When Wakanda went to Middle Earth

“I’ve worked my whole life to play Test cricket. To get across the line and make a contribution is something I’m really proud of.” – Kyle Verreynne

Telford Vice | Cape Town

A prince of Wakanda loomed large and in charge in Middle Earth on Monday. He didn’t exactly come in peace, but, unlike what’s going on some 17,000 kilometres away from Christchurch in Ukraine, due respect was given by all to all, arrogance was not allowed, the rules of engagement were strictly observed, and no blood was shed. 

Kagiso Rabada was that prince. His 34-ball 47, a career-best that was studded with four fours and as many sixes, was a thing of ruthless righteousness. It was exactly what South Africa needed when they needed it — after they had slipped to 219/7, a lead of 290.

Had the last three wickets tumbled quickly, leaving New Zealand a target not much bigger or perhaps even smaller than 300, this would be a different game. But Rabada’s strokeplay, as cleanly hit as it was ambitious and thrilling, powered a stand of 78 off 63 balls. That allowed South Africa to make a declaration that set New Zealand a towering target of 426 in four sessions. 

Then Rabada removed openers Tom Latham and Will Young via catches in the gully and at short leg with the third and 13th deliveries of the innings, reducing the home side to 6/2. Latham and Young were also in Rabada’s pocket in the first innings, which made him the first South Africa bowler to dismiss both openers in both innings of a Test since Morné Morkel undid Chris Gayle and Travis Dowlin twice at Queen’s Park Oval in June 2010.

By stumps New Zealand were 94/4 — still 332 runs away from victory and heavily dependent on Devon Conway turning his unbeaten 60 into something exponentially bigger, on Tom Blundell coming up with something like the 96 he scored in the first Test, and on Colin de Grandhomme reprising the undefeated 120 he made in the first innings. A lot needs to go right for the Kiwis if they are to earn what would be their first Test series win over South Africa.

Rabada, who took 5/60 in the first innings and is three strikes away from his fifth 10-wicket haul, has had much to do with South Africa’s stirring revival after being beaten by an innings and 276 runs in seven sessions in the first Test. And he’s done it with grace and civility; a credit to the game and an example of how to conduct yourself in the heat of even the highest level of competition. Vladimir Putin wouldn’t understand, and not only because he likely has no clue about cricket beyond online tittering about his unsettling resemblance to someone called Nasser Hussain.

But the prince couldn’t do it all on his own, especially when he was batting. He needed a pauper. None were available. Instead, he had Kyle Verreynne: far from a pauper, not quite a prince. When Verreynne made his debut in St Lucia in June, Quinton de Kock was entrenched as South Africa’s first-choice wicketkeeper-batter. Only after De Kock’s bolt from the blue Test retirement in December, in the aftermath of the lost first Test against India in Centurion, did he get his hands on the gloves. By then, Verreynne had scored 39 runs in three innings. In his next five trips to the crease, as the ’keeper, he made 73. An average of 14.00 after eight innings is not what non-bowling Test players are made of, especially if they are trying to fill a vacancy left by someone who has taken middle order batting to another level.

Concerns about the void De Kock left in South Africa’s order were allayed when they won the last two Tests against India. In both of those matches, Verreynne was sat padded up as the next batter in when the winning runs were struck. He didn’t get the chance to show that he was the man for moments like those, and in the process answer the De Kock question.

So the performance he delivered at Hagley Oval on Sunday and Monday was a milestone in more than one way. Only AB de Villiers, JP Duminy and De Kock have made higher scores batting at No. 6 for South Africa in an away Test than Verreynne’s undefeated 136.

He took guard at 104/3, and in the wake of the end of a stabilising stand of 65 between Rassie van der Dussen and Temba Bavuma. It was an important stage of the match, a moment that had to be won. Verreynne won it with patience — he faced 23 deliveries to make it into double figures — before showing dependability and commitment — two of the six partnerships he batted through were worth more than 50: with Wiaan Mulder and Rabada, both 78 — and a dash of acceleration — his second 50 flew off 61 balls.

He fulfilled every entry on the wishlist South Africa might have compiled when Van der Dussen and Bavuma were separated. He also answered the De Kock question, not that he thought it had been asked.

“I’ve never been made to feel I’m ‘Quinny’s replacement,” Verreynne told an online press conference. “His retirement came as a shock to all of us, but from the next day I had support and backing that this is my spot. He had a great Test career and he was very successful, so I understand there’s going to be expectations to live up to what he has done. But I have been fortunate that I’ve been backed.” 

What with Ryan Rickelton also in the squad, did he wonder if his presence in the XI might have been up for discussion? If so, had that pressure been dissipated? “I didn’t feel like I was batting for my place,” Verreynne said. “And I don’t know why you would be relieved about getting a hundred. You’re overjoyed and happy with what you’ve achieved. I’ve worked my whole life to play Test cricket. To get across the line and make a contribution is something I’m really proud of. When I did cross the mark, it was a sense of pride and joy that I had made a big impact towards pushing for a result.”

