Aussies
And so to Australia where the Proteas skipper faces his most searching pre-World Cup test in the three ODIs and sole T20 they will play Down Under next month
provide big test for Faf du Plessis’s Proteas ahead of World Cup
● Evil growled at us out of the darkness as we stood on a street corner in Adelaide postdinner on a Sunday night in November 2016.
The malevolent, rough, fragmented sound of whatever was labouring up the road stabbed those on the kerb whose minds were old enough with a line from Jethro Tull’s Aqualung — “. . . spitting out pieces of his broken luck . . .”
Presently the monster emerged into the sallow glow of the streetlights. It was a car; ghostly, dirty white, headlights deadened, all four tyres shredded, metal rims biting bitterly into the tar road — hence the rumble — and oozing at a fraction of the speed it would have been travelling at had all been well.
Clearly, all was not well. We watched in puzzled silence as the car disappeared into the next trough of night’s blackness, and went warily on our way.
The next morning we learnt that the driver had forced a woman and her two-year-old child into the car at gunpoint and driven into the city, bound for the gods knew where.
The alarm was raised and the authorities sprang into action, trying to talk the driver back from the abyss, then casting caltrops into his path to rip into his tyres and give him four noisy reasons to think again, then descending to his level and resorting to guns and bullets and violence.
Wounded
The driver was wounded, not lethally, happily, and, even more happily, his terrified passengers were unharmed.
Physically, at least.
SA’s team, who were in town to play the third Test of a series they had already won, had no idea what was going down less than a kilometre from their hotel.
But they knew what would feature more prominently than most stories on the next day’s news agenda: that bloody cheating Faf du Plessis bastard and his ball-tampering.
And so it was. You could have consumed all flavours of truth, untruth, innuendo, exaggeration and just plain lies about what happened in Hobart with SA’s then stand-in captain — AB de Villiers was injured — the mint in his mouth, and the ball long before you were informed, briefly, that a woman and a two-year-old had been terrorised on some of the safest streets in the world.
Welcome to Australia, land of such clanging contradictions we should label it Upsidedown Under.
“No matter how much you’ve seen, you haven’t seen anything,” is how Stephen Cook remembers the squad’s senior men trying to explain the challenge of touring Australia to the newbies. “Depending on who the enemy is, it can make it interesting.”
For the Perth and Hobart Tests, both won by SA, the enemy had been clearly caught in the crosshairs.
“The Aussie press had been hammering their team, but once we won the series the narrative suddenly turned,” Cook said.
Writing in The Australian, Peter Lalor, as civilised and intelligent an Aussie as can be found and a damn fine writer to boot, main- lined the nation’s pulse: “Faf is a man the Australian cricket team loves to hate. In 2014 there were constant asides among the touring Australians about the batsman’s penchant for going shirtless at every opportunity. The batsman is proud of his body and is even said to have had his sleeves taken up to further expose his biceps.”
Cook arrived in Adelaide carrying the cares of having scored only 25 runs in his three previous innings in the rubber: “I was under quite a bit of pressure before that, but people seemed to have forgotten that I hadn’t scored runs for a couple of games.”
With the eyes off him, Cook scored a flinty 40 in the first innings and followed it with 104 in the second dig.
Made of different stuff, Du Plessis delivered a defiant 118 not out in the first innings.
“That was one of the finest innings I’ve seen,” Cook said. “There was a fire in his eyes that made you think, ‘Hold on — maybe this isn’t the best way to try to get at him’.”
Du Plessis and his team are back in Australia for what would, ordinarily, be billed as their most searching test ahead of the 2019 World Cup.
Come through next month’s three ODIs and sole T20 OK and they will earn credit they can spend on planning for the tournament. Come second and the pressure will be on to fix what’s wrong.
But even this apparently unshakeable nugget of cricket orthodoxy has been upended. Australia are enduring their worst year in one-day cricket since they played England in ODI No 1, which was minted in 1971, the same year as Aqualung. They have won only one of their 10 games and are 2018’s most poorly performing team in the format.
Even so, they are still Australia. And SA are not at their best, having won just half of their 14 ODIs this year.
A batting line-up that led to more questions being asked than answered in five white-ball games against Zimbabwe, this will have to make do without the injured Hashim Amla and JP Duminy.
But, after what happened at Newlands in March, at least the Aussies can’t claim the moral high ground. You would hope.