotal” and “unimportant”. The company’s action was widely welcomed. But few asked why Nando’s had involved themselves with a figure who has been going out of his way to offend people for far longer than five years, especially as most of the company’s clients are black and brown.

This is the poisoned water in which South Africans swim. That includes representative teams. Are they drinking it? The view from the men’s dressing room would suggest not. “We’ve had time to have long, hard conversations, and it’s been really good getting to understand things,” Anrich Nortjé told Cricbuzz. “I don’t think we’re ever going to be done speaking to each other on this topic. We’re going to go on and on and on. Everyone has learnt. Everyone has been able to be honest in the environment we’ve created. There’s been a lot of things said in a safe space where we can express our feelings.”

Outside of that bubble, different rules apply: “The media have been trying to make things up or trying to get people talking about certain aspects when those issues haven’t been raised in the team. Someone will write something about what they see and people will harp on that, and it becomes a topic of discussion. But we’ve been getting along really well in the team. We had our first culture camp in Skukuza in August last year, and we’ve kept on building.”

If Nortjé wants to offer his teammates a lighter view on these weighty topics, here’s a line from another Caribbean cab driver; this one in St Kitts during the 2007 World Cup: “And over there, in 1492, the Amerindians discovered Christopher Columbus on the beach.”

Get the joke, and we’re getting somewhere.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Race wounds still raw in South African cricket

“Those injustices were done to us as blacks. I doubt that any white player out there has ever been called a monkey.” – Geoff Toyana

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

A statement on Tuesday in support of Lungi Ngidi’s stance on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has thrown into stark relief the gaping racial divisions in South African cricket. The release lists 31 former players and five current coaches as signatories. Not one of them is white. Neither have any white current or former national players volunteered their backing for Ngidi.

The document, which former Titans player and Lions coach Geoff Toyana told Cricbuzz was the work of “a collective”, seeks to “invite our fellow white cricketers to join in this move to defend human dignity”. Had any whites been approached to back the initiative? “No, but that’s a very good question,” Toyana said. “Those injustices were done to us as blacks. I doubt that any white player out there has ever been called a monkey.”

The atmosphere around the game has been racially charged in the wake of Ngidi being asked, during an online press conference last Monday, whether South Africa’s current players were talking about supporting BLM. “That’s definitely something that we will discuss once we are together in person,” he said. “We have spoken about it and everyone is well aware of what’s going on. It’s a difficult one because we are not together, so it’s hard to discuss. But once we get back to playing that is definitely something we have to address as a team.

“As a nation as well, we have a past that is very difficult because of racial discrimination. So it’s definitely something we will be addressing as a team and if we are not, it’s something I will bring up. It’s something that we need to take very seriously and, like the rest of the world is doing, make a stand.”

That earned Ngidi disapproval from former white players, who with no apparent evidence took his view to mean he was telling his peers what to do. “What nonsense is this,” Pat Symcox posted on social media. “[Ngidi] must take his own stand if he wishes. Stop trying to get the Proteas involved in his belief.”

In perhaps the only note of notable white support for Ngidi, Vince van der Bijl, a former fast bowler, disagreed: “BLM does not say other lives don’t matter … Respect is allowing others to have their opinions. You are allowed yours. We do not have the space to state all the things that we talk about. And agree on. Saying one thing does not exclude other beliefs. We ache for so many things in this country. Hopefully we can help the healing as opposed to widen the divides.”

Tuesday’s statement said: “We note … that the most outspoken criticism directed at Ngidi has come via former players such as Pat Symcox, Boeta Dippenaar, Rudi Steyn, Brian McMillan and others, and we urge that their views be challenged. We are not surprised at their comments.

“Given South Africa’s well-known past, black cricketers have borne the brunt of subtle and overt racist behaviour for many years, including from some colleagues. Consequently, there is a need to understand how white privilege feeds into the perpetuation of these old attitudes and assumptions.

