Will Parnell's absence trouble SA?

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

SA will want to focus on events on the field when they play the Netherlands in a World T20 match in Chittagong today, but they could find their minds drifting 2003 kilometres eastward to a Mumbai courtroom.

There, Wayne Parnell will appear on drug charges relating to a police raid on a party at a Mumbai hotel on May 20, 2012. Parnell and Rahul Sharma, who both played for the Pune Warriors in that year’s Indian Premier League, were among almost 100 people detained for allegedly testing positive for cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy.

Parnell has protested his innocence, and said in March last year that the samples taken by police had not been matched to their donors.

His agent, Donne Commins, who will accompany Parnell along with his Indian lawyer, Makrand Narwekar, was quoted in a Cricket SA release yesterday as saying that Parnell’s appearance today was “purely for procedural purposes in the relation to the court’s ongoing administration of the case concerned”.

Translation: there would seem to be little chance of the Indian authorities not allowing Parnell to rejoin the squad in time for him to be considered for Saturday’s important game against England in Chittagong.

But Parnell’s removal from a closely knit team environment can only play on his comrades’ minds. At the least, it will be an unhelpful distraction. At the worst, it could make them feel threatened and vulnerable, albeit irrationally.

Beyond that, Parnell has not featured in SA’s games against Sri Lanka and New Zealand. Today’s match represented a useful opportunity to gauge his form, especially as Morne Morkel leaked 50 runs in his three overs against the Kiwis.

However, Morkel dug deep in his last over - the penultimate of the match - to leave Dale Steyn to defend seven runs off the final six balls. SA won by two runs.

“Morne went for a lot of runs and people might criticise him, but his last three balls were three death yorkers,” Steyn said in Chittagong yesterday. “The last one went for four, which happens. But if he had gone for (more runs) in those three balls it would have been down to maybe three or four runs in that last over, and that would have been almost impossible to defend.

“He might have walked away from the game feeling hard done by because he hadn’t got what he wanted, but he finished off exactly how he was supposed to and we ended up winning. Those little one-percenters make a massive difference.”

The good news is that today’s game is the best possible scenario for unusual situations like a teammate having to appear in court. SA and the Netherlands have never played each other in a T20, but SA have won all four of the one-day internationals the teams have contested - and by margins that have veered between 83 and 231 runs.

But the strong probability of victory today was cold comfort for Steyn. “I don’t know the equation, but because we lost the first one (against Sri Lanka) and won the second one I’m guessing we’re going to have to win every game in the group stages,” he said.

“It’s kind of like we need to win everything right now. We just have to win.”

Whoever SA’s opponents are, that’s the right attitude.