A Malan for the ages, and he’s not Pieter or Janneman

In an age of determinedly single-minded cricketers, the reading, writing, thinking André Malan is a ray of hope.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

IF you’re born a Malan in South Africa, prepare to be prominent. World War II Royal Air Force fighter pilot Sailor Malan was a champion of human rights in a society where they remain unachieved thanks to the evil perpetrated by people like DF Malan, the first prime minister of the apartheid state, which went through its death throes while the supreme commander of the armed forces and defence minister was Magnus Malan. Riaan Malan is a mad, bad, dangerous to know writer and musician whose searing 1990 memoir, “My Traitor’s Heart”, remains arguably the best book yet published in this country and unarguably the best dealing with those dark days. If you want to know the truth of living and dying in South Africa then, read it.

Now we have Janneman Malan, smiter of a series-clinching century in Bloemfontein on Wednesday in only his second ODI. His career in the format started in Paarl on Saturday with his toe being crunched in front of his stumps courtesy of a wickedly swinging 143 kilometre-an-hour delivery from Mitchell Starc. That made Malan the only debutant dismissed by the first ball of a game. His evening ended with him limping off the field because of a cramping glute. Pieter Malan, his brother, has given Test cricket a pair of biceps each as big as both of Nathan Bracken’s thighs. That and six hours at the crease on debut against England at Newlands in January for his 84. Then there’s André Malan, still another brother, who has played 50 first-class matches, only one for a franchise rather than a second-tier provincial side. He has scored eight centuries in 80 innings and averages 38.95. His fast bowling has earned him 60 wickets, among them two five-wicket hauls, at 29.10. You mightn’t think that puts André in the league of Janneman and Pieter, much less Malans of the stature of Sailor and Riaan. But, in the early hours of Thursday morning, with the truth of Janneman’s unbeaten 129 shining too brightly to be consigned to memory, André took to social media and offered 1,318 blazing words that began: “No. Those two letters must have made a nest in his mind and haunted him as he went to rest in his hostel bed that night. But deep down he knew the truth. That when he gets his chance he will make the hairs on the back of whoever is fortunate enough to watch him go about his work stand up. He will provide them with so much joy and awe that they, too, will believe in achieving exceptional feats while making it look like a weekend jog around the block. That is what they do, the special ones. They make mere mortals feel invincible. They make them stand up when they are alone at home in front of the television and cheer as if they are there, in the colosseum. They make them go out in the yard and argue who gets to be who in the game that is about to be played. Theatre. Art.”

What was that fateful “No”? Janneman wasn’t originally part of the North West University squad picked to play in a T20 tournament in February 2015, even though he had scored 129 in a franchise cubs game three weeks earlier. By then he also had an undefeated 214 in an under-17 provincial match and 10 half-centuries to show for his 37 innings since the start of his under-13 provincial career. But his disappointment at being overlooked was eased when injury earned him a place in the varsity squad. Still, he had scored only 72 runs in four innings when he walked out with Wihan Lubbe to open the batting in the semi-final against Stellenbosch University. They put on 140 with Lubbe scoring 52 and Malan the last man out, with a ball left in the innings, for 99. He was one of three runout victims in an innings in which none of the other seven players who batted reached double figures. Stellenbosch reeled in their target of 178 with four wickets standing and an over to spare. But three innings later Malan hammered 140 in the national club championships, and less than three weeks after that he made his first century at senior level: 129 not out in a provincial one-day game. A first-class century, 174, came eight months hence. After 65 innings at that level he has scored nine more hundreds and averages 50.36. International prominence awaits.

It’s long since been achieved domestically. December 17, 2016 at Newlands will forever be a special day for the Malan brothers. First Pieter converted his overnight 51 not out into 117 before Western Province’s second innings declaration came. Then, in North West’s search for a target of 351, Janneman made 135 and André 103 not out. Pieter took the catch that snuffed out his brothers’ march toward a century stand at 89.

All three Malans now live in Cape Town. Pieter, the eldest, moved in September 2013 in search of better playing opportunities while Janneman, the youngest, was still at high school. Now André, his wife, Elzane, and Janneman share a house in the winelands.

None of which tells the Malans’ story nearly as well as André: “I met Janneman before he was born. Myself and Pieter incessantly whispered against our mother’s pregnant belly: ‘We are waiting for you. Hurry up so we can get playing.’ When the news came that he was born [in Nelspruit] at a healthy 4.1 kilogrammes we jumped for joy. Growing up he had to start off his backyard playing career by taking cover behind a big tree in our backyard when we were playing our cricket games. He soon got the go ahead from our insanely knowledgeable (about cricket and everything else) mother that he had outgrown the protection of the bark and was able to now fully compete in Suiderkruis Street 64’s sanctioned cricket games. Our youthful and loving father was the groundsman, umpire, first change bowler and sponsor. Janneman, barely five or so, bravely and enthusiastically strutted to the stumps when it was his turn to bat. Barely being able to look over his pads, he confidently asked for middle. Sooner rather than later the only middle at play was of the bat he was holding in his hands.”

As the words of a brother, they are blood rendered in ink. They are also sentiments of support that transcend even so strong a link. And they are damn fine words in their own right: “Here is where the special ones live. On that razor-thin line between order and chaos. Where they have to contend with the dragon of chaos that hoards the gold.”

To think English isn’t his first language. Or even his second. Like his brothers André is a native Afrikaans-speaker, and he grew up with Setswana also in his ears and his mouth. English is thus his third language. He also speaks isiXhosa. An avid reader of mostly non-fiction — “I said to myself if I’m going to read I might as well read something that’s going to help my studies, so I stopped reading fiction” — he enjoys writing about “incidents that transcend the ordinary”. Like his brother’s innings.

In an age of determinedly single-minded cricketers, who seem to only cricket know and, worse, appear uninterested in much else unless it’s going to make them money, André Malan is a ray of hope. He holds a bachelor of commerce degree in industrial psychology and labour relations and an honours in the former. “I’m also registered as a psychometrist. I’m not practising as one yet as I am just focusing on my cricket career for now.” His writing illuminates a keen interest in people, so it’s no surprise that he says, “I hope it humanises cricketers.” Might he consider taking up the pencil professionally? “Perhaps. When someone tells me I’m too old and terrible to contract anymore.” 

He’s 29, so that’s unlikely to happen for a few years yet. But he has a calling when he gives up the foolery of flanneldom: the Malans could use a few more Sailors to steer the family ship away from the wreckage wrought by monsters like Magnus and DF. Go get that dragon.

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.