“Our attitude, mistakenly, we now believe, has always been to say: ‘These are teething problems, and that these will be resolved if we are patient’. But after almost three decades of cricket unity, the views expressed from one side of the racial divide are still very much part of our lives, and we now believe: ‘Teething problems cannot be allowed to continue for this long’ …

“We represent, or have represented, South Africa on merit. Far too many white South Africans cannot accept that black cricketers have proved, time without end, that they are good enough to play at the highest level.”

South Africa’s 2019 rugby World Cup triumph, achieved with a squad captained by the black Siya Kolisi and that included 11 black or brown players — six of whom started the final — was proof that diversity bred strength, the statement said.

“We want to remind South Africans that, as recently as 2017, we were told that a South African sister sport, rugby, was ‘dead’ — killed by ‘transformation’. But guess what? South African rugby won a World Cup last year. We cannot recall anyone suggesting that the victory was due to transformation. Why is transformation always rammed down the throats of national teams when they lose, but never when they win?

“… We are determined that future generations should not have to experience the pain we have had to endure, and that no South African cricketer should be discriminated against in the future. Racism is a global problem and, as the great Michael Holding explained, we can no longer just keep on laughing, grimacing and moving on.”

Former Test fast bowler Holding, now a television commentator, made an impassioned plea for racial justice last week during coverage of the first Test between England and West Indies in Southampton.

Racial unity in South African cricket was proclaimed in 1991, but the game continues to struggle to properly represent the country’s black and brown people — who make up more than 90% of the population — on the field. Of the country’s 345 men’s Test players, 316 — more than 90% — have been white.

Makhaya Ntini, the only one among South Africa’s nine black Test players to earn 50 or more caps, was among the signatories of Tuesday’s release. The brown Hashim Amla, who played 124 Tests, was not. Neither was the brown Russell Domingo, the first South Africa head coach who is not white.

Such colour coding is grim. Not that it was, for the first 100 years and more of cricket’s history in South Africa, difficult to say which race was winning. But the match situation is changing — to the chagrin of some, not nearly quickly enough for others. Who’s winning now? That’s difficult to say, but this struggle is a long way from decided.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Rabada run ragged, but a long way from Holding’s heap of hard work

“I can say with absolute honesty that I used to run in wanting to take the batsman’s head off when I was trying to bowl a bouncer.” – Mitchell Johnson

TELFORD VICE in London

KAGISO Rabada is 54 days younger than Jofra Archer but he has bowled 6 566 more deliveries in Test cricket.

That was before Thursday’s third Ashes Test at Headingley, where the Bajan-born and raised England fast bowler might well add to his reputation for putting the fear of the gods into all who face him.

But, as Michael Holding warned this week, Rabada’s string of back injuries should serve as a warning of the dangers of pace bowlers piling up too many overs.

“It’s abuse,” the former West Indian quick declared.

Ten Test bowlers have sent down more overs than Rabada’s 1 138.2 since he made his debut against India in Mohali in November 2015.

Seven of them are spinners and the others — Stuart Broad, Josh Hazlewood and James Anderson — are between four and 13 years older than him.

Holding was 21 when he played his first Test, against Australia at the Gabba in November and December 1975 — a year older than Rabada was when he cracked the nod.

Rabada has bowled 6 830 deliveries in his 37 Tests. How many did Holding unleash in his first 37 Tests? A fair few more: 7 978.

But the took Holding almost seven years. Rabada has reached the same point in not quite four years.

And that’s only in Test cricket. Holding had bowled 10 023 balls for West Indies’ test and one-day teams by the time he had played 37 matches in the longest format.

Rabada has run in 11 094 times for South Africa in Test, one-day and T20 matches.

The cumulative effect of all that was alarmingly apparent at this year’s World Cup, where Rabada was sixth in South Africa’s bowling averages with 11 wickets at 36.09.

He looked a flat, pale imitation of the superb athlete who tore through batting line-ups earlier in his career.

And let’s not get too excited about the Indian Premier League, where Rabada has bowled only 410 balls in two campaigns.

