Wanted: Men (and women) of cricket

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TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

WHEN Clive Lloyd talks, powerful people in cricket should listen. They do not, of course. Instead, they listen to odds and sods like Allen Stanford - or anyone else who wears a suit and promises to make the game lots of money. Whether they know a thigh pad from a googly matters not a jot.

Lloyd, now West Indies’ chief selector, is in South Africa for the Test series starting at Centurion on Wednesday. By the time you read this, he will probably have chosen the XI to play in that match on the basis of a tour match against a South African Invitation XI in Benoni - the third and last day of which was washed out.

“I’ve always advocated that we should at least have two four-day games before any tour,” Lloyd said. “I’ve said that to West Indies and to the ICC.

“I think one game is not enough. Suppose that game was washed out; we’d have had no practice. And we should probably have one game inbetween the Tests.

“It’s not only for the benefit of our players but for your own players’. You’d want them to play against the touring team to see them.

“We just jump into a country and then we are gone. You don’t see other pitches, you don’t see a lot of the country. I think it’s wrong. I think we should have had at least three games surrounding this Test match.

“If somebody is out of form, they can go into a four-day game and get back into it but we don’t have that. You can’t tell if a player is doing well in the nets. It’s not the right place. The match situation is what it’s about.

“It’s a good thing that we did bat as long as we’ve done in the three-day game (for more than eight-and-a-half hours to score 508) and at least a couple of players look like they are in good nick. But we know how strong South Africa is and we’ll have to do well to match them.

“These days, you play a four-day game, Test match, Test match, Test match, one-day, one-day, one-day and then you’re gone.

“You can’t groom players anymore. I think that’s the thing you need when you go on tour. You try a few youngsters to see how they will match up against the opposition. I’m not saying you have to have 10 games, but enough games that youngsters will get a chance.

“How many of them would have sampled South African Test pitches? Not a lot because you have to play players who you think will play in the Test match. Outside of the Test match, you could try one or two who you think will be able to get experience. And the bowlers, too, not only the batsmen.

“If you look at most of the tours, they are crammed. You are playing T20, 50-overs and Test matches and it seems like it’s a lot of cricket. Your body can only take so much. I suppose that’s why there are so many injuries.

“Nice, spaced out tours would be the best thing for cricket. The public will see players who are fit enough and hungry enough to play and not just hoping that the game is over quickly.”

Go on - nod like mad in agreement with all of the above. You know you want to. Lloyd sounds like a man of cricket talking about the game he cherishes because that is exactly what he is. Not for him the management-speak of “mission statements”, “vision” and “performance targets” that infects most of what comes out of administrators’ mouths.

Dale Steyn, too, is a straight-talking man of cricket. Here he is on the Phil Hughes tragedy, which has had far too drastic an effect on both the game and Australian society: “I really feel for Phillip Hughes and his family. I think everybody has come out and said that it’s a terrible accident.

“But cricket is not everything in my life. From the point when I leave the ground today to when I get to the hotel, somebody else will have died from a car accident or murder or whatever and the world will go on and people will still get into their cars and drive to work.

“And I am still going to bowl a bouncer, and I am still going to run hard and try and take your head off; not that I’m trying to kill anybody. I will continue to do that.

“It’s a terrible thing. Nobody ever wants to see anyone die doing what they love doing, but cricket will continue. We carry on.”

Cricket and the people who play it and run it are capable of infuriating the bejaysus out of us. How can they be so stupid, so dodgy, so shortsighted, so obsessed with nothing but cricket, so divorced from the real world?

Mercifully, then, cricket also involves people like Lloyd and Steyn. Hello? Powerful people? Are you listening?