All aboard for cricket in a cake tin

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Wellington

COFFEE is done better in Wellington, New Zealand’s hipster capital, than in most places on earth. But even a dedicated sniffer-outer of artfully prepared caffeine is distracted by the whiff of celebrity.

That happened on Thursday when a woman queuing in a cafe across the road from a smart Wellington hotel took her attention off the barista busy behind the brewheads for long enough to ask, “Who are they all waiting for?”

Clumps of people had gathered for and aft a bus parked in front of the hotel. They had a clear view of the 10 or so metres between the building and the vehicle, and they had their phones and cameras out ...

“They’re waiting for the South African cricket team,” the woman was answered. “They have a match today.”

With that the players and their support staff emerged, one by one, from the hotel and walked towards the bus.

Ears were connected to headphones that were plugged into devices doing who knows what - perhaps playing recordings of Nelson Mandela’s speeches, or Tim Noakes denouncing refined carbohydrates as edible evil, or AB de Villiers’ increasingly insistent assertions that SA were the “best team in the tournament”, or prayers, or music, or something that passed for music.

Eyes were sharply focused, but not enough to prevent them from being caught by some of the faces smiling at them a respectful distance away. When that happened, famous hands raised in recognition.

Mouths were utterly, resolutely, implacably, almost glumly, shut.

Minds would have been forgiven for being clean across the Tasman Sea, some 2 225 kilometres westward in Sydney - where SA’s World Cup campaign will leap forward or crash to an end in what is expected to be their quarter-final against Sri Lanka on Wednesday. But on Thursday, in their game against the United Arab Emirates in Wellington, SA were in nothing more nor less than limbo.

All the while as the players stepped aboard, cameras and camera phones whirred and clicked amid shouts of good luck. Then, with a hiss of its closing doors, the bus lurched into motion for a journey that would last less than 10 minutes and just more than a kilometre.

Oddly, for anyone who has seen cricket teams travel to and from grounds in places like SA and Asia, the police cars in front of and behind the bus neither flashed lights nor blared sirens as they went. Instead, the convoy nosed demurely through the light traffic along Wellington’s quiet quayside.

All around, a city got on with what it always did at around noon on a Thursday. A bright and sunny Thursday, at that, with only the merest breath of breeze. It was a fine day for most endeavours, including a cricket match in a cake tin. And getting a coffee.