greenpridefan

In 1953, American playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible. The Crucible is ostensibly a dramatization of the Salem Witch Trials that took place in Massachusetts in the 17th Century. It  follows the story of John Procter, a good and decent man that is  falsely accused of witchcraft and put on trial for his life.

Of course the Salem Witch Trials were all nonsense. Miller wrote The Crucible as an implied critique of McCarthyism, the term used to describe the hearings conducted by US Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. McCarthy was obsessed with rooting out perceived communist spies from within the US government, and this led to him often making accusations of treason based on little or no evidence. The result was that history considers McCarthy to be an idiot, but not before his public and often baseless inquisitions irreparably damaged reputations and lives.

Miller may well have been a prophet before his time. I’ve often thought about the message of The Crucible in the past few years as extremist ideas and identity politics seem to have totally taken over the public discourse. Orthodoxies of thought are defined and controlled by our social media echo chambers. In some communities, the social price to pay for stepping outside these boundaries can be high.

We live in an age of hype. The world didn’t end when Donald Trump was elected president. Brexit will come and go in whatever form, and the sun will still rise and set as it always has. But the hysteria that surrounds these and other issues is sometimes comical. There are people who are afraid to say what they truly think around the office water cooler for fear of forever being branded insensitive and offensive at best, or at worst a racist misogynist.

So the cricketing world needs to get a grip. The fervor surrounding “sandpapergate” is simply aping the same process that accompanies just about any other modern day political crisis or social upheaval. Hysteria takes over and the faux-indignation becomes  a goal unto itself. Of course Steve Smith and co are clearly guilty, but I sense we have lost all proportion. It’s like the #metoo campaign, which morphed from a good idea into a tidal wave of nonsense that destroyed many good reputations undeservedly. Senator McCarthy would be proud.

Yes there are layers and nuance. Clearly, there are other issues at play here, and these issues do somewhat justify a certain degree of outrage beyond the relatively minor offence that ball tampering is. The authorities will have to deal with a team that is clearly unloved even at home, and also try understand how it is that an asshole like David Warner found himself in a position of leadership. The appropriate sanctions will come and they will most likely fit the real crime though it may not be enough to placate the baying masses.

But really this whole incident has distracted attention from what is probably the far bigger story. The Aussie teams that ruined my adolescence could get under the skin of anybody. Countless opponents melted from the heat generated by their potent blend of just the right verbals mixed with total mental domination. It’s why we hated them. Back then they were clever, now they have become simply arrogant schoolyard bullies.

And bullies are easy to deal with. They are not nearly as impressive as they think themselves to be. You stand up to them and watch them shrink back to size. I’m not such a fan of players verbally abusing each other, but to see an Australian cricket team complain that sledging  was unsettling them was one of my childhood dreams come true. The mighty had fallen long before Bancroft thought he could stick his hand down his trousers and no one would notice.

At his trial, John Procter confesses to save his life, but refuses to sign the confession. To do so would ruin his name thus condemning him to a fate worse than death. He pleads with the court, begging them to rather tell the world that “Procter broke to his knees and wept like a woman.” For him weak behaviour is acceptable. Destroying his reputation is not. Procter is hanged for his refusal to sign. He dies, but with his dignity intact.

This series Australia have wept like little girls and also ruined their good name. For almost all cricketing fans around the world, this is simultaneously sad as well as awesome. This fall from grace has been on the cards for years and it may take years to put it right. They will start at the crucible that is the Wanderers on Friday. Good luck to them.

GPF

While I love cricket, and mainly write about it, it is not my only sporting obsession. My first love was football, specifically English football. It gripped me when I was 12 and has held me till now.

This early fixation endured well into my teens. But this was way before the Internet came along and ruined society, so instead of endless hours scouring YouTube for match highlights without Turkish commentary, I would get Shoot! and Match magazines from England. CNA imported them, and the branch at Balfour Park had a pouch with my name on it where they would set aside copies for me each week, lest they sold out before I got there. I loved those magazines and I devoured them, almost literally.

