Durban – There used to be a time when the nation would, quite literally, kak itself if one of the icons in the national cricket team was injured in the lead-up to a Test match.
But the loss of Jacques Kallis ahead of last week’s Test at Centurion was met with the swagger of a team that knows its stuff. If one bloke falls, there are several others waiting to pick up the slack and resume normal business.
The selectors will be rightly chuffed that the Proteas pounded down Pakistan in the manner they did last week, even without Kallis.
The dead-rubber syndrome that was so typical of the great Aussie sides of the 90s is yet to strike Graeme Smith’s men.
And it’s a testament to the state of the domestic game that there have been so many seamless transitions into the national Test team of late.
Faf du Plessis, Marchant de Lange, Vernon Philander… and now Kyle Abbott. All of the them have hit the ground running at the highest level, and produced match-winning performances to boot. And, just as importantly, each one of them has served their time on the domestic stage, standing out by sheer weight of performance.
For Abbott, this last week has been a bit of blur.
By his reckoning, this last week was supposed to have been spent on the road, playing the wham bam stuff with the Dolphins. But it’s funny how the gods of the game hand out their chances.
Even the reception staff at Kingsmead have suddenly started calling him hot-stuff, which would have probably made him more nervous than he was for the first ball bowled at Centurion last week.
Such is the lot of the overnight superstar.
A few months ago, when he was greedily collecting wickets in the Sunfoil Series, it was put to him that he wasn’t far from knocking on the door for the Proteas.
“You reckon,” he wondered. “Jeez, I don’t know. There are quite a few guys in the picture already. I’ve just got to keep working hard and maybe one day it will happen.”
Abbott’s day in the sun was his first full day of Test cricket, as he ran through the Pakistanis like a rampant Durban curry. But the sudden fuss and fanfare won’t change the 25-year-old one bit. As they say, he went to a good school.
And speaking of good schools, Maritzburg went into shut-down on Friday morning, as 1 250 strapping young men went marching through the city to celebrate Maritzburg College’s 150th anniversary.
Hovering behind the schoolboys was a clutch of old boys, resplendent in their blazers. Some of the jackets had seen better and brighter days, but like the magnificently weathered “baggy green” that sat atop Steve Waugh’s greying hair, the old bullets wore their colours with distinction.
And while the rest of the city clapped the procession along, the old buggers were deep in conversation.
“I should have played first team, you know, but that bladdy master had his favourites,” one grumbled to the other.
“He gave me five lashes every time he saw me, but he never gave me a game on Goldstones,” he sighed, decades after the event.
“That’s all I wanted, just one game in front of the whole school.”
As they say, you can take the man out of College, but you can never take the school from his heart. Here’s to 150 more years of academic and sporting prowess. – Sunday Tribune