Gibbs’ hasty recall

December 18, 2000 by neil manthorp

Neil Man­thorp — 18/12/2000

Is it just my imag­i­na­tion or is there real­ly a desire to see Her­schelle Gibbs back in the nation­al side with dis­gust­ing­ly inde­cent haste? As reg­u­lar read­ers of this col­umn will sure­ly tes­ti­fy, Her­sch has few greater admir­ers than me, but hon­est­ly — the man was banned for an extreme­ly seri­ous offense and that ban has still not expired.

I don’t mean to offend the lit­er­ary genius­es out there, but for those of you who nev­er quite caught the gist of Shake­speare’s “Ham­let”, the part I remem­ber most was the angst of Hamlet.

Apart from a prob­lem­at­ic rela­tion­ship with his girl­friend and a father who had just died and come back to speak to him as a ghost, Ham­let real­ly strug­gled to come to terms with the fact that his odd­ball moth­er mar­ried his uncle before his father had even begun to cool in his grave. I think the phrase “inde­cent haste” cropped up once or twice.

Apart from that, Her­schelle had­n’t scored a hun­dred before Sat­ur­day’s Stan­dard Bank match against the High­veld Strik­ers and his form sim­ply did­n’t mer­it a selec­to­r­i­al men­tion, let alone recall. And yet there were clam­mer­ings from all over the place for his recall…

The man who replaced him (Boeta Dip­pe­naar) scored a Test cen­tu­ry in his last innings while Daryll Cul­li­nan and Lance Klusen­er may not have cov­ered them­selves in glo­ry dur­ing the New Zealand Test series but they were part of a win­ning team and did noth­ing to sug­gest they should be left out.

Noth­ing at all.

The real point is this: there is NO ROOM in the Test XI at the moment and Her­schelle is sim­ply going to have to wait his turn.

He is amongst the best three bats­men in South Africa (Kallis is first, sure­ly?) and there is no doubt that he will return and resume his inter­na­tion­al career, but he will have to wait for a nat­ur­al oppor­tu­ni­ty to present itself.

Back in 1998 the fact that Her­schelle was coloured worked in his favour and a place was ‘cre­at­ed’ at the top of the order to accom­mo­date him.

He seized that chance with both, bril­liant hands. It says much for the con­tin­u­ing inte­gra­tion in South African crick­et that his colour is irrel­e­vant in the cur­rent squad, although it does the man him­self no favours in regain­ing his place.