South Africa need to relearn the art of fielding

Peter Kirsten used to hang from a wall in the Border Cricket Board offices at Buffalo Park in East London. A photograph of Peter Kirsten, at least.

It wasn’t a flattering picture but this wasn’t about flattery. It was about genius.

Kirsten is half-sprawled somewhere squarish of the pitch, his cap upended on the turf, his exposed head mussed with what’s left of his thinning hair.

He’s holding up a hand, fingers curled around a ball, as if asking a question: “What the hell just happened?”

The look on his face is the closest we get to an obvious answer: “Buggered if I know.”

What’s happened is that Kirsten has just taken a catch. Not just any catch — a flying, blinding, out-of-nothing pluck of a ball that had no business being plucked; a ball hit too hard and too far out of his reach to be photographed properly by a skilled practitioner armed with the best equipment.

Catch that ball? Don’t be stupid.

Yet Kirsten has caught it. And he hasn’t a clue how.

This bafflement at his own brilliance is writ on his face in what looks almost like worry. His eyes are stunned wide with awe but crinkled with disbelief at their corners.

The art of the photograph is that it tells its story without dwindling to cliche. Even though we have seen neither the delivery nor the stroke, the moment shimmers with heat and drama. You can smell the shock of it.

Kirsten was, of course, one damn fine fielder.

So was Colin Bland before him, and after him Jonty Rhodes, Herschelle Gibbs and AB de Villiers.

Temba Bavuma’s membership to that club is in the post.

And those are only the cream of a crop that has yielded many others who were

The standard of South Africa’s fielding has been skyscraper high since ’63

nearly as good.

The standard of South Africa’s fielding has been skyscraper high since 1963, when Trevor Goddard’s team left for Australia with calls for the tour to be cancelled ringing in their ears.

Not called off for political reasons, mind, but because nobody gave the South Africans a chance against a side studded with Bill Lawry, Bobby Simpson and Richie Benaud.

“We knew we were the underdogs and that they had the more talented team,” Goddard would tell me more than 30 years later.

“But we also knew that we could even the odds with our fielding.

“Do you know why? Because fielding is a skill: you can learn how to do it to a very high level.”

Goddard’s men, Bland included, came home with a drawn series.

It would be another 45 years before South Africa went one better and won a rubber Down Under. That 2008/09 team had De Villiers and JP Duminy, as much a superstar in the field as he was at the crease in those magnificent few weeks.

And who among those who were at the WACA in Perth last November to witness the moment, which will forever be trapped in cricket’s amber, when Bavuma levitated horizontally to run out David Warner with an impossible direct hit did not also feel that the tone of the series — which South Africa would go on to win — had been set?

By then Dale Steyn had broken his shoulder, which would have taken other, lesser teams out of the equation. But here was this kid, believing he could fly and proving it and hitting the stumps to say it ain’t so.

We need to fetch these wonderful memories because the quality of fielding in South African cricket is not what it was.

Anyone who has watched the franchise Twenty20 competition would concur. You get the feeling one of those boeped okes in the crowd, holding a beer in one hand and a cellphone in the other and trying to latch onto a share of R2-million in prize money, has at least as good a chance of completing a catch as the fielders.

Like Goddard said, you can learn to field. You can also relearn.