Surrey – Bulletproof Truth

Amla starts another innings

“He doesn’t assign himself to any particular group. ‘Hash’ is a lone warrior. He can fit in with anyone.” – Dale Steyn on Hashim Amla

Telford Vice / Cape Town

WEDNESDAY’S announcement that Hashim Amla had been appointed the Gauteng Lions’ batting coach prompted a question: had he ever been away from the game? Not really, or not nearly long enough for anyone to forget the mark he left on it. Some players leave memories. Others make magic that shimmers long after they’re gone.

But even a career as stellar as Amla’s — 28 centuries and 9,282 runs at 46.64 in 215 Test innings, and still the fastest man to reach 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 6,000 and 7,000 runs in ODIs — doesn’t guarantee success as a coach. What might he bring to the role?

“Any team who sign him up are going to benefit from him and his presence,” Dale Steyn, who shared a dressing room with Amla in 89 Tests, 95 ODIs and 20 T20Is, or more than half of Amla’s international career, told Cricbuzz.

“Even if he wasn’t a coach, if he was just a mentor, just people talking to him and listening to him, seeing what a calm person he is, would help a team so much. As a coach, what’s even better is that he can add his input on things like how to score, where to score, when to score, when not to score. From a batting perspective, that’s massive.

“He’s also a leader in that he captained South Africa [in 14 Tests, nine ODIs and two T20Is, and to the final of the 2002 under-19 World Cup]. He ticks a lot of boxes in the sense that he can assist many people in that space, whether it’s the captain, the head coach, or any player.

“He’s one of the most approachable people I’ve ever had the pleasure of hanging around with. He doesn’t assign himself to any particular group. ‘Hash’ is a lone warrior. He can fit in with anyone. That’s a great benefit to have in a team because anyone can go and talk to him. He has a wealth of knowledge, and the Lions are really going to benefit from that.”

Amla featured in the last of his 349 internationals in June 2019, then appeared in 59 other matches. These were for Karnataka Tuskers, Falcon Hunters, Khulna Tigers, World Giants — T10, BPL and legends outfits — and Surrey.

In 21 innings for the latter in last year’s county championship he scored two centuries and three 50s amid his 718 runs at 39.88. Not bad for someone who turned 40 on March 31. Then again, that makes him 245 days younger than James Anderson, who is still going if not exactly strong.

On January 18 this year Amla said he was hanging up his famously unsweaty batting gloves for good, prompting an outpouring of appreciation for his career and character from former teammates and opponents alike. But, in March, he played in two legends T20s in Doha. He scored 68 off 59 in the second of them, against an attack that included Mohammad Hafeez, Mohammad Amir, Abdur Razzak, Sohail Tanvir, Shahid Afridi and Abdul Razzaq.

By then he had graced Mumbai Indians Cape Town’s dugout as their batting coach, but they lost seven of their 10 matches and were the first team eliminated from the playoffs in the inaugural SA20. And now this, a real job. Amla will be Lions head coach Russell Domingo’s go-to batting man for all three formats. He will also, Lions chief executive Jono Leaf-Wright said on Thursday, “add value in the women’s, academy and U19 space”.

On last season’s evidence, most of Amla’s focus will be on the first-class competition, in which the Lions finished fourth out of eight teams. Ryan Rickelton, fuelled by what he took as the injustice of being ruled unavailable for South Africa because of an ankle injury that didn’t stop him from playing domestically, scored three centuries in five innings. But Joshua Richards, Wiaan Mulder and Bjorn Fortuin were the team’s only other century-makers with one each.

The addition to the Lions’ ranks from Western Province of Zubayr Hamza, who will hope to find his way back to the path he veered off after playing six Tests from January 2019 to February 2022, will be watched with interest. Amla will prove his worth if he coaxes Hamza back to the kind of form that earned him an undefeated 202 in his fourth first-class innings, along with two other double centuries and 11 mere hundreds in 139 trips to the crease in which he has scored 5,647 runs at 46.28. Amla will earn more credit if he sorts out Rassie van der Dussen, who has reached 50 just twice of his last 17 innings for South Africa across the formats, both in the course of scoring centuries in ODIs against England.

Fix Hamza’s game and revive Van der Dussen’s. Keep Rickelton firing, Temba Bavuma solid and Reeza Hendricks’ eyes on the prize of a regular place in South Africa’s white-ball sides. Help Mulder hang onto his self-belief. Build Fortuin’s batting ability. Make sure Dominic Hendricks, Evan Jones, Mitch van Buuren and Richards keep doing what they’re doing, only better. Do so despite limited contact with some of those players, who will be in the national set-up for much of their time.