He got through more than half as many — 213 — for the Jozi Stars in last year’s Mzansi Super League alone.

But it is clear Rabada has mislaid the fire that once burned so brightly in his bowling, and which was crisply articulated by a former keeper of the flame, Mitchell Johnson, in his column in the Independent this week.

“Bowling with pace and hostility doesn’t happen without the intent to do so,” Johnson wrote.

“You need the desire to do it in order to go through all the pain that comes with bowling at extreme speeds.

“I can say with absolute honesty that I used to run in wanting to take the batsman’s head off when I was trying to bowl a bouncer.

“That’s not me saying that I ever wanted to hurt anyone. It was simply a way to trick my mind and get up for the battle.”

Johnson wrote in the wake of Archer putting Steve Smith out of the Headingley match with a blow to the neck during the second Test at Lord’s that concussed the Australia kingpin, who scored centuries in both innings of the series opener at Edgbaston.

The sight of Smith poleaxed on the pitch would have reminded many of Phil Hughes being killed in similar circumstances in Sydney in November 2014, but it took Johnson back to the Centurion Test of February the same year.

“The one incident similar to Archer’s ball to Smith that I can recall from my playing days is when I hit South Africa’s Ryan McLaren in a Test,” Johnson wrote.

“I bowled the ball aiming for his head, but when it struck and I knew I’d hurt him I got no pleasure from it at all.

“I went to every length to make sure that Ryan knew that I was asking after him and hoped he was OK.”

McLaren rose and batted on in that second innings, but only for another five balls before being caught behind off Johnson — who also dismissed him in the first innings and finished with a career-best match haul of 12/157.

Rabada has taken 10 wickets in a Test four times. How many more such successes he will celebrates is difficult to know.

But he will know that, injury permitting, he has a long way to go before he’s done.

So far, Rabada has bowled 19 140 deliveries in all cricket since his junior days.

Holding, who played his last competitive match for a Malcolm Marshall XI against an International XI at the Honourable Artillery Company Ground in Finsbury in July 2000 — seven years after his 37th Test — sent down 61 396 balls in total. He was 46.

Hang in there, KG, you’re just more than half that age and not even a third of the way towards matching Holding’s heap of hard work.

First published by TMG Digital.

Jofra Archer stealing Simon Harmer’s thunder in England

“Archer bowled a third of all the overs bowled. That’s a spinner’s quota.” – Michael Holding bemoans fast bowlers’ workloads.

TELFORD VICE in London

JOFRA Archer is the flavour of the moment in English men’s cricket but he has a way to go to match the leading bowler in the country.

Off-spinner Simon Harmer, the South African who captains first-division Essex, has claimed 65 wickets — which includes seven five-wicket hauls and two of 10 wickets — at an average of 18.18 and an economy rate of 2.57 in 11 county championship matches.

And there are more South African players lighting up county cricket where Harmer came from.

Dane Vilas cracked this highest score in England this season, a career-best 266 off 240 balls, for Lancashire in their second-division game against Glamorgan in Colwyn Bay on Monday.

Vilas hit 35 fours and six sixes in an innings that started when Lancashire were 137/4. They were 539/9 on their way to a total of 545 — which helped them win by an innings and 150 runs — when he was bowled by medium pacer David Lloyd.

Dwaine Pretorius put in a reasonable T20 performance for Northamptonshire, scoring 139 runs in six innings and taking five wickets — although at the expensive economy rate of 8.28.

But he raised his game significantly in his first championship match for the second-division side this week, scoring 111 against a Worcestershire attack that included Wayne Parnell and Moeen Ali and doing his bit in Northants’ 10-wicket win.

None of which has caught much of the spotlight, which is being hogged by Archer, who claimed match figures of 5/91 on debut for England in the second Test against Australia at Lord’s, which ended on Sunday.

But that’s not why the Bajan-born and raised fast bowler is hitting the headlines hard.