Cricket’s princes aren’t asked questions like that. Ensconced in the ranks of the rarefied, they are above and beyond such banality. Don’t bother them with mission possible. Bother, instead, mortals like Verreynne, who was asked to explain South Africa’s stirring comeback just days after crashing to the second-heaviest defeat in their history. He gave an admirably straight answer: “Within the team there were no doubts about what we were capable of. To the public it looks like a massive turnaround but less than a month ago, against India, we dominated them with the bat in the sense that we scored more runs than they did in tough conditions. So there was always that confidence.

“We saw the first Test as just one of those things. Sometimes it happens in this sport where everything just falls apart, which it did in the first Test.”

And sometimes everything comes together, like it has for South Africa in this Test.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Baklava, bridges and brutality: inside Erdoğan’s Turkey

The hand of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the closet islamist – some accuse him of practising neo-Ottomanism – trying to subvert Turkey’s decades of secularism is plain to all who want to see it.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

“ARE you a christian?” The question was trapped in the amber of the muslim call to prayer ringing out all around. It was asked by an old man as we stood across the street from the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate and in front of St George Church in the Fatih area of Istanbul upon a golden Sunday evening a few weeks ago.

I said I was free of faith. He looked bemused.

“Free of faith? Free of faith! Hmph! But without faith you cannot live.”

I did not argue the obvious: here I was, alive, well and happy. Probably, in significant part, because I was free of faith.

He didn’t pursue the issue, no doubt considering me a lost cause. Instead he unfurled priest’s vestments, all but disappeared into their billowing blackness as he donned them with a flourish, bade us farewell, and marched theatrically into the church to solemnise a wedding. Father Elvis, not his real name, had entered the building.

In a restaurant in thoroughly hipsterised Karaköy, a young woman sat among friends who had gathered to mark one of their birthdays. Only she wore hijab. But, like everyone else at the table, she smoked and swigged beer from the bottle.

Was she rebelling against her culture? Was she a subversive in disguise trying to undermine the faith that signals that culture? What would the Istanbullus who are adamant that the nation is divided strictly into those who drink alcohol and those who do not make of her? She had faith, it appeared. Would Father Elvis have approved?

Like baklava, Turkey has many layers. It is more probable than possible, in only a few of Istanbul’s teeming streets, to find cafés serving muddy Turkish coffee alongside those offering the jet fuel that is Antipodeans’ gift to espresso.

Or classy bars and restaurants showcasing some of the 61.5-million litres of wine the country producers annually — much of it of high quality, but only 5% of it exported — to a nation of more than 82-million, 99.8% of whom call themselves muslim.

Or nostalgic shrines to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — the modernising secularist who was galvanised by leading an army to victory over the Allies, commanded by Winston Churchill, at Gallipoli in 1916 into the founding father of modern Turkey in 1923 — within sight of staunchly sacrosanct places of worship.

Or luridly pink-mouthed, wigged, tight-topped transsexual sex workers leaning out of first-floor windows and trying, loudly, to fish customers from the streaming pavements leading to a market frequented by conservative Kurdish women, identifiable by their penchant for snowy, delicately tassled, almost gossamer hijab.

Or 3.6-million Syrians, having fled the war at home, transposing their lives — complete with cardamom-laced coffee, a type of dried spinach called molokhiya, and restaurants using the same names, offering the same menu, staffed by the same chefs and waiters, serving the same customers as they did in Damascus and Aleppo — onto a city that has shape-shifted through the ages from being called Lygos, Augusta Antonina, Byzantium, Stanbulin, Constantinople, Islambol, Polin, Bolis, al-Qustantiniyya, the New Rome, the New Jerusalem, to Throne of the Romans.  

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has mastered separating the layers of the baklava just far enough — while also keeping the whole in one piece — to stay in power.

Born, on February 26, 1954 in Kasımpaşa, an ancient section of Beyoğlu on Istanbul’s European side whose hills tumble into the Golden Horn, Erdoğan grew up selling lemonade and simit, a kind of crisp, sesame-seeded bagel that is the breakfast of choice for almost every Turk, in the streets — where he also played football.

Rather than a prolific scorer he was blessed with the foresight to create goals, and played professionally for Kasımpaşa. These days the club’s stadium, immaculately appointed but small with a capacity of only 14 000, bears his name.

That doesn’t fit with rest of the Erdoğan story, because what he does he does big. Bridges swoop and gleam, one, across the Golden Horn, comes replete with a metro stop, another is the third suspension bridge across the Bosphorus. A mosque in the grand imperial manner, big enough to hold 63 000, looms lumpily in the distance. A vast new international airport is slickly efficient and almost an enjoyable place to be. A tunnel has been burrowed under the Bosphorus, all the better to apply a laxative to Istanbul’s chronically car-clogged colon.

