Can we trust SA to win when it counts?

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TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

SORRY to bother, Professors Sen, Chomsky and Einstein, but could one of you - indeed, it might require all of you putting your famously fantastic heads together - tell us how the dark alchemy of Zimbabwe’s zeroes beating Australia’s aces and semi-piddling India winning against utterly piddling England clears the way for India to make an undignified belly-crawl to the top of the one-day rankings.

Make that a belly-flop. The No. 1 position has, after all, fallen into India’s laps as limply as James Anderson’s attempts to intimidate opponents - on or off the field - fizzles into unfunny comedy. If India are one-day cricket’s best team, Geoffrey Boycott can cook a mean butter chicken. Eeh by bloody gum he can’t.

And the Aussies, Glenn Maxwell, Mitchell Johnson and all, have slip-slided away to fourth place? Clearly, this script has been flung at us from the ragged edge of Bollywood’s lunatic fringe.

But who are we to complain? Anyone or anything that makes 50-over cricket any less unwatchable than it has been since someone had the bright idea to excise the boring sludge of the middle overs of the innings, throw it all in the air and call it T20 is a dear and valuable friend to the game.

South Africans out there are watching all this with the kind of cold, calculating cackle that has been beyond them in campaigns past. Their team’s perennial failure to fulfill their potential in tournaments and their unhappy habit of refusing to perform any better than they have to to win their matches has had a sobering effect on our expectations. What was once blind passion is now all-seeing cynicism.

Whatever the rankings are by the time the World Cup looms large and in charge in February, South Africans will know their Proteas are only a few losses away from wilting without trace. We have been shot in this movie too many times before to expect anything different, and to hell with the logic of form and talent and skill and experience and all the other fine things that, the cliche wallahs tell us, are not for sale on the supermarket shelf.

Which is why a hope stirs secretly, a hope that shall not be held up to the light lest it crumbles like a vampire in the first shaft of dawn’s light; a hope that, this time, things might be different ... Yeah, right. Wake us up when it’s over.

So nothing like surprise will strike us should South Africa find a way not to reach the final of the triangular series in Harare on Saturday. All they would have to do is, in their match on Tuesday, not beat an Australian team that lost to Zimbabwe on Sunday - what price a tie, especially as Michael Clarke has gone home with a hamstring injury? - and decline to thrash the eminently thrashable Zimbabweans on Thursday. Can do? Absolutely.

“We all know that Zimbabwe is a dangerous team, especially in this format,” AB de Villiers managed to say on Monday without laughing at this nonsense. “That is the nature of the game. If you are not on top of your game or in good form you bring a team like Zimbabwe into play.”

Zimbabwe beat Australia because Australia played like Zimbabwe, not because Zimbabwe played like Australia. Zimbabwe did not win half as much as Australia lost.

South Africa, of course, are capable of playing like dead men walking when the mood takes them, as it has done much of the time they have been under pressure.

Does it count as pressure to know that you will rise to the No. 1 ranking if you beat Australia and Zimbabwe in your remaining games and go on to win the final? Damn straight it does, especially if the other team in that final is the side that has so often been the one that has laid your insecurities bare for all to see.

That is South Africa’s challenge this week: to show us why we should trust them to win when it counts. This is a nothing tournament that, whatever happens, will be forgotten by the time the World Cup starts. But, right here, right now, it matters more than anything else.

South Africa already know that. Now they need to believe it.