Rather, it’s because he’s making a habit of hitting batters even harder with his express deliveries.

Archer put the skids under South Africa’s World Cup campaign by smacking Hashim Amla on the grille of his helmet, via the edge of Amla’s bat, in the opening match of the tournament at the Oval.

Amla returned after retiring hurt but missed South Africa’s next two matches.

On Saturday at Lord’s, Archer felled Steve Smith with a blow to the neck that concussed the Australian and has ruled him out for the third Test at Headingley, which starts on Thursday.

Archer also hit Marnus Labuschagne, who became cricket’s first ever concussion replacement when he stood in for Smith in the second innings, but did not injure him.

But former West Indies fast bowler Michael Holding has offered batters hope with his view that Archer won’t be around for long if England don’t ease his workload.

“Archer bowled a third of all the overs bowled,” Holding was quoted as saying in an interview with the Independent. “That’s a spinner’s quota.”

Archer sent down 44 of the 142 overs England bowled in the match: significantly less than the 27.3 assigned to Jack Leach, the home side’s first-choice slow bowler.

Part-time spinner Joe Root and Joe Denly had three overs between them, which means Archer bowled 23.3 more overs than the three spinners combined.

“If you keep bowling him like this you will lose the 96 miles-per-hour [154.5 kilometres-an-hour],” Holding was quoted as saying.

“He’ll still bowl fast, 90 mph [144.8 kmh], but do you want to lose the express pace? It is not just about this match or the next, but next year and the one after that.”

Holding held up Kagiso Rabada, who has been hampered by back injuries and was flat and ineffective at the World cup, as a cautionary tale against over-bowling.

“It’s abuse,” Holding said. “When I was bowling, we had three other quicks just as fast. We could share the burden.

“England need to be very careful with Archer. He is obviously very fit, as you could see with his recovery from the side strain.

“Like me, he is tall, not big and muscular. He relies on rhythm and looks very relaxed running in.

“All that is in his favour but it is not sustainable for England to use him like this in every match.”

First published by TMG Digital.

Time for commentators to put their mouths where the money is

It’s difficult to believe anyone listens to television commentary.

Times SELECT

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

SO, what’s it like to be a sportswriter? There are as many answers to the question as, you would think, there are sportswriters.

Here’s this sportswriter’s standard response, which he has had many more occasions than he could count to trot out in the past 26 years — it’s much better than a real job.

After those 26 years, which were preceded by several all too real jobs and interrupted by a sorry segue into the degrading unreality that is television, easily the worst job he’s ever had, it remains true.

At least it does for this sportswriter. As long, that is, as we’re not talking about making money, of which there is ever less in an industry eager to publish bloggy crap in lieu of journalism as long as it’s offered for free.

But there’s another answer to the question that’s right up there with the original — as a sportswriter, you don’t have to hear the television commentators.

Mind the difference between hear — which is often beyond our control, as in hearing traffic — and listen — a choice we make to lend someone our something our ears.

Put up in the pressbox, where televisions are either muted or at the lowest volume, or snug with the sideline, where the surround sound commentary would be too blue for television, sportswriters are embalmed against this irritating irrelevance.

So much so that it’s difficult to believe anyone listens to commentary. They might have to hear it, not least because watching a game on a mute television evokes the weirdness of sensory deprivation. And, yes, this sportswriter has tried that; more than once.

But listen to it? Why? The only possible reason is if the commentator is going to tell you something you can’t see for yourself.

In this sportswriter’s experience, which stretches back thousands of television hours and more than 40 years, that happy state has been achieved in a meaningful sense only once.

The broadcast of a Currie Cup match at Ellis Park was graced by the presence in the commentary box of James Small, who solved the mystery of an especially odd bounce of the ball by explaining that that spot of turf dipped below the level of the rest of the field, who told of which shards of wind blew through which gaps in the stands and did what to the airborne ball, who made it all wonderfully real for the viewer.

