Worst day ends with worst subject

December 27, 2001 by neil manthorp

Neil Man­thorp — 27/12/2001

South Africa may have endured their worst day on the field since arriv­ing in Aus­tralia — and there have been a few — at the MCG on Thurs­day and it did­n’t get any bet­ter once they could final­ly get off the field, either.

Half an hour after stumps were drawn on a day which almost cer­tain­ly saw South Africa’s chances of win­ning the series dis­ap­pear, they were addressed in the chang­ing room by two gen­tle­men from the ICC. Two very impor­tant gentlemen.

Mal­colm Gray and Mal­colm Speed are both Aus­tralian and they hold many aspects of the future of the game in their hands as Pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of the game’s inter­na­tion­al rul­ing body.

The two Mal­colms addressed Shaun Pol­lock­’s bat­tered team on the sub­ject of match-fix­ing and it’s ulti­mate erad­i­ca­tion from the sport. Involv­ing the play­ers in the process is felt to be the best way to edu­cate them and not alien­ate them from the process.

Amongst sev­er­al top­ics for con­ver­sa­tion was the pro­posed art­work for a selec­tion of posters due to be dis­persed around the crick­et play­ing world with slo­gans such as “stamp out cor­rup­tion” on them.

Sev­er­al designs have been pre­pared and the play­ers are being used as a sound­ing board for what is accept­able and what is not. The men will speak to all 10 Test nations before the project goes ahead.

The Aus­tralian team were the first to be con­sult­ed and they reject­ed two pro­posed posters — one of an anony­mous play­er hav­ing a wad of dol­lars stuffed into his crick­et whites on the way onto the field and the oth­er of a play­ers arm accept­ing cash.

The arm was not white. You can be sure Pol­lock and his men will also veto such an unsub­tle, insen­si­tive image.

But the whole process, nec­es­sary as it is, would have been the last thing a gut­ted, bruised SA XI would have felt like after such a mis­er­able day on the field.

They will have to dig deep­er into their resources of willpow­er than any South African team in liv­ing mem­o­ry to stay in the Test and the series. Most peo­ple in Mel­bourne have already writ­ten them off.