Two days into the job Amla’s to-do list is long, and will likely lengthen. It’s hard enough making memories and magic as a player, harder still when all you can do, after everything, is sit and watch like everyone else. Good thing he’s a calm lone warrior who can fit in with anyone.

Cricbuzz

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Robin Jackman: A life in much more than cricket

Decent, loved, complex. Jackman was, like all of us, someone of light and shade.

Telford Vice | Centurion

ROBIN Jackman smiled as easily as he made others smile. He knew how to tell ordinary stories in extraordinary ways and in a warm, welcoming voice that helped him earn another career in the game. He could bowl a bit, talk a bit, and sing a bit: “Jessie, paint a picture about how it’s going to be. By now I should know better, your dreams are never free.”

Few of the evenings on which South Africa’s cricket media gathered didn’t feature Jackman crooning soulfully through Joshua Kadison’s 1993 song. Those happy times are no more. Jackman died on Friday. He was 75.

He lived a life that seemed to have spilled from the pages of a novel. His father was a one-legged officer with the Second Gurkha Rifles, which is why he was born in the Indian hill station of Shimla. His uncle was Patrick Cargill, a noted actor, who one day invited his nephew, then 15, to lunch. Also there were Charlie Chaplin and Sophia Loren — who arrived in a Rolls Royce and elegantly swept into the kitchen, carrying her own pots and pans, to do the cooking.

“She was drop dead gorgeous, sitting in a chair, a bit like royalty … I wish I could claim that I dazzled her with my scintillating conversation and rapier wit but I don’t think I said anything to her other than ‘Good afternoon’,” Jackman wrote, with the help of cricket journalist Colin Bryden in “Jackers: A Life In Cricket”, of his encounter with perhaps the most famous woman in the world at the time.

Despite the title of that 2012 book, Jackman’s life involved so much more than cricket. Even his playing career collided with the real world. His record lists four tests and 15 ODIs for England, but the truth is he was as much South African as he was English. His widow, Yvonne Jackman, is a nurse originally from Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. His home was in the Newlands area of Cape Town. Along with Surrey, he played for Western Province — and managed and coached them — and what was then called Rhodesia. All that connection to pariah states like South Africa and Rhodesia was bound to raise red flags.

So what were England thinking when they picked Jackman for their tour to West Indies in 1981, considering by then his ties to South Africa stretched back 11 years? Guyana revoked his visa, England refused to back down, and consequently the second Test at the Bourda in Georgetown was cancelled. Barbados let Jackman in, and on debut at Kensington Oval he had Gordon Greenidge and Clive Lloyd caught at slip and Desmond Hayes taken behind.

No-one who knew Jackman was surprised by those polar opposites. He was made for drama, or comedy-drama. His uncle was the thespian in the family, but one of Jackman’s early ambitions was to follow him to the footlights. Instead he developed one of the most theatrical appeals of his era, which upset with Ian Botham. “When I first played against him I wanted to knock his head off because he really antagonised me; I thought you arrogant, strutting gnome,” Botham wrote in his autobiography.

Jackman was proud of being able to bowl fast despite, as he described it, being “five-foot fuck-all” and built like an old-fashioned rugby scrumhalf. In the Times, Alan Gibson dubbed him the “Shoreditch Sparrow”. He was a workhorse for Surrey, sending down 71,094 deliveries in the 611 matches he played for the county from June 1966 to September 1982. He took 1,206 first-class wickets at 22.36 for them, and 399 at 20.73 in list A games.

His eyes shone like medals when he was told, in 2010, that he had dismissed Barry Richards more times — 16 — than anyone else who dared bowl to him in first-class cricket. That was no doubt influenced by the fact that Jackman had more chances than others to get Richards out because both played in England and South Africa, but it tells the story of Jackman’s class nonetheless. As did his decision not to use that truth to talk himself up, but to paint a picture of Richards’ greatness: “When the fixtures came out at the beginning of the season, one thing we always used to look at was whether we were playing Hampshire over the Wimbledon fortnight. Because if we were, there was very little chance that Barry would be playing. He managed to find a groin injury when Wimbledon was on.”

CSA’s interim board captured something of what Jackman meant to cricket in a statement on Saturday: “His passing … leaves a void in the cricketing world but particularly in South African cricketing life. We mourn the loss of a fine man, a lover of life, a cricket aficionado and a commentator who became part of the fabric of South African cricket in so many ways.”

