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.
Bulletproof Truth 