Times Media
TELFORD VICE, Wellington
ARE SA’s tyres filled with air or with pressure ahead of their World Cup quarter-final next week? Rilee Rossouw answered that question nine times on Friday.
That’s how many times Rossouw used the p-word in less than a minute-and-a-half during his press conference on Friday - or every nine seconds.
“The pressure is probably going to go up (in the knockout rounds) but that’s why we play this game,” Rossouw began.
“We love it and we want to play it under pressure. You want to take it as just another game and not put too much pressure on yourself because there is already enough external pressure on you as a SA player.
“If the guys haven’t performed under pressure they’re going to have a look at what they haven’t done right and what they have done right they’re going to try and work harder on that.
“There’s always pressure on SA to do well in a World Cup. That and the media pressure and this pressure. So it all piles up and there is a bit of pressure.”
SA won four of their six group games and will finish second behind India in pool B. But the two matches they lost were against the Indians and Pakistan - the only sides who put them under, well, pressure.
And now this - an untimely look into the dark side of their all too mortal soul by not just one of their own but one of their very best who, for all his talent and skill, was just as unable as everyone else to win a World Cup.
In a column on Cricket Australia’s website, Jacques Kallis writes of SA’s “horrible record in World Cups”.
“You enter a World Cup with no baggage, nothing weighing you down, convinced that every game will feel the same as the last,” Kallis wrote. “And for a while, that’s exactly how it is. The ‘reputation’ begins to catch up, however.
“It has nothing to do with many of the current squad. They arrived in Australia convinced that they were unscarred by what had happened before only to discover that they are tarred with the same brush of failure that their predecessors felt.
“In five World Cup campaigns we spoke about playing games as though they were ‘normal matches’, and the first few always felt that way. But the closer we got to the knockout games, the more different it felt.”
Kallis described SA’s elimination from the 1999 World Cup in their tied semi-final against Australia as a “nightmare, and (it) remains so”. The match was “a lottery of tangled nerves”.
In 2003, another tie - against Sri Lanka - removed SA from the equation after the first round. “We cried together after that,” Kallis wrote.
This time, after losing to India, SA totalled more than 400 in their wins over West Indies and Ireland. Then they were bowled out for 202 by Pakistan.
“When batsmen are caught on the boundary hooking (against Pakistan), with around four runs per over required, you know there’s a problem of some sort. It seemed like the obvious time to absorb some pressure from a rampant attack and try to draw their sting.”
There it is again, that word: pressure.
You can ask why Kallis said this now, with the team he used to play for about to take another crack at the title. But you can’t tell him what he says is wrong.
True. As a huge Proteas I don't know what's wrong. In the Pak game, AB ended up playing very risky because he realised the team was collapsing around him and couldn't expect anyone else to help win the game. It better not come to that in Q/F, I'll surely collapse at work