A little later came confirmation that South Africa would wear black armbands on the second day of the first Test against Sri Lanka at Centurion on Sunday. But that wasn’t soon enough for Jacques Kallis, who tweeted on Saturday: “Sad to see no black armbands worn by Proteas for Robin Jackman today. A man that gave so much to SA cricket at all levels and all walks of life. RIP Jackers.” That would be same Kallis who has said nothing for all the months that the fraught conversation about racial injustice in cricket has ripped through the game in his country, and who has shown that he is not above using sport to talk abut politics by calling for the return of the death penalty in South Africa.

Ben Dladla, the president of the KwaZulu-Natal Cricket Union, a candidate for the vacant CSA presidency, and one of the few figures on the members council who commanded respect, died in the early hours of Sunday morning. Nobody said a word about him until a CSA statement landed at the stroke of lunch on Sunday. There was no mention of black armbands, although the team has been asked to state their position.

Even in death, Jackman can’t avoid the real world. The fact that he was fathered by a member of a colonising army in a brutally colonised country is in itself worthy of honest examination. Jackman wasn’t responsible for that, of course. But it was his decision to associate himself so closely with apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, where a war between a minority white regime and a subjugated black majority raged even as cricket continued regardless.

And yet, it was impossible not to like Jackman. He neither suffered fools nor put himself on a pedestal. He afforded all he encountered a level of respect that, were it more widespread, would make today’s social media poisoned world exponentially more kind. It was as much a pleasure to talk to him as it was to listen to him. “Howzit Jackers,” was among the most common things you could hear in South Africa’s press boxes. As was: “Fine, thank you, mate. And how are you?”

Jackman’s life teaches us what we should know already: that no-one is entirely good nor entirely bad, and that most of us — if we’ve lived decently — will be closer to the former than the latter when we die. Jackman, who spent his evenings drinking and smoking but always looked good as new in the morning, who could crackle with swearwords and cackle with joy all in the same sentence, was decent. And complex. And loved. He will be missed, including by those who question aspects of his life and times.

An hour before the resumption at Centurion on Sunday morning, with the players warming up and the press filtering in for work, the strains of Joshua Kadison’s “Jessie” echoed around the ground, courtesy of the public address announcer. Few seemed to understand the significance, but those who did allowed their eyes to shine like medals.

Jackers, paint a picture about how it’s going to be. By now we should know better, our dreams are never free.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Leading Edge: the death and birth of cricket seasons

It’s a cruel truth of sport that, however much lip service stronger teams pay to the notion that all opponents are created equal and must be respected, they don’t believe anything of the sort for the damn straight reason that it isn’t true.

FIELD OF DREAMS: The Oval in repose. (Photograph: Telford Vice)

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

IT’S strange and alienating to be at a funeral when, far away across the latitudes, the birth of a new member of the family is awaited with keen anticipation.

So it was that this reporter found himself looking down last week on The Oval, where a match in the last round of county championship fixtures for this English summer spooled through what will be the final days of sunshine before winter takes its grim, grey grip on every aspect of life here.

Essex, who bowled Surrey out for 67 in the first innings and ended up chasing 132 to win, lost their ninth wicket with eight runs still required. They got there in the end.

Surrey had won the title the week before, not least thanks to a rejuvenated, reinvented Morné Morkel, who took 59 wickets at 14.32 in 10 games.

“So happy,” Morkel said as he stood on one of cricket’s most storied outfields even as raucous celebrations erupted around him. “It’s a fantastic bunch of guys. We worked so hard this season to lift this trophy, and what a special day today. It was a very close game, but, ja, so happy.

“We are the champions and we needed to show that. We could easily have gone through the motions and let the game drift. But we wanted to put up a fight and we wanted to show why we’re the No. 1 team in the country.”

It was the way a season should end: with drama and whooping and champagne, and with one of the finest men cricket is privileged to count among its own on hand to seal it all with his personal happiness.

If only all funerals could be like this — no-one dies and we get to do it all again in a few months’ time.

Over the seas, past the equator and southward still to the sharp tip of Africa, another cricket season is stirring to life.

It’s not the best one South Africans could have had but it is the only one. Besides, you can’t expect to see India and Australia up close and, sometimes, way too personal every summer. And whether we would survive another round of Virat Kohli’s movie star bumptiousness and the Australians’ proudly professional uncouthness with our sanity intact is not at all certain.

So perhaps we should be quietly grateful that it is Zimbabwe, the last team anyone besides other Zimbabweans would pay good money to see in action, who got South Africa’s home season going in Kimberley on Sunday in the first of three one-day internationals.

Watching Zimbabwe is a little like seeing a once great player fallen on hard times and reduced to telling stories of their glory days well enough — or with enough embellishment — to coax a pitying audience to buy them another beer.

