Moment of madness may cost KG
at St George’s Park
● That this story has pushed onto an inside page our analysis of the cricket, played on day two of the second test between South Africa and Australia yesterday, tells you this is no ordinary match in no ordinary series.
Things will get more extraordinary if Kagiso Rabada is banned, as seems likely, for the rest of the rubber at a hearing this evening for the moment of male madness in which his and Steve Smith’s shoulders collided, seemingly malevolently, after he dismissed Australia’s captain on Friday.
But we should begin not on the field but in the seats of the western grandstand.
“We want the band! We want the band! We want the band . . .”
The chant went up before tea from the crowd clumped there after the umpires, Kumar Dharmasena and Sundaram Ravi, shushed the brass band, who got up and left, tilting the tuba huffily as they went.
They returned after tea, to cheers more rousing than anything offered for a player’s feat. But twice more the umpires suspended play to silence them, to an edgy swelling of boos.
No one was surprised by then. On Friday, this ground, the country’s gently fading grand dame of the game, was defiled by barbarians at the gate putting their misogyny where their faces were.
They wore Sonny Bill Williams masks in an attempt at humour that would have been risibly flaccid if it wasn’t so mindless.
Eight years before Candice Falzon married David Warner, she and Williams’s liaison was dragged through the more feral depths of the internet, photograph and all.
The masks were a few individuals’ idea of Picture: AFP getting back at Warner in the wake of the invective he spewed at Quinton de Kock in the first test at Kingsmead.
That they should drag into this idiocy a woman who has enough male stupidity in her life is vile and disgusting.
That two senior Cricket South Africa officials, commercial and marketing manager Clive Eksteen and communications head Altaaf Kazi, should see fit to pose, smiling, armin-arm, in a photograph with three of these masked morons is a brain fart of nuclear proportions.
That SuperSport should say it will take no action against Derek Alberts, who celebrated this stunt on social media, is beyond belief.
At least CSA knew it had to, in a statement, “distance itself from the alleged action of certain officials” and apologise.
● ➽