Right from the beginning, I started removing the pictures and sticking them up on my bedroom wall. This continued for a long time, and at an age when I had friends decorating their walls with all sorts of pin-ups, my bedroom sported an ever increasing mass of football imagery. When the walls were finally complete, I started on the inside of my cupboard, and when that too was full, I moved on to the ceiling. Opening my eyes each morning, I was greeted by the smiling face of Dennis Irwin holding up a Manchester United scarf, and the drudgery of getting ready for school was made easier by my morning chats to Ally McCoist and Darren Anderton as I rummaged through my sock drawer.

If I wanted to actually watch games, my only option was the weekly Monday night roundup on M-NET. Over the course of several seasons I recorded each episode, and would watch them over and over again, till the commentary was etched in my brain. The rule was I could never record over an existing episode,  so at an age when many of my friends were filling their bedroom cupboards with all sorts of video collections, my videos had far less titillating titles, like ”Season 89-90, weeks 6-9”.

This drove my parents nuts, and they insisted that my football obsession, and my insistence on plastering my room was interfering with my schoolwork and that I had to take the pictures down. I was having none of it. After several years of disagreements and arguments, in a final act of desperation my father sold the house and told me to go live somewhere else.

Of course this was in another age. My bedroom may no longer resemble the Sistine Chapel of football, but we are no less surrounded by sport and commentary.  This morning I was driving to work, listening to one of my many football podcasts, and the conversation turned to Arsenal midfielder Jack Wilshere and his hesitancy in taking up his latest contract offer. Like many footballers over the years, his is a name that has never been far from my general sporting consciousness. I have listened to countless podcast discussions about his career; from budding starlet, to future England captain, to his propensity for injury, and his general failure to live up to his full potential. Listening to the five minute discussion this morning, a thought struck me.

I have absolutely no idea what Jack Wilshere looks like.

Very unsettling. For someone with my level of sporting interest, a general idea of a sportsman’s appearance is not too much to expect. So is something special about Jack that I don’t know him, or is this a symptom of our modern day information overload? Is there so much of it out there that we have lost our ability to focus?

So I turned off the podcast and ran a little mental exercise. I ran a roll-call of the first ten famous sportsmen that came to mind to see which of them I could pick out of a line-up.

Randomly, the ten that came to mind are:

• AB de Villiers – yes.
• Alistair Cook – only with his helmet on.
• Usain Bolt – no
• Neymar – He used to have orange hair, I think. That picture probably. Otherwise, no.
• David de Gea – I know he’s tall and blonde, but maybe that’s because I grew up with Peter Schmeichel in the Man United goal.
• David Silva – no.
• Jordan Spieth – no.
• Any of the current Springbok squad – at a stretch maybe one or two.
• Maria Sharapova – duh!
• Kevin Pietersen – he’s on my dartboard, so yes.

Not a great pass-rate.

So how did it come to this? Has the modern age really brought me to a point where Springboks themselves could rob me in broad daylights and probably get away with it?

I know exactly where the blame lies: Cricinfo. For years I have marveled at its ingenious ability to keep me wholly engrossed in a match for all five days, all the while maintaining the illusion that I am being productive doing something else. I keenly followed the recently completed Ashes with great interest, but I didn’t watch any of it. Not a single delivery. Cricinfo is just too good, and at times very funny. On the odd occasion when I am able to watch live cricket, I have Cricinfo open as well, just to see how they describe the action. Pretty much in the same way I greet news of any Arsenal defeat by frantically searching Twitter for Piers Morgan’s hysterical overreaction. Seriously, if you have never done that you must.

It seems we have evolved to a point where watching the games themselves is sometimes secondary. Maybe I don’t need to know Jack Wilshere. Maybe his face is less important than his ability to generate a discussion that keeps me occupied in a traffic jam.

Is society better off? I don’t know. I’m not necessarily complaining. I don’t enjoy it any less, it’s just that the nature of the experience has changed. It does get me thinking though, what will be the next stage in our evolutionary development as our machines change the way we interact with the things we know and love?