The difference is that Zimbabwe are all out of stories, and that they have never really had any glory days to embellish.

Even if they win the series three-zip, and all three T20s that are to follow, they will be forgotten by South Africans before they pack their kit and go home. Ag shame and thanks for coming.

It’s a cruel truth of sport that, however much lip service stronger teams pay to the notion that all their opponents are created equal and must be respected in those terms, they don’t believe anything of the sort for the damn straight reason that it isn’t true.

South Africa know this. Zimbabwe know this. But, for the next two weeks, the myth will be repeated rote fashion at every opportunity.

All of which means the new family member is awaited with something less than the joy that greeted the funeral up north.

Strange and alienating days indeed: for the first time in more than 10 years there will be no Morkel in a South Africa shirt this summer and no AB de Villiers, and in Kimberley — as well as in Bloemfontein on Wednesday and in Paarl on Saturday — there was no Faf du Plessis and no Hashim Amla.

But we’ll be there. Always.

Elgar back at Surrey, but so far not so good

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

DEAN Elgar was back at the crease for Surrey at the Oval on Wednesday, looking for the form he left in England three months ago.

Elgar made 87, 90 and 51 in consecutive one-day innings, which followed the 61 he scored in his last first-class match for them, to end his first stint with the county in style.

But those runs evaporated in Sri Lanka’s heat and dust last month, when he scored 59 runs in four innings in the Test series.

Now Elgar has replaced Aaron Finch, who has returned to Australia, as Surrey’s overseas player.

So far, not so good. The South African batted at No. 3 against Nottinghamshire on Wednesday and was trapped in front for eight. He faced 24 balls.

Elgar, who will stay in England until the end of the season, which is scheduled for September 27, would do well to follow his own advice, which he dispensed in a video interview with former Surrey and England batsman Mark Butcher that was posted on Surrey’s Twitter account.

“If you wait for the ball you’ll be able to manipulate it more or less where you want it to go,” Elgar said as he hit balls in the nets, purposefully using minimal footwork.

“It allows you to leave if the length’s not there or the line’s not there for your. It’s important for allowing the ball to come to you.

“I’ve been doing that ever since I started playing professional cricket.”

Had Surrey played the fixture that started on Wednesday later in the campaign Elgar might have come face to face with Keshav Maharaj, who has been signed by Notts for their last four championship matches.

Other South Africans available for national selection don’t feature prominently in the county statistics.

They are led by Derbyshire’s Duanne Olivier, who is joint 12th among the wicket-takers in the second division with 31 scalps in seven matches.

Dane Vilas, who played six Tests and a T20 for South Africa before signing a Kolpak deal, has scored two centuries and a half-century for Lancashire and is ninth on the list of runscorers in the first division.

Elgar’s Surrey teammate, Morné Morkel, who retired from international cricket last season, took 33 sticks in six games before Wednesday and was joint sixth among first-division bowlers.

Durban-born Wayne Madsen and Colin Ackermann, who hails from George are the top runscorers in the second division.

Neither are able to play for South Africa.

Saffers star in Surrey’s success

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

LIZELLE Lee lit up the final of the Super League in Brighton on Monday, hammering 104 to blaze Surrey Stars to a total of 183/6 in their 20 overs.

Then almost newlyweds Marizanne Kapp and Dané van Niekerk took 5/51 in community of property — or 2/14 and 3/37 in antenuptial terms — to help dismiss Longborough Lightning for 117.

Lee lashed her runs, only 16 of which she actually had to run, off 58 balls with 13 fours and six sixes.

Fast bowler Kapp and leg spinner Van Niekerk, who clipped a cameo 15 not out, took 3/17 in the three overs they bowled in tandem.

Van Niekerk ended her second over, the 10th of the innings, by dismissing Georgia Elwiss and Georgia Adams with consecutive deliveries.

She was denied a shot at a hattrick when the next over from that end was bowled by Mady Villiers.

Lee’s innings was the tournament’s highest score and only the second century made this year.

Van Niekerk and Kapp finished fifth and joint sixth among the wicket-takers with 13 and 11 scalps.

The only other South African in the tournament, Mignon du Preez, scored 174 runs in 10 innings for the Southern Vipers.

As much as Surrey thank their stars for their Saffer Stars, the South Africans will no doubt be grateful not only for the money they’ve earned but also for the gametime they otherwise would not have had.

As Lee said after the final, with reference to the competition being played over two rounds for the first time, “It was good to know that if you didn’t have a good first round you could always come back in the second round.”

In just days more than a month in England, Lee had 11 innings — only one fewer than she had for South Africa in T20s for the whole 2017-18 season.