“It seems gone are the days of a good wicket and the best team will win. Now it’s how quickly can we win.” - Evan Flint
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in London
DAMNED if they do, damned if they don’t. Unsung if they get it right, incompetents if they get it wrong, traitors if they give the visitors too much help. They can’t win. And all for the privilege of working from before dawn to after dusk in whatever weather for not enough money.
It’s the job in cricket that, it seems, dare not speak its name. Not least because its name is disputed.
Groundsman is a problem in gender terms, and probably dissuades women from considering involving themselves.
Curator is Australian, and wrong. The Oxford Dictionary defines a curator as the “keeper or custodian of a museum or other collection” and a “person who selects acts to perform at a music festival”.
But you know them when you see them: they wear shorts and a floppy hat, and their knees are muddy. Prominent among them is Evan Flint, who is leaving Newlands, his patch for 10 years, for the Wanderers, where he starts work on February 1.
“There are times when I ask myself, ‘What am I doing?’,” Flint said. “But how often does the Bullring job come up for grabs? That sound the ball makes when it hits the bat …
“But there’s no mountain …”
Flint spoke from Johannesburg before the third Pakistan test. He was there to “have a look at how Mr Scott and Mr Buthelezi go about their business”.
That’s Chris Scott and Bethuel Buthelezi, who hit the headlines hard last January when the India test was temporarily suspended because their pitch came close to being declared dangerous. Instead it was labelled merely poor, which earned the Wanderers three demerit points. Another two during the following five years would see South Africa’s premier ground suspended from hosting international matches for 12 months.
Infamously, the home side had asked for the surfaces for that rubber to be overtly South African. They duly were at Newlands and the Wanderers. But at Centurion intense heat that killed the additional grass, which led to a sluggish pitch that brought the culprit, Bryan Bloy, unwanted attention.
“You’ll struggle to find a groundsman anywhere who wants to have people talking about them,” Flint said. “If they are talking about us then we haven’t done our job properly.”
There has been less of that kind of talk this season because pitches have been less spicy. But only marginally.
“You want it now, perhaps because of the influence of T20,” Flint said. “We’re playing at home and we want to maximise our strengths.
“It seems gone are the days of a good wicket and the best team will win. Now it’s how quickly can we win.”
Still, the line can’t be crossed. So did events at the Wanderers last season influence Flint’s appointment?
“To some extent, yes,” Gauteng Cricket Board chief executive Greg Fredericks said. “The risk is too great. We’ve got this thing hanging over our heads for five years.”
The alchemy of making pitches isn’t a job. It’s a country song.
Like Johnny Cash, Flint and company walk the line.
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