Times Media
TELFORD VICE, Cape Town
FASTEN the seatbelts of your ambition, stow your propensity to panic, and return your sensibility to the upright position. Or something like that.
SA will board a flight to Christchurch on Wednesday. At least, that is what their boarding passes will list as their destination. But their hearts and minds will know better than that.
Wednesday marks the first step of a journey that began in Dhaka on March 25, 2011 - the day SA found a way to crash out of that year’s World Cup.
If that sounds odd, it is because nothing about SA and the World Cup has yet followed a logical flight path. Despite being favourites to win the damned thing more often than not, they have yet to reach the final or even win a knockout match.
SA’s meticulous planning and relentless preparation have been undone by punitive rain rules, a bizarre runout, their own failure to grasp the most important bit of a Duckworth/Lewis equation, and opponents who know just how to push the right mental buttons to get them to do the wrong thing.
Twenty-five of Herschelle Gibbs’ 248 one-day internationals were World Cup games, but he carries none of the mental scarring that might have been inflicted by any of the above.
“I was always looking forward to it from about a year before,” Gibbs said on Tuesday. “I couldn’t wait to get on the plane and go.”
Well he might have. Gibbs scored centuries in two of his three World Cup campaigns and hit all six balls of an over for six in the other.
But his memory is single-edged. At Headingley in 1999, Gibbs’ 101 anchored SA’s total of 271/7. Then he tried to celebrate taking the catch that should have dismissed Steve Waugh for 56 by throwing the ball high into the sky. Except that Gibbs had not quite caught the ball before he tossed it upward.
Waugh has denied saying, “You’ve just dropped the World Cup, son.” But another page from SA’s crazy World Cup history was writ complete when Waugh’s undefeated 120 took Australia to victory.
And here we are, cleared for take-off for another episode of onboard entertainment. In Christchurch on Monday, SA play Sri Lanka in their first warm-up match ahead of the 2015 World Cup. Next Wednesday, they take on New Zealand in another warm-up.
Then, next Sunday in Hamilton, Zimbabwe will be SA’s opponents and the time for warming-up will be over. The match will be the first of six group games. They will be followed by quarter-finals, semi-finals, and that unchartered territory for South Africans - the final.
SA have again tried to cover all the real and imagined bases in getting themselves ready to go where no team from this country have gone before. Have they succeeded?
“I don’t know if beating West Indies so badly in the ODI series (which SA won 4-1 last month) was a good thing because they weren’t tested at all,” Gibbs said. “For instance, batsmen No. 7 to 11 need to get some batting time.”
They have two more chances to get it. Then South Africans will only want to hear one click ...
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