SA step back into the hurt locker

GO Cricket - http://www.gocricket.com/columns/telford-vice/ICC-World-Twenty20-South-Africa-step-into-the-hurt-locker/articleshow/33058368.cms

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

India. Dhaka. Friday. Bring it. Not so fast. The last time South Africa had to win a match in Dhaka, they found a way to implode. Somehow, they lost their way chasing 222 to beat New Zealand. Somehow, they were bowled out for 172. Somehow, they did not reach the 2011 World Cup semi-finals.

“You’ve gone from chokers to jokers,” was how one reporter twisted the knife in the press conference that followed. Graeme Smith, his passion drained by events on the field and in his frazzled mind, didn’t feel a thing as he stared back with eyes that had stopped seeing.

Somehow, South Africa, for all their perennial strength and swagger and certainty, have won only four of the 14 knockout games they have played in ICC one-day and T20 events - all of them in the first two editions of what we now call the Champions Trophy.

That means the last time South Africa won a game that mattered in an ICC tournament was in 2000. Yes, 14 years ago. That also means there exists an entire generation of South African teenagers, spots, hormones and all, who have never jumped up and down in front of a television set in the unmitigated giddiness of their team beating another in an ODI or T20 of wider significance than what the result might mean for a bilateral series. Let the sadness of that fact seep into all you Australians, Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, West Indies, and Englishmen and women for a moment. OK, don’t let it, then.

South Africa were isolated from the international arena for 21 years because of apartheid, but - somehow - these past 14 years have hurt more. It is one thing to be told, rightfully, that you are not allowed to play until you sort your country out. It is completely another to play with pride and be the best team and still not win anything.

That is the kind of hurt that lingers like the pain of a love affair you wanted more than anything to turn into a marriage but, instead, destroyed. It hurts because you know the failure is on your head, and that by all that is good and proper you should not have failed.

South Africans have only just learnt to live with that hurt. This time, they bade their team farewell with a yawn and a long look at the football and rugby fixtures. There’s a World T20 on? Really? Good luck, chaps. We won’t wait up.

And now this; the exhumation of freshly buried hope. Whose bright idea was that? Why do we want to put ourselves through it all again? Why can’t we simply flick the channel from the football or the rugby to the cricket, see which of the other teams are winning this time, and flick back?

We can’t because we won’t. Not because we’re South African - any team that reaches any semi-final can count on a surge of support from home - but because we can’t fake the truth that 14 years is too bloody long.

So, come on India, come on, come on. But first, the facts. The Indians are the only unconquered team at the WT20. They beat Australia by 73 runs, Bangladesh by eight wickets, and both West Indies and Pakistan by seven wickets. South Africa have lost most of the skin on their teeth, going down to Sri Lanka by five runs and then pipping New Zealand, Netherlands and England by two, six and three runs respectively.

One way to interpret those numbers is that India are easily the stronger team in bristling form playing in conditions they understand better than most. The other is that South Africa have been hardened by their close encounters, and that they have found a way to win despite conditions that dull their strengths.

If India have bowlers who can stop AB de Villiers in the kind of mood he unleashed on the English in Chittagong on Saturday, when he scored the fastest T20 half-century by a South African, off 23 balls, they deserve to win. If they have batsmen able to survive Dale Steyn’s madness and Imran Tahir’s intensity, well done to them - they will be in the final.

We already know the Indians will have come with confidence, and they deserve to. But there is something of immense value that India do not have, something they would rather not have and that South Africa have more of than they could ever want. That something is hurt. India. Dhaka. Friday. Bring it.