Maybe CricInfo should create an add-on called “BossInfo”. A system that alerts you when your manager is getting too close, giving you enough time to minimize the screen.

Or what about a weekly “Wife” podcast. Forget Jack Wilshere, I could drive to work and listen to how the house is a mess, the kids are not doing their homework, and how badly we need a holiday. I could even click “Stop” when I’ve heard enough.

Something to think about.

GPF

As a typical kid growing up, much of my free time in primary school was spent as a member of one gang or another.

Nerdy little groups with quirky little names like “The Sharpeners”, or “The Muck-ups”. There were others to be sure, but these two stick in the memory.

The Sharpeners existed for one reason only. We thought,  for reasons unclear, that it would be cool to collect ‘sharpen’ as we called it – the stuff that comes off your pencil as you twist it in the sharpener. So, we would collect our own, and anyone else’s were they kind enough to share, and meet behind the Standard 4 classroom at break to tally up. What we actually did with it is unclear to me now.

The Muck-ups on the other hand had a far more sinister goal. Ours was to ‘muck up’ the other gangs, or stop them from achieving their goals in whatever ways we could think of.

There is much that can be said about these innocent schoolyard groups and the role they played in our social development. But one of their most defining characteristics was that membership was a very fluid concept. It would change one day to the next. You could turn up for a very important gang meeting, only to find that the leader had invited his new mates to join. This would really piss me off. There were some people I would never share my carefully collected sharpen with, under any circumstances. By second break I’d make sure I’d joined some other clique.

Typically the gang phase passed. Not so much because I lost my passion for useless stationery, or because mucking up gangs when you are a member of half them is confusing, but rather with time we realized that the whole concept was kinda stupid. In short, we grew up.

Lately however, it has dawned on me that international sport has become just a glorified version of the Sharpeners vs The Muck-ups. I’m referring to the ease with which players seem to swap allegiances from one country to another. Something which ultimately demeans the whole concept.

I’ve always taken following sport seriously. For so many people around the world, it is not just as a pastime but rather a measure of pride in where you come from, be it your city, province, or country. It’s why I could never understand why some people chose to support teams from the other side of the country. Even if they had better players, to me there was no choice.

It was always quite simple. I was born and raised in Johannesburg, and so therefore I had to support Transvaal. Yes, this meant sucking it up year after year as Naas Botha and Uli Schmidt kicked and pounded us into oblivion, but there was always the hope that in the end we’d get one over them. It was part of the fun. In the meantime, we just had to sit there and take it. Such is the lot of the local supporter.

I understand that players are not fans. They follow whatever direction the money is blowing in, and that’s fine. As supporters, we don’t often like it, but we accept it.  At what point however, does a player moving from one locale to another go from acceptable to not? Is there even such a line?

For example, in the early 90s, James Small left Transvaal to go play for Natal. This really annoyed me, as I loved that man. But, it was acceptable.

At roughly the same time, Northern Transvaal legend and our tormentor-in-chief, Uli Schmidt, left Pretoria and headed down to Jo’burg to finally lift us out of our misery. Him I never really liked, but two Currie Cups, a Lion Cup, and the Super 10 championship later, he was my hero too. Acceptable.

Kevin Pietersen, not acceptable.

As much as I would like to see clubs only allow players who grew up locally play for them, I know it is not realistic. Take Yorkshire County Cricket Club for example. For years only players born in the county were eligible to represent them. A fine and noble stance. It lasted until 1992 when a 19yr old Sachin Tendulkar became available. So they did away with the rule, and they loved him at Headingley.

Which is why we have international competition. In all sports, it is meant to be the ultimate representative contest, not watered down by money. It is a genuine Us vs Them. Who is better? Who makes the fastest, strongest, the most skillful?

