Leading Edge: Edgbaston is a mother of a cricket ground

Another tournament is on its way into the annals of failure. Thanks, Edgbaston, for nothing.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

EDGBASTON is a mother of a cricket ground. No, not like that. Like this: if you go there, you will be fed. And fed. And fed some more.

At least, that’s what happens if you’re a reporter — whose uncritical adulation suits everywhere and in every sport try to buy with perks; stuff like free desk space, free power, free wifi and, especially, free food.

Judging by the array and quality of the fare on offer to the press at Edgbaston — which is way too good for the likes of us — Warwickshire or England or the ICC or all three must be hiding something properly big and particularly nasty.

How many bodies are buried under the outfield? Is the pitch block a portal into Hades itself? What evil stalks the concourses in the late, lonely hours once stumps have been drawn?

Either that, or something like that, or the suits are really nice people …

It seems a good idea to give South Africans another reason to think about a ground where only bad things appear to happen to the team that flies their flag. It is their field of nightmares, and even more so after Wednesday.

South Africa didn’t play badly in their World Cup match against New Zealand. They just didn’t play well enough when it mattered. New Zealand did.

And so another tournament is on its way into the annals of failure. Thanks, Edgbaston, for nothing. It doesn’t matter a jot that South Africa last lost a test there in 1960, or that they have gone down in only five of the 16 matches they have played at the ground.

It also won’t matter much that the genuine and lasting damage to the cause this time was done in the first week of the tournament at the Oval, where South Africa should have chased down England’s 311/8 and never should have allowed Bangladesh to get anywhere near 330/6. Instead, they crashed and burned 104 runs short and then sputtered and stalled to 309/8.

But it’s Edgbaston that is the keeper of the flame of #ProteaFire: the kind that burns South Africa’s hopes and ambitions to an ugly crisp.

And all because of 1999 and all that, when Lance Klusener and Allan Donald … You know the rest, and this reporter couldn’t be bothered to find new ways to tell old stories anymore.

Suffice to say that what happened in that World Cup semi-final against Australia 20 years ago will live forever for cricketminded South Africans. Yes, it really was, is and always will be that catastrophic.

Wednesday can’t come close to it, which is no bad thing. We don’t need our shelf of horror stories bookended by two of similar magnitude.

Aesthetically, Edgbaston doesn’t stick out from the rest of Birmingham because it is just as unremarkable as the rest of the city. Ordinariness, it seems, is the ideal there. So you would be forgiven for thinking you had happened on a circular office park that featured a treeless park at its centre.

That should only add to South Africans’ distaste for the place. If you get hammered in Mohali, where a filthy stream oozes past the ground and sparks leap from power points in a pressbox that seems open to anyone, or the Gabba, where the Vulture Street End is opposite the spot where Greg Ritchie used the K-word in a spew of racism he thought was funny in a lunchtime speech delivered during South Africa’s 2012 test series, you have the shoulder of a narrative to cry on.

Edgbaston isn’t like that. It is as banally beige as it is possible for a place to be. Nothing wonderful or terrible should ever be able to happen there. It wears its mediocrity faultlessly flat.

But not when South Africa are there. At least not when they are there to play a game they must win to keep hopes and ambitions alive.

Edgbaston is a mother of a cricket ground. Yes: like that.