It's time to go...

Oh South Africa, South Africa. As Hanse Cronje said to Ian Chappell on the podium after the 1999 semi final, “It’s a cruel game”. In what is clearly becoming a habit, I felt for South Africa. They wanted it so, so badly, their intensity throughout the game was so palpable and they must have woken up in cold sweats all last night with flashbacks of moments when they might have saved one run, or two, taken another wicket, or two... But I can’t hide the fact that I wanted them to win to save them for an even more dramatic humiliation in a potential AUS-RSA final, so my bleeding heart was a little disingenuous.

I’m not sure whether South Africa’s “choking” reputation comes from a genuine historical tendency or whether it’s just that the 1999 choke was so monumental, such a Choke for the Ages that it is by itself equivalent to 100 separate chokes. South Africa have never made it to a World Cup Final, but neither have New Zealand, and the New Zealand team is not seen as a bunch of chokers but as plucky and dashing, heads always high.

Why do current teams feel responsible for the failures of past teams? It’s like a country’s team is a Ship of Theseus that keeps its identity even though over time every part of it has been replaced. Obviously it's the eye of the beholder, the projections and expectations of the millions of onlookers whose turnover is much slower. It doesn’t help that when they look at the South African team at the moment they run a good chance of beholding Allan Donald.

Hanse was livid in 1999, he walked away from Ian Chappell mid-sentence when Chappelli was winding up his commiserations. The batsmen didn’t have a chance to collapse in tears at the end of that match because the pitch was invaded and everyone had to run off. De Villiers looked sad and haunted, hugely conscious of letting everyone back home down. The presenter said he was sure those people would appreciate that the team had done their best and De Villiers winced.

You know it’s a New Zealand commentator when after a soaring, thunderous triumph, he suggests we could all open a bottle “or maybe make a pot of tea.”

Time, gentlemen (on Pocock and co.)

When “Monkeygate” happened, in which the person on the receiving end of a racial slur was hung out to dry and there were calls for the sacking of the captain that reported it to match officials, I seriously had to track down a copy of Tom Brown’s School Days and read it to understand what the hell was going on.

And there it was, Death before Dobbing:

In fact, the solemn assembly, a levy of the School, had been held, at which the captain of the School had got up, and after premising that several instances had occurred of matters having been reported to the masters; that this was against public morality and School tradition; that a levy of the sixth had been held on the subject, and they had resolved that the practice must be stopped at once; and given out that any boy, in whatever form, who should thenceforth appeal to a master, without having first gone to some prepostor and laid the case before him, should be thrashed publicly, and sent to Coventry.

What school does Tom Brown go to? Rugby. If you wonder why I hate the “gentleman’s” tradition in any code, well, this, this, a thousand times this. It’s one thing to sweep things under the carpet, it’s the open proclamation of the moral superiority of sweeping things under the carpet that blows my mind. A letter writer to the Herald yesterday actually wailed “what have we come to?” He wasn’t bemoaning a plague of political correctness, he was suggesting that reporting an incident to a referee instead of dealing with it on the field or “in house” was by itself a sign of moral degradation.

I can’t tell you how weird this all looks from where I sit. Weird and at the same time stinkingly familiar as a howl of wounded privilege. The horror of being like everyone else, of having to do things like everyone else, of being judged by everyone else. Report a wrongdoing? Follow a rule? I know, it's so obvious. One of us is the alien and one of us is at home in this world. Which one is it? I’d like to think it’s time, gentlemen. Or: party’s over, dickheads.

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