And this is where I fear that it has become a case of The Sharpeners vs The Muck-ups. Or rather more annoyingly, England’s South Africans vs France’s South Africans, or Ireland’s, or Scotland’s…

In this year’s Six Nations, each competing country had a South African in their squad. Shockingly, this actually means that somewhere out there, there are rugby players who, for enough money, would rather play for Italy. I just cannot think of anything funny to say about this.

But of course it is on the cricket pitch where most of the damage has been done. The talent drain from SA to the UK ultimately must wear away at the very fabric of international competition. If playing pride can be bought and sold, then supporters’ passions must surely fade over time.

This is not just sour grapes at England’s ability to cherry pick the best of the rest. They’ve been plundering the West Indies for talent for decades, and there is usually an antipodean or two on the fringes of their team. A benefit of once ruling half the planet I suppose.

Maybe I just wish we could do it too. We’ve only really tried it once, when Imran Tahir took a wrong turn from Lahore to London and ended up in somewhere between Pretoria and Johannesburg. We had finally managed some duty free shopping of our own, but test match figures of 0/180 in Adelaide in November 2012, must have had the team management frantically looking for the receipt. That he ultimately came good in the one day game and is one of the best in the world now only really underlines my point. When you pay with Rands, buying in bulk is not really an option.

Of course it is all about the money. Pounds talk louder than Rands. (Do Rands even make a sound?) I guess that is the way of the world. So we will just have get used to the fact that CJ Stander plays his rugby for Ireland and the British and Irish Lions, that a boy from Durban called Greg Rawlinson danced the Haka, and that far too many others  pretend to care about the Queen.

Will my passions fade over time? I doubt it. But there are times when I think back to January 1994 and wonder if the youthful innocence of my 2am dance with my mates as Fanie de Villers ripped the Aussies apart is gone. I hope not, but I do wonder.

Diego Costa played for Brazil before deciding he’d rather play for Spain. Wilfried Zaha could not get back in the England squad, and so headed back to the Ivory Coast. Loopholes in FIFA regulations made their switches technically legal, and good news if you’re Spanish or Ivorian, but as a fan of international sport in general, maybe world football is a little less shiny. Perhaps I am overreacting, but I just know that it feels wrong.

Of course, I see the obvious question. How is it that I can leave SA and make a life for myself elsewhere but sportsmen can’t? And if that genuinely requires an explanation then you do not truly understand what it is to be a fan.

When they retire they can do what they want. Uli Schmidt took his medal haul after his stint with Transvaal and has been living somewhere on the north coast of Queensland  for the last 15 years. I honestly don’t care. My abiding memory of him is scoring the winning try in the 1992 Currie Cup final. And yes, he wore the green and gold, so he can live where he wants.

Ironically the rugby player I hated the most was Australian legend David Campese. Cocky beyond description, I really disliked that man. For close on 10 years now he’s been living  in Durban with his South African wife and his South African children. Now if only he had met her 25 years earlier.

GPF

PS. If Kevin Pietersen comes back to play for SA and helps us win the world cup in 2019, I shall forgive him.

Hatred.

It’s a strong word is it not. It conjures up images of some of the worst atrocities committed by mankind: Apartheid, ISIS, Donald Trump.

I sometimes wonder whether hatred plays a role in sports though. More specifically, in the life of a sports fan.

Ok, so maybe hatred is a too strong a word, so let’s rather say a passionate dislike of your opponent. So, to what extent does a passionate dislike of the ‘other’ impact the sports fan’s experience? Does it enhance it or detract from it?

We’ve seen this recently, with the various referenda and election campaigns that have had us glued to our TVs on an off the past couple of years. Or at least self-confessed political junkies like myself. The levels of disharmony in a country are rightly used as a barometer of society’s health and as an indicator of national direction.

Is there a parallel though in the world sports fans such a me inhabit? Are my celebratory dance of joy at seeing the Aussies lose a test series, or my howls of laughter at watching England fail to qualify for Euro 2008 spontaneous expressions of pure elevating joy, or are they tinged with more than a healthy dose of schadenfreude – that perverse pleasure we feel when other people suffer?