Erdoğan holds a Trumpian perspective laced with Putinesque overtones, which never fails to quicken the patriotic pulse, particularly of Turks outside the main centres. At the Bosphorus bridge’s opening in August 2016, he presented a Turkish proverb as his own profundity: “When a donkey dies it leaves behind its saddle. When a man dies he leaves behind his works. We will be remembered for this.”

But, as with Donald Trump, there is dodginess in the details. The running track that hugs the shore under the bridge over the Golden Horn looks like something out of user-friendly Brisbane. Alas, it peters out in less than a kilometre.  

Similarly, kiosks flutter with all manner of newspapers, 45 of them national dailies, and another 15 exclusive to Istanbul. And few will say less than a glowing word about Erdoğan, not least because 231 journalists have been jailed in the wake of a failed coup on July 15, 2016.

The hand of Erdoğan the closet islamist — some accuse him of practising neo-Ottomanism — trying to subvert Turkey’s decades of secularism is plain to all who want to see it.

Mosques are built in spaces previously dominated by churches, and like all the others in the country they are funded by the regime, which pays everything from the salaries of clerics to the cleaning bills — and controls what is preached. Every Thursday evening the sermon for the next day’s juma service, the week’s most important and best attended prayer for muslims the world over, flutters into the inbox of every imam in Turkey. That’s not to say the men of the cloth don’t have a choice: either they relay the message as is, or follow the themes outlined, helpfully, in the same document.

Lessons on evolution and Atatürk and his successor, Ismet Inönü, have been removed from the school curriculum amid promises to teach “from the perspective of a national and moral education” to “protect national values” — code for a more conservative, religious approach.

And it’s working. Turkish flags displayed prominently in the streets, and there are many, have been put there either by overt nationalists or immigrants desperate to proclaim their affection for the country. 

If you want to research why that has happened if you are in Turkey don’t bother with Wikipedia: since April 2017 the site has been banned there in the wake of articles that said the country was a state sponsor of terrorism.

“My motherland, my beautiful but bruised motherland, is not a democracy,” Turkish author Elif Shafak wrote in an article for Politico last year. For views like that she is routinely rubbished in Erdoğan’s press, and never given the right of reply.

Yet erudite, impassioned opposition to the president and his government’s policies is as easy to find in Istanbul’s streets as crisp baklava and muddy coffee.

People speak openly about their fear of where Turkey might be after Erdoğan, who has ruled since 2003, is no longer in office; when his powerful allies in the construction industry finally run out of money. But some of those same people decline to accept the fact of the genocide, perpetrated by the Ottomans, that claimed the lives of 1.5-million Armenians between 1914 and 1923. On that score they are one with Erdoğan’s regime, which protested petulantly in April when France and Portugal officially recognised this systematic mass murder for what it was.

The Kurds will know how the Armenians felt. Erdoğan has long labelled their organised structures as terrorist, and there is evidence that in their attempts to raise funds they operate more like the mafia than political groups. But Turkey’s army didn’t ask who was a member of what when they began driving the Kurds out of northern Syria on October 9 — which they were free to do after Trump withdrew a small force of strategically situated American troops. Erdoğan wanted a buffer 30 kilometres deep and 480 kilometres long on Turkey’s southern border with Syria, and by October 28 his troops had displaced an estimated 130 000 and left 400 000 without access to clean water. How many have been killed in the cause is unclear.

On October 29 the anti-Trump US congress decided, by 405 votes to 11, that the Armenians had indeed been victims of genocide. As a position of principle it came a century too late. As a backlash against their own president it was clear, and derided by the Turks.

“Circles believing that they will take revenge this way are mistaken,” foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu posted on social media. “This shameful decision of those exploiting history in politics is null and void for our government and people.”

The brutality and bloodletting has ceased, at least until Erdoğan makes good on his threat to chase the legions of Syrian refugees back from whence they came. But the damage has been done. It didn’t help the Kurds that most of them are, like Erdoğan, Sunni muslims. Not that they would have been spared had they been something else.

Because Erdoğan is, at his core, once all his artifice is stripped away and his ambition exposed, that thoroughly human thing: free of faith.

First published by New Frame.

Soccer-punched: why Marx was wrong about religion

World Cups are state-sanctioned, capitalism-controlled drug-dealing that put people in the kind of funk the powerful can use to take the attention off their actions.

STRAIGHT RED – Karl Marx was right about almost everything. Almost …

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Lisbon

KARL Marx got it wrong. Not about the importance of the workers of the world uniting, nor recognising that they who control the means of production boss almost everything, nor on the inherent evil of capitalism.

