Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE, Cape Town
THE most impressive thing Australia have accomplished in Zimbabwe is not Glenn Maxwell impersonating AB de Villiers at the crease or Mitchell Johnson shattering windows. Instead, it involves their captain, a kid, and a cap.
While his team were playing the home side at Harare Sports Club on Monday, a metre two on the other side of the rope, Michael Clarke walked his dodgy hamstring around the boundary in the company of Darren Lehmann.
Captain and coach were in cosy conversation as they passed the grass bank beyond the eastern boundary. But Clarke had kept enough of an eye out to spot a boy, nine or 10 years old, elbows on the fence and angling for an autograph as his mother hovered nearby. So Clarke veered off the path and reached for the kid’s pen. Then followed nods, gestures and smiles. Their conversation has since been confirmed to have gone something like this:
“You want a cap, son?”
“Yes, please.”
“Righto. I’ll go get you one.”
Dale Carnegie would have had nothing on Clarke, who had acquired a fan for himself and the Australian team. For life. And he done so with nothing more than a moment of friendliness. A little accessibility goes a long way between a Goliath like Clarke and a David like the boy; no slingshot required.
Out on the field, Australia were busy smashing Zimbabwe. If they showed them any respect, it was the polite amount and not a smidgen more. The Aussies batted with what might have been mistaken for a sense of entitlement for their 350/6 - the highest total in the 110 one-day internationals played at the ground - and bowled like men deeply insulted to dismiss Zimbabwe for 152 in not quite 40 overs. They did not simply win the game by 198 runs: they drove it like they stole it.
Not that you would know it from the happiness on the Zimbo kid’s face. The Aussies were winning on the field as well as off the field, and they made their success look effortless on both sides of the boundary.
On Friday, SA found a different way to put smiles on Zimbabweans’ faces - by treating their team with too much respect. Several of the eight batsmen dismissed for 78 runs by suddenly omnipotent off-spinners Prosper Utseya and John Nyumbu glared at the pitch as if it had sworn at them.
Certainly, the surface offered unusually sharp turn for a Zimbabwean strip, but not enough to render bowlers of the middling ilk of Utseya and Nyumbu suddenly unplayable.
Rather, there was a bleakness to SA’s batting. They played as if they had turned up expecting to play the 2014 Zimbabweans and were instead made to face the 1948 Australians.
If Utseya and Nyumbu had merely threatened and not wreaked their havoc, SA would likely have dawdled to a total somewhere north of their eventual 231 but south of 300 and excused themselves by saying they were “sticking to our processes”. The kids in the crowd would not have thought much of that.
That SA dismissed Zimbabwe for 170 does not excuse them: poor batting, not fiery bowling, made it watchable.
And to think, on Wednesday SA and Australia met in the kind of match ODI aficionados want to cut out and keep handy for when the next person wonders out loud what the point of 50-over cricket is in the T20 age.
Wednesday’s game was played on a pitch significantly better designed for the purpose than Friday’s stale ginger snap of a surface, but that cannot explain everything away.
Against Zimbabwe, SA have been boring. Against Australia, they were exhilarating. When they play as well as they can, not as well as they must, more kids will want their caps.
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