Criticism of a team

January 3, 2003 by neil manthorp

It is eas­i­er to crit­i­cise a team that is play­ing poor­ly than a team which is play­ing well, and it is cer­tain­ly eas­i­er to crit­i­cise the cap­tain of a los­ing team than a win­ning one.

So Shaun Pol­lock should be applaud­ed for his cur­rent form and for the com­pelling form of his team. But may we be for­giv­en just a small gripe?

A crowd of 10,260 paid to watch the sec­ond day of the New­lands Test and the great major­i­ty would have cher­ished the oppor­tu­ni­ty of say­ing, poten­tial­ly for many years, “I was there” when talk­ing about the record total achieved by South Africa.

Shaun has often paid trib­ute to his pre­de­ces­sor as cap­tain, Han­sie Cron­je, and both men had an aware­ness of the his­to­ry and the ‘essence’ of the game. Shaun could hard­ly not be aware of the sport’s rich tra­di­tions giv­en the achieve­ments of his father, Peter, and uncle Graeme.

Records are occa­sion­al­ly man­u­fac­tured, but rarely so. Indi­a’s Anil Kum­ble took ten wick­ets in an innings two years ago because seam­er Jav­a­gal Sri­nath spent two overs bowl­ing down the leg side in an effort not to claim the last vic­tim. Fair enough, perhaps.

But the South African record total was there for the tak­ing hav­ing been set up by the bril­liance of Her­schelle Gibbs and Graeme Smith on the first day. To have reached the thresh­old of his­to­ry by mid­way through the sec­ond day was extra­or­di­nary. It required just five more min­utes, just a sin­gle over.

Amaz­ing­ly, Shaun admit­ted after the day’s play that he had been unsure of exact­ly what the record was. “I actu­al­ly thought we’d passed it,” said a sheep­ish cap­tain afterwards.

It would be extreme and unfair to sug­gest that Shaun’s igno­rance of the details of his­to­ry had robbed the crowd of some­thing they ‘deserved’, but it is cer­tain­ly rea­son­able to expect a cap­tain to be aware of his place in his­to­ry and to remem­ber it for the sake of his audi­ence, espe­cial­ly when the ulti­mate objec­tive — win­ning the Test match — would not be compromised.

Cron­je had the chance to claim the record for his team in 1999 but declined it for very dif­fer­ent rea­sons. He admit­ted that a pitch cov­ered in wood glue at Eden Park, the mec­ca of New Zealand rug­by, on which bowlers of any sort were utter­ly neutered, was not the right place to erase Graeme Pol­lock and the bril­liant team of 1969–70 from the record books.

And praise his mem­o­ry for that. But it would have been deeply appro­pri­ate to equate Gibbs and Smith’s open­ing stand of 368 with the record total.

Oh well. Nev­er mind. Next time, Shaun?