What purer expression of sport can there be than the Olympics. So consider the following statement from the Olympic movement’s official website:

“The most important thing … is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

So I’ve given it some careful consideration and done an honest self-assessment. And I’ve concluded that it’s bullshit.

I’m sure there may be some fair-weather fans out there who for them this is the case. But they don’t count. From a young age many of us naturally intuit that the only thing more important than whether you won or lost is by how much. Triumph is the most important thing, irrespective of the degree of struggle involved. Do I really care if an Australian batting collapse is due to exquisite bowling or poor shot selection?

I think this extreme attitude is fed to us subliminally from early on. Think about all the war-like terms and metaphors used to describe sports. Must-win games become “do or die battles”. Legends are cajoled out of retirement because “their country needs them”, as if the national infrastructure will collapse if they don’t play. Great performers are called “warriors”.

So I am comfortable with my passionate dislikes. Defeat breaks me and I have no warm feelings for the enemy . Just ask my wife. I’m not fun. It’s who  I am.

So who do I dislike the most then? Defeat to who is most likely to have me reaching for a bottle of scotch, no glass required? I started this blog just before the series against England last year. And yes, while it is true that I have no love of the poms, for a variety of reasons, they are not the worst. They can’t be at any rate as my wife is from London, and peace in the home is a virtue.

It’s the Australians I truly despise. As the architects of much of our suffering in the early days, the antagonism I felt for Waugh and co. have become permanent edifices etched into my psyche.

I don’t mean to say Australia is a bad place, or that the people are bad. Far from it. Some of my best friends are from there. I even visited once, many years ago. The people were genuinely nice. So pleasant in fact that it totally pissed me off and completely ruined my holiday.

So here we are then again, one test in to another series against the old enemy. And man, what a thing of beauty that match was. It did pose one dilemma for me. How to follow the game. Unusually for me, I could not find a reliable illegal stream. And as the test wore on into day 4, and a SA victory came into view, I was made aware of a secondary option. Australian radio.

But to do so I had to sully myself. To access the radio link on the Cricket Australia site I had to register as a fan of Australian cricket. I wrestled with this for the better part of an entire session, and in the end, I did it. To add insult, the sent me this email:

Just how does one balance the indignity of an email like this against the opportunity to listen to their commentators squirm and try explain the inexplicable?

From Australia’s position of dominance after one and half days to the magnitude of their defeat is a collapse even Hillary Clinton supporters would agree is a shocker.

So I did it. I made my choice. There are two tests to go. I hope the boys don’t make me regret it.

GPF

Admit it.

There is a part of you that desperately wants Donald Trump to win.

It’s the sheer curiosity of it. Personally, I’ve been saying since day one that I support him. Just for the comic value a Trump presidency would bring. But for even those of us who are less concerned with the funny side of one man ending Western society as we know it, there must be some part inside somewhere that just has to see what would happen.

You see, human nature is like that. Sometimes we are so desperate to know what something feels like, looks like, tastes like. Most of the time, sanity prevails and we step back from the abyss. And then at other times we give in to temptation. That’s when we end up with 5 Police Academy sequels, Carel du Plessis as Springbok coach, or Brexit.

Experiencing the unknown though, does not necessarily have to be a negative assault on our senses, let alone a threat to our way of life. Sometimes we can be blessed with seeing something quite so extraordinarily beautiful that we dared not have dreamed it possible.

Cue the Proteas magnificent 5-0 series victory these past couple of weeks. Not only was this series win built on some really entertaining stuff with bat and ball, but it was a total hammering of the evil yellow ones. This was more than an added bonus. The first time ever Australia have been blanked 5-0, in any format. A truly amazing feather in our green suffering caps. And let’s be honest, no one saw this coming. It genuinely warmed the soul.

You see, an expat’s relationship with his country of origin can be a complicated one. Yes we have moved on, but we still tend to care very much about what’s going on. And lately the news from SA has not exactly been good. The universities are burning down, the Springboks are determined to commit suicide, and Jacob Zuma is, well… well he just is.

