Win, lose, draw or cheat, players are only human after all

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TELFORD VICE, Harare

“YOU must understand,” the answer to my question began, “when this man speaks, India listens.” We were in the indoor nets at the Wanderers. Outside, the kind of violent storm that scares the life out of anyone who is not from Johannesburg was clearing its throat across the afternoon sky. It was December, 2006.

The man in question was Sourav Ganguly, who was to grant us, the press, that rare thing: an audience. This, we were led to believe, was an honour and a privilege.

“What’s all the fuss about; it’s only a press conference,” I had asked, stupidly, as reporters, radio rats and television types scurried into the echoing space.

Presently, and in an atmosphere at least as electric as the one that was by then ripping holes in the gunmetal sky far above, the Prince of Kolkata glowed in regal splendour before our very eyes. For a few precious minutes he spoke gilt-edged words.

Whether those words were of magic and wonder or were the banalities delivered wearily and warily at almost every player’s press conference did not matter nearly as much as the fact that they came from the mouth of Himself and were carried to our undeserving ears. Then he levitated and walked out of the room on imported air.

A few days later, four of them filled with breathtaking cricket, we crowded into a different room at the Wanderers. Again, the air crackled with the anticipation of magnificence being handed down by a fabulous figure in the firmament of gods.

This time, the deity behind the genuflecting microphones was Rahul Dravid. The moment he stepped through the door, you could smell the beer that had soaked his shirt. He apologised for that with a sheepish but dazzling grin, and everyone present dared to let out a little laugh of forgiveness and understanding. Of course we did - golden moments earlier, India had completed their first Test win in South Africa. If their captain had chosen to douse himself in matured bat guano before gracing us with his eminent presence, who were we to object?

I am, I hope it is obvious by now, trying to see things from the perspective of those for whom cricketers are far removed from the fallible people they really are. In South Africa, land of the match-fixing Hansie Cronje and the ball-tampering Faf du Plessis and Vernon Philander, we should need no reminding of that truth.

Except that we do need our realities checked. Du Plessis and Philander have received their punishment and we have moved on from all that, but you will not struggle to find South Africans who believe they did nothing wrong or that their only crime was getting caught. “Everyone does it,” is the most common argument in their defence. So, if everyone robbed banks, would that make it OK?

Similarly, too many South Africans are too willing to see past the thundering and overriding ugliness that Cronje was a greedy fraud whose legacy is of damage and deceit. For these deluded souls, he left behind stardom and success. He made, they like to say, “a mistake”. Wrong. Cronje deserves the same stark headline that Rolling Stone magazine slapped across Hunter S Thompson’s brilliant obituary of Richard Nixon: “He Was A Crook”. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we must remember that.

But South Africans have nothing on Indians when it comes to hero worship - or so we are gather from the frenzied monitoring of that country’s players’ every move in both the mainstream and the social media. On countless pages, screens and airwaves, the Indian cricketer is elevated so far above the human condition he might as well be in orbit.

It would be arrogant to label this strangeness right or wrong, but even though South Africa’s society is among the most unequal on earth this makes no sense to us. We don’t get it - are cricketers not simply people like us? They are, and they prove it.

Ganguly is now an approachable member of the media corps, always ready with a smile and to look you in the eye. If he is arrogant, he hides it well. Dravid, meanwhile, has made at least one impromptu appearance in a London pub where his friends happen to be with reporters, and been entirely at ease with himself and those around him.

Even Sachin Tendulkar is not above the ordinariness of good manners. In 1998, he granted the BBC a telephone interview which was conducted in my Bulawayo hotel room. When he stood up to leave he straightened the bed cover where he had been sitting and apologised for any inconvenience his presence might have caused. I marvelled at this. He did not.

Also in Bulawayo, Ian Botham turned around from pecking uncertainly at the keyboard of his laptop with two wavering fingers to address the reporter in the pressbox row behind him who had just finished rattling through several hundreds words of his lunchtime report: “It would take me a bloody year to do what you’ve just done.”

Botham, like Ganguly, Dravid, Tendulkar, Du Plessis and Philander are and Cronje was, is only human after all. It is important that we remember that whether they win, lose, draw or cheat.