Morkel’s move eased by milk of kindness
● Milk. You wouldn’t think it could bring together two of the most notable names in the wide world of fast bowling.
Beer? Certainly. Whisky? Yes. Marijuana? No doubt. Milk? Surely not. But, in Centurion in the spring of 2004, it did.
Daryll Cullinan, the Titans captain, had asked a still uncontracted Dale Steyn to come to pre-season training.
“I got there early because I knew I could use the milk in the change room for my Weet-Bix — I didn’t have enough money to buy my own milk,” Steyn said this week.
“I walk in and there’s this long, tall, skinny guy. And I go up to him and greet him and shake his hand.
“Since that day there hasn’t been a day that’s gone by where I haven’t thought, ‘How’s Morné doing?’.”
On Monday, Morné Morkel arrived at that place every elite sportsperson dreads.
The place of no return, where you know it’s over and you announce your retirement.
Morkel has been coming to that place for a while. He will arrive there at the end of the test series against Australia, which is scheduled for April 3.
“He’s had to play second fiddle to a lot of guys, whether it was me and Makhaya [Ntini] opening the bowling, and then it was Vernon [Philander] and myself,” Steyn said.
“When you look at his career and his stats, he’s still managed somehow to maintain fantastic averages and do what he did without ever moaning. An unselfish cricketer is always going to be rated more highly in my book than somebody who had better numbers but played for himself.”
Steyn counts Morkel as his best friend in cricket, which is evident in the emotion that rises as he speaks of him.
Even machines break down
“We’ve been saying things to each other for the last year-and-a-half now, just talking about what our plans are going forward.
“You want to know what your mate’s up to, what his thinking is. Am I thinking the same thing? Because you don’t want to feel alone in the situation.”
Many of those conversations would have been informed by the back injury that kept Morkel out of South Africa’s team from October 2016 to March 2017.
“Everyone said he’ll never play cricket again. He said to me, ‘What do you think?’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, do what’s in your heart. You’ve got to go for it’.”
No-one is more qualified to answer Morkel’s question than Steyn, who has played only seven matches of any description since breaking a shoulder while bowling at the WACA in November 2016.
That followed him fracturing a different bone in the same shoulder at Kingsmead in December 2015. Then, at Newlands in January, he made a mess of his heel.
We think of elite players as exemplary human machines able to do anything. The reality is different. Their bodies work exponentially harder than ours and are exposed to greater risks more frequently. Calamity follows them like a mugger down an alley.
Morkel and Steyn know this from bitter experience, as does Mark Boucher, whose career was ended by a bail that cartwheeled into his left eye on an otherwise ordinary day in Taunton in July 2012.
Steyn shared Morkel’s dark thoughts after his second shoulder injury: “I got hold of ‘Bouch’ and said, ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to play cricket again’.”
Titans coach Mark Boucher’s reply, as relayed by Steyn, offers a precious glimpse into vulnerability. “He’s like, ‘I’m telling you, you can play again, and if you do play you can come and play for me because you helped me through that period’.”
These men are not alone. They have each other.