He spoke in words of high definition picture quality, using language that helped you smell the Deep Heat in the dressingroom itself.

Alas, Small’s commentary career, if it was ever that, was never cleared for take-off. It wouldn’t be a struggle to believe he was doomed by his own excellence, which put the mediocrities ranged around him in a poor light.

There have been other, less striking but more enduring examples of the holy grail Small found with little apparent effort.

Bill McLaren would come up with gems like, “And the father of four from Pontypool goes crashing into the loose scrum …”

But by the time he ventured into a commentary box McLaren had fought a war — he never shook the memory of happening on a heap of 1 500 corpses in Italy — and been denied his own international career by tuberculosis, which almost killed him.

He added richly to the experience of watching a rugby match because he knew the game itself mattered little, that it was something to be celebrated and not a lot else, that he was part of a grand carnival. He knew, and appreciated, that he didn’t have a real job.

Richie Benaud was dispassionate reason itself. So much so that he was what every other television type tries, and fails, to be: a journalist.

Thing is, Benaud was indeed a journalist — a police reporter and sport columnist — before he retired as a player. He was the real thing amid fakery, and that helped him tell his stories arrow straight. When Benaud spoke, you believed.

For McLaren and Benaud life beyond the boundary was more important than what happened within it, just like it is to the rest of us. James small, too, had his run-ins with reality.

Michael Holding merits an honourable exception. Regardless of whether you agreed with his assessment of the Wanderers surface for the third test against India as a “shit pitch”, you knew what the man thought.

But Holding went from a stellar career as a fast bowler, which ended at international level in 1987, to owning a petrol station in downtown Kingston, Jamaica until 1996.

The station was pointed out by a taxi driver to this sportswriter as we rattled past it in 1992, when it was abundantly obvious that it took a strong person to own anything in downtown Kingston.

But what is life to a generation of commentators who have gone from elite schools to illustrious playing careers to television studios? How do they relate their reality to that of their audiences’?

They don’t. Instead they prattle on anodynely, making sure not to say anything that would endanger their bosses’ status as rightsholders.

Controversy is not allowed. And controversy is what the suits say it is.

HD Ackerman and Danny Morrison were sacked as Indian Premier League commentators for daring to describe Virat Kohli as “a captain in waiting” during MS Dhoni’s tenure at India’s helm.

Daryll Cullinan was fired for saying South Africa had delivered “the worst fielding performance I’ve ever seen”.

Remember, gentle reader and viewer, that sport in the television age is bought and paid for like any other consumer product in deals that stretch beyond the limits of the field of play. There are no honest brokers in commentary boxes.

High time, isn’t it, that how much broadcasters pay for rights is revealed in the same way that we know how much a football club pays for its stars? Then we’ll know how much it’s worth to their commentators to toe the line.

Let’s hear them put their mouths where their money is.

Almost no blood at Wanderers, but drama aplenty

India’s captain would be justified in asking why the state of the pitch is an insurmountable problem now when it wasn’t for more than the first eight sessions of the match.

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE at The Wanderers

BLOOD was spilled at the Wanderers on Friday, but not in the way that you might think.

A reporter misjudged the height of a step in pressbox and his consequent stumble put a significant scratch in his leg.

“Nothing wrong with a bit of claret,” he quipped gamely as he rose and went in search of a tissue so as not to make a mess of the place.

But, if you believed what you saw, heard and read of some of the media coverage of the third test between South Africa and India, the Wanderers was awash with the red stuff. Or would be soon.

According to sources close to sources, the Bullring was living up to its nickname. The bulls — or batsmen — were dead. The matadors — or fast bowlers — were taking their bows, ears and tails in hand.

Except that all ears and tails stayed put. The closest anyone came to losing theirs was when Jasprit Bumrah bounced Dean Elgar at 5.09pm, midway through the ninth over of South Africa’s second innings.

The ball reared up as Elgar leapt and raised his bat in defence. Too little, too late: the round, red missile climbed above everything the batsman put in its way and hit him solidly on the grille of his helmet.

