Smith posts Natal depression

Wisden Comment by Telford Vice

August 8, 2003

Just under a month ago, every right-thinking Natalian was giddy with glee at South Africa's dismal display in the NatWest Series final at Lord's. How times have changed. The winning draw at Edgbaston and the unmitigated triumph at Lord's have plunged the good people of Durban, Pietermaritzburg and surrounds into a deep funk of depression.

Natal, you see, is Shaun Pollock country. And Lance Klusener country. They, along with Jonty Rhodes, are gods. No less. Natalians will brook not a smidgen of an argument against that plain truth - accept it and shut the hell up or find the fastest, shortest route out of the banana plantations. Now.

So when Graeme Smith managed to succeed Pollock to the South African captaincy and reveal a less-than-flattering side to Klusener's personality, all in the space of a few weeks, he earned himself an avalanche of abuse from every cricket supporter who calls Kingsmead home. When South Africa crashed and burned in that one-day final on July 12, Natalian schadenfreude knew no bounds. They awaited the Test series like vultures circling a doomed giraffe.

After Smith's 277 and 85 at Edgbaston, their mugs were a little less smug. But the draw cheered them up. Then came the Lord's Test, Smith's 259, and an innings victory, and the bottom fell out of their world.

"That bloody Smith! How am I supposed to hate him when he keeps scoring all those runs?" a nursing sister in a busy Durban medical practice spat with a scowl as she averted her eyes from the waiting-room television even while South Africa marched to their Test triumph at Lord's. She wasn't entirely unserious.

Natal-based cricket writers have admitted in print that they had only one eye open when they rubbished Smith's elevation to the captaincy, and the bloke at your elbow in any Durban pub would rather discuss his looming prostate examination than the exploits of South Africa's youngest-ever Test captain.

Of course, the atmosphere couldn't be more different in Cape Town, Smith's adopted home and a place where sporting heroes are smothered in undiscriminating adulation even more enthusiastically than in Durban. More no-eyed than one-eyed, that's Cape Town. So it took a while before someone sniggered at the bar-room suggestion that a Mount Rushmore-style likeness of Smith should be chiselled into Table Mountain to enable all to pay homage. Might have been the whisky, could have been the gin ...

Naturally, no Capetonian chooses to remember that Smith was born and educated in Johannesburg, and that he moved south less than three years ago, already obviously a player locked on to a path to the very top. Curiously, Jo'burgers aren't whipping themselves into a frenzy to remind the rest of the country that Smith is one of their own. In the City of Gold the bottom line is all that matters: he's a South African, and he's doing a damn fine job.

Telford Vice is a Natalian, and a cricket writer with MWP Sport in South Africa

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Lance Klusener

Shaun Pollock

Graeme Smith

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South Africa tour of England

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