Damn straight, comrade, on those counts and many more. So, what was Marx wrong about? God-bothering. Or, at least, about its place in modern society.

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

Those are 20 of the most beautifully arranged words yet translated into English.

It’s a pity we tend to remember not them but the next seven words: “It is the opium of the people.”

All 27 of those words are from “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, which Marx wrote in 1834: more than 200 years after cricket became professional and 23 years before the world’s first football club was founded, in Sheffield.

So he had no idea of the monster football would become. But he did take himself off to a cricket match, where, according to Ben Carrington’s “Marxism, cultural Studies and Sport” (2009), he decided that “if the masses could be so easily subdued by such a resolutely sedate game with its mores of bourgeois Englishness dripping from every rule and expression, then all was lost for the socialist cause”.

That explains, perhaps, why Marx didn’t see that the opium of the people wouldn’t be religion in future. Instead, it would be sport.

And that makes World Cups state-sanctioned, capitalism-controlled drug-dealing that put people in the kind of funk the powerful can use to take the attention off their actions. That’s a dark thought, but there are many more and much darker where that comes from. Here are but a few:

Russians were still celebrating their team’s 5-0 thumping of Saudi Arabia in the opening match of football’s 2018 World Cup when it emerged that the Kremlin had hiked VAT and planned to raise the retirement age.

During that match, Saudi forces launched a brutal offensive in their despicable proxy war on Yemen to isolate the main port and so sever deliveries of food and medicine to a nation already wrecked by famine and disease.

The day before a Moroccan own-goal earned victory for Iran, the latter’s authorities arrested Nasrin Sotoudeh, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer, and told her she had been sentenced, in absentia, to five years in prison.

Hours ahead of scoring all three of Portugal’s goals against Spain, Cristiano Ronaldo agreed to pay a fine amounting to almost R300-million rather than face further prosecution on tax evasion charges.

None of those stories garnered anything like the amount of coverage devoted to the comparatively insignificant on the field in Russia.  

The masses were high on football, leaving the bold and the bad to do whatever they wanted in sickening sobriety.

That’s as much a comment on what’s wrong with media concerned with little else but their numbers of viewers, listeners and readers as it is on those viewers, listeners and readers.

Sometimes players are dragged into the mess, like Mohamed Salah was in Grozny on Sunday. Chechnya’s boorish oaf of a leader, Ramzan Kadyrov — who insists there are no gay men in his country, which may soon be true considering he has them tortured and executed — turned up at the Egypt team’s hotel and apparently insisted the sleeping Salah be woken up.

Then he posed for photographs with the player that rocketed around the world, leaving Salah to explain the how and why of his seemingly willing fraternisation with a vicious tyrant.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s autocratic, anti-democratic president, and Donald Trump, the dangerous buffoon Americans somehow chose to lead them, must have looked on in impotent rage and envy at Kadyrov’s naked chutzpah. 

It’s not only countries governed by criminals who use the cover of sport to try and hide what they’re up to, or at least give it a respectable face.

At a fan park in Lisbon before the Portugal-Spain game, a former lawyer and journalist and the godson of Portugal’s last fascist dictator stopped traffic and gathered a crowd around him. 

Well he might have: he was Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s centre-left president who doesn’t need to be asked twice to pose for a selfie with his beloved compatriots, who could easily be mistaken for voters.

As a woman in Lisbon said the other day: “Ah yes. The World Cup. Our politicians always wait for it to come before they force through unpopular legislation.”

She was from Düsseldorf in Germany, which is led by the ostensibly sane, outwardly decent Angela Merkel, patron saint of refugees everywhere.

This as much a comment on what’s wrong with media concerned with little else but the numbers of the viewers, listeners and readers they attract as it is on what’s wrong with those viewers, listeners and readers.

Which would be worse, a website putting up a video of Ashwin Willemse’s pet scorpion stinging the bejaysus out of a photograph of Nick Mallett, or people clicking on that video?

And how many more hits do you think this article would earn if the names of Willemse and Mallett were in the headline, nevermind that they have bugger nothing to do with this story? 

What the hell are we thinking? How can we allow something as comparatively unimportant as the World Cup to hijack our critical attention when we need it most?

Aside from the damage the tournament aids and abets in our society, the tournament doesn’t even do what it says on the tin.

The idea that we will, after the final in Moscow on July 15, know which is the best team in international football is outdated and laughably naive.

What we will know is which squad of players, arbitrarily chosen more often than not, who represent nothing except themselves and their teammates, have been more successful than 31 other but similar squads over the course of a particular month. Nothing more, nothing less.

How do we keep our eye on the real ball while the World Cup is here to distract us with fakery? By turning to Marx.

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.”

Yes, that’s Marx. Groucho Marx.