So it’s nice to turn on the TV and see the stadiums we used to visit full of cheering colourful crowds. That desolate look on the faces in the visitor’s dressing room as it slowly dawned on them that 371 in the 3rd ODI would not be enough was priceless. Who cares that they say that this is one of the weakest Australian teams in recent history. That alone is reason to celebrate.

So I really am sorry to do this, but I feel I must. It’s just my sporting dna that condemns me to never be truly happy. But there is something I feel we’re all thinking and that deep down we all know to be true.

This doesn’t really count.

Yes it feels nice, and it’s certainly fun to watch David Warner score over 170 in a dead rubber and still lose. But let’s be honest, if these same two teams, on current form and current strengths, met in a crucial world cup knock out, what would happen? The thought doesn’t even hurt anymore it’s happened so often.

I’m not taking anything away from this achievement. It’s been awesome to watch. Truly impressive. I’m just saying that context matters, and in context this does not matter very much. Perhaps we have become too conditioned to think in four-year world cup cycles, but those tend to be the memories that stick over time.

So let’s enjoy this for what it is, not more.  It won’t come round again anytime soon. And how much the average American voter would like that to be so!

GPF

It’s been a while since I was able to sit down and dedicate some time to formalizing my current sporting thought, but alas, despite my many entreaties to the one above, I do not make my living watching sport.

There are advantages to that though, as it sometimes gives me more time to mull things over before committing my thoughts to words.

World cups can be very exciting, especially for those who follow a team who has a chance of winning. I wouldn’t know about that so for me there needs to be a secondary level of excitement. Indeed the recently completed World T20 was a let-down by any measure. I’ve gotten used to the disappointment, and the emotional turmoil that inevitably follows. The masochist in me even looks forward to the roller coaster ride that takes you up to the very top, then drops you just when you think you’ve made it.

The truth though is that world cups can be microcosms of life itself. And as Mick Jagger would say, If you don’t get what you want you can always re-calibrate your happiness meter to find joy on a lower level.

When I started writing this, I tried making a ‘Hierarchy of world cup pleasures’ table. For example, SA winning the tournament, trouncing Australia in the semis and England in the final would be total nirvana. On the other hand, painfully losing to either of them while they go on to win it is like, well… 1999. Still hurts.

Needless to say there are so many countless permutations to this that a definable table was not practical. But you see where I’m going. There was genuine joy at the end and Brathwaite’s magnificent 24 off the final over gave me an opportunity to let rip with a roar of genuine joy. Beggars can’t choosers; take what you’re given.

So attention turns to the next world cup, the 50-over variety, to be held in England in 2019.

And a short news headline caught my attention the other day. I had earlier heard about this listening to Darren Gough on TalkSport a few weeks ago. He was positing that Kevin Pietersen might consider making himself available to play for South Africa once his ‘stand down’ period is over. I didn’t really pay much attention to it because it seemed too absurd. But then I saw on the BBC that the devil himself was actually considering it.

For years Kevin Pietersen has made my sporting blood boil like no one else. Only Clyde Rathbone came close. In a game of word association my answer to “Kevin Pietersen” would be “Rot in hell for all eternity.”

That’s not sour grapes at a seemingly decent South African who defected to play for the enemy. There have been others before him and others will follow. I get the economic realities of the age we live in. But there are ways of doing things. There are some South Africans who went on to have decent careers with England and are still remembered quite fondly. Alan Lamb remains a very popular figure in SA. Others, like Jonathan Trott, made no noise when they left and just got on with it. Hence no one really cares about Trott one way or another.

So the point with KP is not that people hate him because he left. Half the country would too if they could. They don’t even hate him because he went on to become the leading test run scorer in England’s history. They hate him because he’s a doos. It’s that simple. (It’s hard to explain to non-South African readers what a doos is. You can google it to find your local equivalent.)

