All aboard for a passage to enlightenment

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TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

For South Africans, Sri Lanka is where the sub-continent makes sense. It does not intoxicate to the same degree as the magnificent madness that is India. It is not the bedlam on wheels that Bangladesh can seem, and what Pakistan - unseen, unheard and untoured by a South African team since 2007 - is thought to be.

Sri Lanka is the small but perfectly formed place where west can meet east in a beach bar and, the next morning, remember who and what both of them are with no awkwardness.

It is also where South Africa cannot win cricket matches for toffee, relatively speaking. Since their first tour to Sri Lanka in 1993, the Proteas have played 39 matches there across all formats. One was washed out. Of the rest, South Africa have won just 12 and lost 22; or 31.58%.

It’s the conditions, stupid, is it? No, it isn’t. In India, South Africa have a winning percentage of 52.08. In Pakistan, they are 51.52% in the black. So, what is it, then?

“Sri Lanka are a very dangerous allround team but, specifically in ODIs and T20s, they have been performing very well over the last four to five years,” AB de Villiers offered before the squad departed on Sunday for a tour of three one-day internationals and two Tests. “They have won a T20 World Cup and performed very well in the ODI World Cups. They are a very good shorter-version team.”

Fair enough. But so are Australia, India and England, all of them - along with the Lankans - currently ensconced on higher rungs than South Africa on the one-day ladder. The thought of beating those countries in their own conditions does not loom anything lie as large as when Sri Lanka are the home side.

And how about those Test tigers in England? What do the South Africans makes of the fact that Sri Lanka have, apparently, learnt to win away from home? Not a lot, according to Russell Domingo.

“Sri Lanka played very well (in England), and both Tests were very close,” he said. “But the conditions are going to be vastly different (in Sri Lanka). Their seamers had to do a lot more bowling than they would have done in Sri Lanka. In that respect, I don’t see too much to analyse in that.

“The cricket is going to be different, but it did give us insight into how good they are as a team, how they are performing. They have had a good few months. That’s why it’s going to be a really good challenge for us.”

What no-one says is that South Africans struggle with unorthodoxy and subtlety - precious qualities Sri Lanka have always had in spades. If Muttiah Muralitharan was not bowling with an action designed by Salvador Dali and welded together by a demented plumber, then Arjuna Ranatunga swatted bowlers to all parts despite lugging a belly that should have got in the way of him playing most of his strokes.

These days, Ajantha Mendis twirls away with an elfin puckishness that disconcerts South Africans more than they would care to admit. Rangana Herath, meanwhile, looks to them far more like the bank manager he is than the wonderfully perceptive bowler he also is. Dinesh Chandimal, too, would be few South Africans’ idea of a proper batsman - too lazy, too hazy, too David Gower.

Then there is Sri Lanka’s quality of seam bowling, or lack of it. South Africans do not respect spin, even when fine practitioners of the art like Muralitharan, Herath and Shane Warne teach them why they should. They are this way because a lumbering bear of a fast bowler called Brett Schultz went off to Sri Lanka in 1993 and came back with 20 wickets from three Tests. The truth is that the quicks have done the job for South Africa more often than not and irrespective of the prevailing conditions. By contrast, the only Sri Lankan seamer South Africans have yet considered worth feeding is the long gone Chaminda Vaas.

This is all, of course, according to what has gone before. There is strong evidence that South Africans are examining their cricket identity. Are they as one-dimensional as they are painted? Do they have the ability to add subtlety to their swagger? How much better would they be if and when they find a world class attacking spinner, or have they looked past him already?

Good thing for South Africa, then, that they are going to a place that makes sense to them. They know that they aren’t nearly as good in Sri Lanka as they are in other countries. For their next trick, they need to discover why.