“They were amazing. We know people want to come and see good cricket, and cricket is also a party in the Caribbean.” – Shai Hope on the Buffalo Park crowd.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
A sizeable chunk of the membership of the Buffalo Club was not happy. How dare Border cricket decide to put up a new scoreboard? And so impede the members’ view of the Indian Ocean, which they could see lapping onto Eastern Beach from their clubhouse’s privileged perch on a hill overlooking Buffalo Park.
It wasn’t enough that the members could watch all the live cricket they wanted in the comfort of their club, and without having to bother with buying a ticket. They wanted the view, too. To hell with spectators who would benefit from being better informed about the match.
The club’s ownership of the ground gave them a false, unpaid for and unearned sense of entitlement and superiority over the wishes and needs of the ticket-buying thousands who thronged the grass banks and stands on big match days.
This was deep in the dark 1990s, when Buffs’ membership was even whiter than the make-up of the teams who played at the foot of the hill and the crowds who watched them. Then, clubs like Buffs, which had until recently been physically, mentally and emotionally ensconced in the bosom of the apartheid establishment, were seen and saw themselves as bastions of the old order.
You want fairness? Democracy? Something closer to unity? What you hoped would soon be reality? Rather join United or Willows in Buffalo Flats and Mdantsane, brown and black areas of East London. And, if you’re white, be satisfied and shut up. Not many years earlier and you would have had the security police asking whether you were a communist or a terrorist, or both — they were the same thing for the goons, anyway — for wanting to play cricket with and against people who were not white. Or the cops would not have bothered to ask before they took you away. Buffs and their ilk was not for you and your ilk. Exactly the same people, and their enablers, among them members of clubs like Buffs, demanded that sport and politics be kept strictly separate.
So you wonder what the membership of Buffs club thought while they watched the second men’s ODI between South Africa and West Indies on Saturday. These days they keep themselves apart from the hoi polloi not with the help of repressive legislation but with a sturdy fence that runs across the hill horizontally, marking out where the club’s lawns end and Buffalo Park begins. The membership is less white than it used to be but it is still attuned to affluence über alles, even though it can no longer shut itself off from reality.
Only seven of the 24 people — umpires included — who took the field on Saturday were white. Better yet, one black player’s century was followed by another’s: Shai Hope, in his first match as the Windies’ captain, scored 128 and Temba Bavuma made 144, his second hundred for South Africa in as many innings in the wake of his 172 against the same opponents in the Wanderers Test. Both are career-bests for Bavuma.
Many in the crowd were of the same blood as Hope and Bavuma. They availed themselves of the wide expanse of lawn on the outside of the unusually shrunken boundaries in an all-dancing, all-singing carnival of cricket-watching. The magical melody of Zizojika Izinto, an isiXhosa hymn and struggle song, poured through them many more times than once.
The singing and dancing rose and fell and rose again even as it became apparent to these proper cricket people — they and their forebears have been part of the game in South Africa since they encountered it at colonial mission schools in the Eastern Cape hinterland some 180 years ago — that only Bavuma stood between South Africa and defeat.
It was one thing for Hope to bat with verve through stands of 86 with Nicholas Pooran, 80 with Rovman Powell, and a mad dash of 42 off 22 with Alzarri Joseph; quite another for Bavuma to hobble on one-and-a-half legs — he hurt himself in the field — through 41.2 overs to play with such authority and urgency.
Bavuma and Quinton de Kock put on 76 before South Africa’s captain shared 61 with Tony de Zorzi. Of the 49 realised in the company of Lungi Ngidi, Bavuma scored 36. Ngidi, a tailender’s tailender, was inspired enough to heave Akeal Hosein over midwicket for six. The West Indians, having piled up 335/8 — their highest ODI total against South Africa — probably knew they had the game won, especially as the wickets mounted. But Bavuma kept the possibility of an improbable victory at least half alive.
“The ball before I got out, I said to Lungi, ‘If we can get two 15-run overs here, we can get them to panic,’” Bavuma said during his television interview. Only when he flapped at Joseph and gloved a catch behind, the ninth wicket down, was the issue put beyond doubt. Two balls later South Africa were dismissed 48 short.
Starting with his 109 in an ODI against England in Bloemfontein on January 29, Bavuma has scored three centuries in seven innings for South Africa and twice passed 50 in five trips to the domestic crease. In his previous dozen innings his 65 in the Boxing Day Test at the MCG was his only half-century and his highest score. Where were all the runs coming from?
“My mind is a lot more clear as to what I’m trying to do and how I’m trying to do it,” Bavuma told a press conference. “I’m feeding off the confidence I’m getting from the players as well as the new coaches [Shukri Conrad and Rob Walter]. I’m just enjoying my cricket.”
Hope, in his press conference, said of Bavuma’s effort: “He deserved to win the game, playing an innings like that. But there can only be one winner.”
Along with Bavuma’s and his own batting, Hope also enjoyed the crowd: “They were amazing. That’s something that we as West Indians appreciate as well. We know people want to come and see good cricket, and cricket is also a party in the Caribbean.”
Little wonder Zizojika Izinto had kept ringing around the ground. The song’s title translates as “Things will turn around”. Up at Buffs Club, the members knew things had indeed turned around. And not only because they could see, instead of waves lapping onto Eastern Beach, the feats of people like Hope and Bavuma writ large on the scoreboard. The Windies captain was wrong: sometimes there’s more than one winner.
Cricbuzz
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