In 2005, he scored three centuries for England in the ODI series in SA. He celebrated the first, (108 n/o at Bloemfontein) by kissing the lions badge on his helmet. He did it to make a point. Total lack of class. No respect. The fact that he’s also fallen out of favour with quite literally every dressing room he’s been in, always led me to believe that the greatest service he gave SA cricket was getting on the plane for England.

Which brings me to my next point, and here I have a confession to make. I just don’t hate him as I did in the past.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve gotten older and don’t have room in my heart anymore to truly hate sportsmen who I feel have betrayed me. But that’s not the case.

I started following him on Twitter a couple of years ago. I follow many people on Twitter whom I don’t like, no doubt motivated by the same part of my psyche that has gotten used to choking in a world cup.

And to my surprise, he seems like a normal person. No tweets of him burning the SA flag, showing off his horns, or eating children for breakfast. Instead one of the first things I saw was him tweet was of him settling down to watch the Boks, Castle Lager in hand, bowl of biltong on the table.

“Aha! It’s a trick!” I said. But it wasn’t. Next he was tweeting pictures of himself visiting SA, going on game drives and hanging out with mates, legends like Graeme Smith and Jacque Kallis. If they can stand him, then maybe I need to cut him a little slack.

So I do. Just a little. This is a man after all, who in the middle of a test against South Africa, texted Smith that his own captain, Andrew Strauss, was a “doos”. Maybe he has some redeeming qualities after all.

So as absurd and as unlikely as it is, it makes for a fun intellectual exercise to imagine a scenario where he does turn out in the green and gold in 18 months’ time.

(If you are reading this and happen to be my wife, best you log off now J)

It’s the ultimate “what if” scenario. We all have that “girl who got away” when we were dating. The one we really liked. The one who seemed to be the answer to all our prayers, but left us leaving us feeling unworthy and all alone.

But what if she came back one day? Told us she never meant to hurt us after all, and that it was all a misunderstanding. The grass really wasn’t greener in England. Would we give her a chance at redemption? Would we let her bat for us?

If I try hard enough, I can see KP hitting the winning runs in the world cup final. Delirious SA fans dancing in the stands at Lords, despondent locals wondering how they let him get away. For a few fleeting moments it’s a wonderful thought. A quasi-taste of delicacies never savoured.

But life has a way of ultimately making sense of everything. There’s a reason the blonde left us all those years ago. She was psychopath who left a trail of devastation in her wake. Not unlike a certain well-meaning boy from Pietermaritzburg.

Perhaps some things are better left as dreams.

In an ideal world, I would get paid to watch cricket. Actually, almost any sport. Except for basketball. Basketball is not a sport.

If I had nothing else to do except ponder the fine intricacies of leg spin bowling, I would have written something much sooner about the conclusion to the England series. Alas, I have a wife, a mortgage, and children who annoyingly insist on eating every day. So whilst I would have loved to have shared my immediate passionate thoughts on the limited overs triumph over the poms, my job had to take center stage for a while. And that really is frustrating, because trust me, the stuff I write for work is not nearly as interesting. Least of all to me.

The break actually gave me an opportunity to consider in some depth the cognitive dissonance I have been experiencing in the immediate aftermath of the England series. Specifically the brutal bludgeoning handed out to the visitors in the final fixture.

And the problem is this:

On the one hand, dishing out a hiding to the poms is one of the most pleasurable experiences for me as a sports fan.

On the other hand, it was a T20 game. And I have never really liked T20 cricket. Forgive me but I am a purist at heart. The part of my brain that takes sport seriously just doesn’t register anything when shortest format rolls around. I could not care less what happens in the IPL, the Big Bash, and all other such travelling circuses.

But I enjoyed this. I really really did. And it made me wonder if I was finally getting on the T20 train.

Had you asked me prior to the T20s what I thought of the format in general, I would have probably explained it in terms of one of my other passions in life. Good whisky.

