Zen and the art of SA’s mental maintenance

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TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

LAMB. Sauvignon Blanc. Coffee. Rugby. Flintiness. Resourcefulness. Cricket? Not so much. Considering they number just 4.5-million souls marooned on a couple of spits of land abandoned a long way from anywhere, New Zealanders do many things better than they should. Cricket is not often put on that list.

Australia is 1491km away from New Zealand. Antarctica is 7094km in the distance. That’s pretty much the neighbourhood in a nutshell.

But it is to this place, located somewhere between far and flung, where vowels are flat and pitches flatter, that South Africa have gone to measure their readiness for the World Cup. And a good thing they have gone there, too.

There is significant value in South Africa putting themselves through the pressure test of playing what will be eight one-day internationals against Australia before the tournament. The Aussies bring out the worst as well as the best in teams like South Africa, who rely on emphatic performers pulling off feats of brilliance.

When South Africa win, AB de Villiers has played strokes straight out of a cartoon strip, or Dale Steyn has made Superman seem ordinary, or Faf du Plessis has withstood the kind of forces that create diamonds deep in the earth, or Hashim Amla has batted for days.

Rarely is South African success difficult to analyse. They don’t win because they are the better team; they win because they have better players who seize the moment. Which is also why they lose - when those big players do not do their thing, the smaller players do not step into the breach well or often enough to find another way to win.

At Headingley in 1999, all Allan Donald had to do to put South Africa in the World Cup final was run 22 yards half-decently. He failed, abjectly. At the Wanderers in 2006, all Makhaya Ntini had to do to give South Africa the best chance to chase down 435 was take a single off the first ball he faced and put Mark Boucher on strike. That the bowler was Brett Lee added significantly to the challenge. But Ntini nudged him to third man to tie the scores as if he had spent the past month in the nets doing exactly that. Boucher drilled the next ball through mid-on for four, and the rest was chaos.

These snapshots offer deep insights into the South African psyche. Whatever else Donald achieved or will achieve, he will be remembered for shambling about Headingley like a sheep on its way to the slaughterhouse, as batless as he was bloody hopeless. Whatever else Ntini achieved or will achieve, that gorgeous single is the cameo of his life.

We anticipated the Donald disaster as we brace ourselves for the violence of a Highveld thunderstorm - had to happen; damn fool fast bowler never did know which end of a bat to hold - but we never imagined Ntini had the subtle skill required to do what he did.

If South Africa are to win the World Cup, the all too tried and tested basis for those views will have to be changed: the seeming insignificance of things like tailenders having the confidence to run in a straight line or dab a crucial single must become more important. If not, expect another meltdown.

And New Zealand, where the sharp edges of outsized talent are subtly but securely insulated out of harm’s way in a double layer of bubblewrap formed by plasticine pitches and a resolutely unemphatic home side that survives on cleverness, is the perfect place to do so.

New Zealand is as close as cricket gets to sensory deprivation, to a Zen garden where the small stuff is all that matters. This is where cricketers go to be alone with their game, especially the weaknesses in it.

The three one-day internationals South Africa will play there are not nearly enough to effect this required change of mindset permanently, but they should set the gears clicking in the right direction.

From there, it’s off to Australia for three T20s and five more ODIs. The return to bright lights, big cities will take South Africa back to their default setting of playing grand cricket. But they will do themselves a disservice if they unlearn the lessons that were taught them in New Zealand.

When you think about it, 1491km is not that far away.