Leading Edge: The bad marriage that is South Africa versus Australia

The real Australian team — the snarling, swaggering, sniggering version, not Tim Paine’s hand-shaking wimps — will stand up before the end of South Africa’s tour.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

IT’S a bad marriage made neither in heaven nor hell but in that dark place within us where push comes to shove in all its ugliness: the gut.

It’s primal and grimy and fuelled by hot blood gushing in where logic fears to tread.

It’s what would have happened had John McEnroe met Bjorn Borg round midnight in an alley in the bad part of town, circa 1980.

Or what did happen to Nancy Kerrigan’s knee, thanks to a lead pipe and a thug, at the instigation of Tonya Harding weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympics.

Or what might happen again should Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger bump into each other during unhappy hour in an old man’s pub somewhere.

It’s South Africa versus Australia, and it takes no prisoners.

It’s always been like this, in the same way that Americans have for centuries ignored the enduring truth that what they call their country is built on the theft of black lives that don’t matter to them. Except in the cause of capitalism.

Then they came clean and owned up and dropped the act and, finally, elected Donald Trump, who isn’t afraid to be the monster his people want.

South Africa versus Australia is in the throes of its Trumpian moment. It burst its fetid banks there in November 2016 when Faf du Plessis and his gobby, freshly-minted mouth landed the starring role in a made-by-and-for-TV ball-tampering soap opera.

It came here last summer when David Warner outed himself as Trump in pads and plasters, and dragged useful idiots like Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft to the bottom with him in what ended as another ball-tampering saga.

Now it’s back over there for three one-day internationals and a T20, a trifling in the greater scheme of cricket things but a burning coal of righteousness for those involved. Which includes you and me and all those Aussie bastards.

The view from here is that you can bet on the real Australian team — the snarling, swaggering, sniggering version, not Tim Paine’s hand-shaking wimps — standing up before the end of the tour.

That’s not to say South Africa are angels. They are, as has been written in this space before, the team most nabbed for ball-tampering in recent years, and they have given the game the corrupt and corrupting Hansie Cronjé, among others of that miserable ilk.

If this tour follows the telltale track marks of those that have mainlined malevolence in the past, these two sides will again bring out the worst in each other’s characters and culture.

Along, of course, with the best of their cricket.