Concentration the biggest challenge

February 4, 2002 by neil manthorp

South Africa’s great­est chal­lenge before and dur­ing the VB tri­an­gu­lar series finals will be their abil­i­ty to main­tain con­cen­tra­tion dur­ing a pre­vail­ing atmos­phere of con­tro­ver­sy, anx­i­ety and anger.

The route to the finals tak­en by New Zealand abd Shaun Pol­lock­’s team will be debat­ed for some time to come but their pres­ence will not be reversed now and it is cru­cial that they are not drawn into the argu­ments and recriminations.

Poor old Stephen Flem­ing has even come under fierce fire from his own coun­try’s lead­ing news­pa­per, the Her­ald, who described his deci­sion to ‘give’ South Africa a bonus point as “cow­ard­ly” say­ing that he broke the first rule of the ICC’s Code of Con­duct by not allow­ing the match to take it’s nat­ur­al course and by influ­enc­ing fel­low play­ers to underperform.

South Africa, too, have come under fire for not try­ing to win their final game against the home nation although the major­i­ty of crit­i­cism has been based more on the bit­ter­ness cre­at­ed by Aus­trali­a’s fail­ure to qual­i­fy for the finals than a con­struc­tive analy­sis of Pol­lock­’s actions.

There has been an over­whelm­ing feel­ing since the end of Sun­day’s match in Perth and the team’s arrival in Mel­bourne on Mon­day evening that ‘com­mon’ Aus­tralians have very, very lit­tle prob­lem with what hap­pened at all.

It’s a lit­tle unsci­en­tif­ic to rely on a check­out clerk, an air­line host­ess and a taxi dri­ver to guage pub­lic opin­ion, but this is a col­umn not a sci­ence paper.

“Good luck — I hope you guys win, espe­cial­ly after the Test series,” we were told while sign­ing our bills in Perth. “We’ve flown with the Aus­tralian team plen­ty of times,” said our all-blond, all-smil­ing host­ess. “They seem so full of them­selves — not like your team (who were sit­ting ahead of us in busi­ness class!).”

“They’re a bunch of arro­gant tossers, mate,” said the dri­ver, mat­ter-of-fact­ly on the way from the air­port. “That Glenn McGrath’s got the biggest mouth in Aus­tralia, mate. You guys should clean up now…”

So there you have it. Hard­ly a cross sec­tion of soci­ety, but that’s what we’ve heard. Just as long as the crit­i­cism from the ‘experts’ is treat­ed with a suf­fi­cient­ly large pinch of salt by Pol­lock and his team then they should be fine. By the way, Chris Cairns has declared him­self “90 per­cent fit.” Hmmm…