Publications
Partners
Now that the cricket season is under way and the Proteas are halfway through their first test against New Zealand at Kingsmead, it feels as though (our not particularly harsh) winter might just have taken its last gasps, and spring has finally arrived to breathe some life back into a sporting calendar that was missing a certain green-and-gold component. (It might be white in this case, but let’s not let that distract us.)
It is difficult to steer away from well-worn ideas of a lean winter and bountiful spring when it is clearly so relevant in this instance, particularly after international cricket has taken a back seat for the past few months.
It is not as if our boys haven’t been getting in some practice, what with the West Indies Tri-Nation series, English county cricket and the Caribbean Premier League ticking over in the background, but all we can hope is that coach Russell Domingo and co have used the downtime well.
“In winter, I plot and plan. In spring, I move,” Henry Rollins, that obnoxious American jack-of(f)-all-trades, is quoted as saying.
My estimation of Rollins aside, there’s a nugget of wisdom in there, even a possible indication of how he manages to be so prolific. And smug.
What Rollins glosses over, though, is how easy it is to allow winter’s short, chilly days to lull an otherwise productive person into a sense that tomorrow is another day. Groundwork, after all, takes a degree of ingenuity, which seems to have been lacking in the Proteas set-up of late.
To be fair, the last time we saw the side decked in white was in the sweltering January sun, when an unassuming England outfit tore through our batting line-up faster than Caster Semenya through the field in the early heats, and left our bowlers bewildered and staring wide-eyed like first-time Grindr users at the Olympic Village in Rio.
What that last test series set in motion, though, besides the emergence of Temba Bavuma as a diminutive middle-order gem, was the Proteas’ fall from grace as the undisputed champions of test cricket.
Beginning this season at seventh on the International Cricket Council’s test rankings gives the team a chance not only to redeem themselves, but to discard all the tags we’ve come to associate with South African cricket in the modern era.
They now have a chance to go into the new season not as giants, but as potential killers.
And with Australia having demonstrated their vulnerability against Sri Lanka, and a mouth-watering one-day and test series kicking off against the Aussies next month, the Proteas should be arming their slingshots with the best rocks they can find, stand-in captain Faf du Plessis included.
That’s hopefully where the movement Rollins refers to comes in, provided the team and support staff have put in the requisite plotting and planning.
With up being the only direction to go, at least there’s no chance of them getting vertigo. But don’t be surprised if they get a crick in the neck.
@longbottom_69 is an armchair cricket critic. He prefers lateral movement to vertical