You see, test cricket is the pure single malt of sport. It’s a Balblair 1986, or a Balvenie 16yr old triple cask, both of which sit proudly in my collection. Fans who appreciate it really know their stuff. There is a premium on quality. A small dram is usually enough to know that this is where the real action is.

T20 on the other hand is a Johnny Walker Red Label. Or a Teachers, or any other kind of cheap blended rubbish. It’s freely available, and loved by alcoholics the world over. It’s something you indulge in when you don’t really love yourself.

But maybe it’s time to promote the young upstart. There are whiskies out there that are not the greatest, but not the worst. Decent blends like a Chivas 12yr old. It’s not ideal but since I’m not a snob, in the right circumstance it can be quite pleasant. This is the ODI level. Maybe T20s belong here as well.

So my new found passion for T20s has come just in time. The Aussies are now in SA for 3 T20s before the T20 World Cup next month. I’m quite pumped for it now. Hopefully we can beat them convincingly before we go to India and find a new way to screw up a multi-national tournament. It’ll be interesting to see what we come up with this time.

Had we won the test series against England I for sure would not have cared about the T20s. But losing them created an extra edge that I appear to have fallen off. It’s actually quite nice on the other side. Maybe it was worth it to lose the test series to get here….

Oh my God… I did NOT just say that! I think I need a therapist.

GPF

Ask any cricket fan, from anywhere in the world, and they all will tell you: the sound of leather on willow is one of the most poetic sounds in sport. Be it in a packed Wanderers, or just watching high school cricket on a Saturday morning, there’s a certain beauty to the sound of bat on ball. If cricket’s heartbeat made a noise, that would be it.

So what do you do when that sound rings hollow?

I swore blind that after South Africa lost the series to the poms, I would pay no attention to the dead test. I’m just too competitive to take it seriously. My fears of it being a “5-day pommy gloat fest” were realized by the Barmy Army. Those drunkards who faithfully follow England to all corners of the world, desecrating fine cricketing venues with football flags.

But the nature of an addiction is that you act on your compulsion even when you don’t really want to. That’s why it’s called a compulsion.

So I did it. I broke the promise I made to myself, and to the seven faithful readers of this blog. I submerged myself in the 4th test bubble, with all the fake headaches, illegal streaming, perpetual Cricinfo, and general excitement of a 1st test.

I call it a bubble because that was the only way I could handle it. I really do get seriously pissed off when the Proteas lose, especially to England. But as one mate kept reminding me, “A test is a test”. So I created an emotional bubble around myself to tune out the context of the game.

I allowed myself to revel in a seemingly fine performance despite the Barmy Army doing their level best to remind me that no matter the final score here, we were very much second best.

So how does someone like me, who prefers to see things in black and white (life’s much simpler that way) process these seemingly contrasting emotions? Terrific performance on the one hand, overall losers on the other.

I felt like a fraud celebrating Cook’s debut and test ton, de Kock’s brutal batting, or KG’s 13 wickets like we’d won the series. Driving home on the 4th evening listening in the car, I let rip with a series of determined fist pumps as England’s collapse commenced, and immediately turned around to see if any other drivers had seen me being so foolish.

I heard many commentators and analysts say things like “builds momentum” and “bodes well for the future” and they are absolutely spot on. The future is indeed bright and there is much to look forward to. Despite what the English media are saying, this was no eulogy for SA cricket.

I’ve also written in the past about the peaks and troughs of sport, and how at times like this I like to day-dream about future victories.  But still, that wasn’t enough. I needed to find a more visual mechanism to cling to as I start rebuilding my optimism.

And that image is a bridge.

A bridge to redemption. This win was us summoning the courage, and enduring the humiliation of the walk across with our heads held high. Similar to Queen Cercei’s walk of shame. If you know what that is, great. If not, I suggest you not Google it if you’re reading this at work.

In just over a year, we play the poms again. Four tests in England. I have that to look forward to. And for now I’m ready for the ‘one dayers’. A slightly new team, and technically a new competition. I have crossed the bridge. I only hope I’m not on a road to nowhere.

GPF