Members End: Love, unpredictability, fruit flies, rugby, and AAAAAAAAAAA

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Auckland

RUSSELL Domingo was in top form at a press conference in Auckland this week ahead of SA’s match against Pakistan at Eden Park on Saturday. Having wondered out loud whether all Quinton de Kock needed to get back among the runs after scoring 26 of the elusive things in his first three underwhelming innings at the World Cup was “a bit of love and attention and affection”, Domingo revised that to, “I’m hoping his girlfriend is giving that (love) to him. I am giving him a lot of attention - love is not the word.” Whereupon one of the reporters present mused that this was one cricket story that might require an age restriction.

DOMINGO also employed some impressive sleight of word when discussing the threat the Pakistanis posed: “Their unpredictability is not a challenge because they are predictably unpredictable. Their strength lies in the predictability of their unpredictability.” Anyone out there have the foggiest what that might mean? Answers on a conundrum inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma, please.

EDEN Park’s place in the South African consciousness is of 1981, Andy Haden, flour bombs, and all that. A label in the lift at the stadium that promises a “barbarian room” on the top floor fits the bill. But surely not a creature just 8mm long. “FRUIT FLY” is the top line on several signs around the stadium, which continue: “This is a controlled area under section 131 of the Biosecurity Act 1993. Do not move any whole fresh fruit or vegetable beyond this area.” The gogga in question has prompted dire introductory sentences in local media like, “A fifth Queensland fruit fly, a male, had been found in Auckland.” Trivial as it all sounds, New Zealanders have around 20-billion reasons to be nervous of the little critters - that how much their country’s horticultural export trade is worth annually, in Rands, and what the fruit fly threatens.

IT had to happen at a rugby stadium - just the third of the 13 questions Dale Steyn was asked at his press conference at Eden Park the day before the SA-Pakistan game was, “Are you related to any other famous Steyn’s, like Francois or Morne?” Steyn replied, “No, I don’t think so. My dad? Is my dad famous. No, I don’t think so, no.”

SA journalists covering the World Cup came face to face this week with the Anal Antipodean Approach to Absolutely Anything At All Angled At Alleviating Anality (AAAAAAAAAAA). The entirely reasonable fact that they did not hold air tickets to leave New Zealand - because, like duh, no-one knows when and where SA will play their knockout matches - sparked classic cases of AAAAAAAAAAA when the reporters tried to travel there from Australia. Some were lucky enough merely to be detained for several minutes at the boarding gate while immigration was consulted. Others were barred from getting on the plane until, having spent the night in the luxury of the airport, they booked a flight out with an arbitrarily invented departure date. Earth to the antipodes - you can keep your country: we wouldn’t want to live with all this AAAAAAAAAAA if you paid us.