Still life with potplant

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TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

When is a backward step a sign of progress? When South Africa lose a knockout match at an ICC tournament and there is no evidence of the sky falling.

We know. We have checked. Several times: the sky remains where it was when India won the World T20 semi-final in Dhaka on Friday.

The game was, before and after everything, a cricket match and nothing more. For South Africans, there is no banality in that statement. Too often, must-win games involving their team have become scenes from a soap opera dreamed up by Freud, written by Shakespeare and directed by Tarantino. The bad guys always wear green and gold, and they never win. Instead, they beat themselves to a pulp. And that’s no fiction.

This time, they also did not win. But they also were not the bad guys. They simply played lesser cricket than their opponents - not poor cricket, just not as good as that played by India. South Africa did not beat themselves; they were beaten, fair and square.

For most of South Africa’s innings India looked like a team shellshocked to discover they were finally under pressure in the tournament. Welcome to the WT20, Mahi. Good luck with stopping the bleeding. Then came Virat Kohli, and the rest was runs, runs and more runs.

“We all know how good he is,” Faf du Plessis said in the post-match press conference. “We all know he’s done it so many times. As a fielding captain and on the bowling side you always know Virat is a real danger, a real threat. Tonight he was too good for us.”

Minutes earlier, Du Plessis had walked away from a television interview with something close to a smile playing on his face. When he sat down to answer the gathered reporters’ questions, he was simply a man doing exactly that.

He was not, as Graeme Smith had been at the same ground after South Africa crashed out of the 2011 World Cup in their quarter-final against New Zealand, knocked emotionally unconscious by the manner of his team’s defeat. How could he have been? They had played well, just not well enough.

Less than 24 hours after Friday’s match ended, Paddy Upton, South Africa’s shrink, posted a photograph on social media of Dale Steyn doing what, by his own admission, he does not do best: play the guitar.

The picture showed Steyn focusing on the fingers of his left hand as they curled around the neck of the instrument. His right hand had strummed itself into a blur.

Steyn wore shorts and a sleeveless shirt, and his exposed tattoos and that shocker of a Mohican made him look more like Sid Vicious than Peter Siddle ever could.

“You just pick up a chord, go twang, and you’ve got music,” was how John Simon Ritchie-Beverley - which was what Vicious was called before he landed the gig to play bass for the Sex Pistols - summed up what Steyn was trying to do.

An unruly potplant, a fire extinguisher and a gauche painting of a hand holding a cup near some sprinkled coffee beans all added to the utter normality of the scene. For Steyn, life was going on - loss or no loss.

Upton captioned his photograph, “Play a lot in life, and often. Play while you still can.”

Because, Upton did not say, one of these years you will have to face up to the fact that there is a real world out there, a world that will no longer pay you to play cricket, a place where you will have to find other, less fanciful, more real ways to earn your keep.

South Africa’s performance at the WT20 was a reality check. They left home knowing they were not expected to win it and they return having done better than many thought they would. They won games they would previously have lost. They had the balls to drop the under-performing Morne Morkel and Lonwabo Tsotsobe. They stuck to their guns on their theory that AB de Villiers is a bigger threat if he comes to the crease in the second half of the innings.

Upton’s photograph, too, reminded South Africa and their supporters what it was all about. Play as often as you can, shout as loudly for your team as the neighbours will endure. But remember that, before and after everything, cricket is a game. Nothing more, nothing less.