Hughes, Mandela deaths prove cricket world is wrong way up

www.GOcricket.com - http://www.gocricket.com/Hughes-Mandela-deaths-prove-the-cricket-world-is-the-wrong-way-up/Telford-Vice/columnshow/45426981.cms

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

WHERE does cricket end and real life begin? What is the murk that lurks between those two tangibles? Why should we believe that crassly commercial cricket gives an altruistic damn about anything that might not make money?

These are not light points to ponder, and that is no accident - they were inspired by death; one fresh, another a year ago.

Phil Hughes’ dramatic demise has plunged Australia into mass mourning. So much so that the cancellation, at the Hughes family’s request, of a state memorial service and the fact that Michael Clarke made himself available for the first Test against India have hit the headlines unduly hard.

If the world was the right way up, that a state memorial service should be held for any cricketer and a captain pulling out of a Test over the death of a friend - neither his spouse nor a close relative - would be the news.

Australian society is over-regulated and its bureaucracy is bumptious. Proof of that can be had by anyone trying to get into the members’ enclosure at Adelaide Oval wearing a collarless shirt, or entering the WACA in a dress held up by spaghetti straps. “But those are tagliatelle straps,” from someone near the wearer of the dress cut no mustard with a sour steward during South Africa’s tour in 2012-13.

So the fact that Hughes’ death from a catastrophic injury sustained on a cricket ground has collided with real life in Australia in so overwrought a way compared to what would have happened in many other countries will not surprise those who have experience of a society that, sometimes despite itself, succeeds in almost everything it attempts. Even public torrents of grief.

South Africa is a different place in every sense. We murder, on average, 47 people a day. In Australia, 244 homicides were recorded in the whole of 2012. That’s less than six days’ worth of murdering in South Africa this year.

Mercifully, then, on December 5 last year death came with dignity to Nelson Mandela. He had survived judicial and extra-judicial attempts to kill him, but in the end his body simply became too old for this world and he went like many of us would like to go: peacefully and painlessly.

Mercifully, too, Mandela was not Australian. South Africans are still mourning him and this generation always will. But we were never emotionally crippled by his death like Australians seem to be over Hughes’.

We were, of course, forewarned by Mandela’s ever more frequent admissions to hospital - no-one who was at the Sydney Cricket Ground on November 25, 2014 would have imagined they were to see Hughes cut down 70 years short of Mandela’s eventual age of 95.

But we do not get everything right in a country that has four Noble Peace Prize winners - apartheid-era African National Congress president Albert Luthuli was the first in 1960, followed by clergyman Desmond Tutu in 1984, and both Mandela and apartheid’s last president, the undeserving FW de Klerk, in 1993 - to go with our 47 murders a day.

Cricket South Africa (CSA), for instance, organised and garishly marketed a T20 between the South African cricket and rugby teams that, they said, “celebrates the one year anniversary of (Mandela’s) death”. Time was when deaths and their anniversaries were commemorated, not celebrated - and certainly not in the cause of putting some clumsy gimmick on television.

That the venture raised money for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund is commendable, but how much more impressive and profitable to charity would it not have been to instead dedicate all the days of next week’s first Test against West Indies to the same cause?

That the Test does not coincide exactly with the date of Mandela’s death is the kind of excuse CSA would make for not doing so. This is, after all, the same organisation that in July last year blamed Mandela’s poor health for their third failure to meet the deadline to appoint a chief executive.

So, on Friday evening, the circus came to town at the Wanderers. Wayne Parnell impersonated a spinner. Dale Steyn bowled at backyard pace off a stunted run-up and took a phone onto the field with him to snap selfies. Mark Boucher “coached” the Springboks. Faf du Plessis, in a sharp suit, “managed” the Proteas. Hulking great rugby forwards batted with the kind of intent some of our best murderers bring to their wretched work. A washed up rock band warbled from a tent beyond the boundary.

As light entertainment, it was no doubt fun for some. As a way to honour someone who was prepared to die for his ideal of a free South Africa and was instead imprisoned for 27 years, it was an embarrassing and tawdry insult.

Australia is in seemingly irreversible despair over Hughes, a player who is destined to be much more highly regarded than he was while he lived. South Africa - if you take CSA seriously - remembers Mandela with mediocre music, flashing lights and more silliness than you could throw a rubber chicken at.

Death, where is thy sting?