Off came the headgear to reveal a properly groggy face. But Elgar was on his feet, and there was no blood.

A salient fact was that the ball was pitched legitimately short.

Another was that Elgar didn’t play it as well as he might have; he took his eye off the delivery at the crucial instant.

Still another was that is was the only time in almost nine sessions of the match that a batsman had been hit on the helmet.

Even as medics were conducting concussion tests on Elgar, match referee Andy Pycroft was making his way down the stairs and onto the field.

After a short consultation with the umpires, Ian Gould and Aleem Dar, play was suspended.

Then the officials and the captains, Faf du Plessis and Virat Kohli, disappeared into a meeting room.

That was in accordance with the laws of cricket: “If the on-field umpires decide that it is dangerous or unreasonable for play to continue on the match pitch, they shall stop play and immediately advise the ICC [International Cricket Council] match referee.

“The on-field umpires and the ICC match referee shall then consult with both captains.

“If the captains agree to continue, play shall resume.”

Kohli would, of course, want to carry on. His team are nine wickets away from victory with two days left in the match and South Africa need 224 more runs to win in some of the most challenging batting conditions they will ever face.

Also, India’s captain would be justified in asking why the state of the pitch is an insurmountable problem now when it wasn’t for more than the first eight sessions of the match.

More than three hours after the forced close the ICC said the match would continue on Saturday.

From the start on Wednesday until an hour into the third session on Friday, physios had been called onto the field nine times; once for a blow to the ribs and seven times for thuds on the gloves, and then came Elgar.

Emphatic seam, swing and bounce are all part of the match’s thrilling equation.

Whether the pitch provides for a fair contest between bat and ball is another question, and the ICC will give us their answer after the match. For now, we have an enthralling game of cricket on our hands.

Cracks on the pitch have widened enough to become a factor in how the ball behaved after pitching. But they weren’t anything as alarming or alarmist as the cracks being made by the paid pundits in the commentary boxes upstairs.

Here at TMG Digital we prefer not to waste words on overpaid opinions. So we won’t trouble you with most of what was said.

But here’s a taste of it from a neutral, nogal, former West Indies fast bowler Michael Holding, who told ESPNCricinfo before lunch on Friday: “Two out of 100 — it’s a shit pitch. You can interpret that.

“They should have called it off when [Murali] Vijay got hit. This is not a cricket pitch, this is dangerous. Call it off, forget it. You can’t play cricket on that.

“I have no idea what has gone wrong but I know it’s not a good cricket pitch.

“The last time I saw something like this, the match was abandoned, in Jamaica in 1998. And it didn’t even last this long.”

This is the 2 294th test, of which only two have been abandoned because of substandard conditions.

In the first test of England’s series in the Caribbean in January 1998, the Sabina Park pitch was deemed too dangerous after 61 balls had been bowled.

Only 10 deliveries had been sent down in the second test at the Vivian Richards stadium in Antigua in February 2009 when it was decided that the outfield was too sandy. A halt was called after Fidel Edwards slipped, three consecutive times, as he tried to get into his delivery stride.

Neither of those matches, then, lasted anywhere near eight sessions. Did Holding voice anything like his views as expressed above after 61 or 10 balls had been bowled at the Wanderers, or at any stage of the first two days’ play?

Nevertheless, the theory that the umpires were considering calling off the match spread through the stadium like smoke from a braai gone badly wrong.

At lunch, as they were leaving the field, Gould and Dar spoke to groundsman Bethuel Buthelezi and his consultant, former groundsman Chris Scott.

Later, when deliveries seamed or swung or bounced excessively, the umpires conferred or went to stare sagely at the spot where the ball had pitched.

But there didn’t seem to be much indication that they would abandon the match, not least — as explained — because that authority doesn’t rest with them.

The ICC also make it clear that, “In no circumstances should the pitch ‘explode’.”

This one isn’t, but the suits might want to offer the same advice to the commentary box.