How Newlands Disgraced Jacques Kallis

There was once a kerfuffle about whether to name a grandstand at Newlands after Kallis.

In their infinite wisdom the Western Province Cricket Association board decided not to, which is a little like failing to name a spacesuit after Neil Armstrong, or an auditorium after Louie.

The cricket-loving public of the Western Cape have long since got used to such japes by the Western Province board. They just shrug their shoulders and walk away. 

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Transcript

It’s remarkable to think, what with Newlands Cricket Ground attracting so much negative publicity recently, that Newlands was host to one of the all-time great Test matches only 12 years ago. The Test against Australia – let’s call it Vernon Philander’s Test for convenience sake – was over in two-and-a-half days, you might remember, so there’s some serious doubt in cricket circles that it ever happened at all. 

The sport itself has moved so far and so quickly in the intervening period, what with the T20 jamboree now a fact of cricket life, that 12 years ago seems like a lifetime away. In a way it was a lifetime away. 

Jacques Kallis was in the twilight of his long and distinguished career and Graeme Smith, although five or six years younger than Kallis, wasn’t far from calling it a day either. With their retirements, so went two Protea greats. It was the end of an epoch, a period, an age. That age is a bit like Kallis’ hairline: it seems to have aged tremendously between then and now.

Without further ado, then, to the Test under consideration. It was played in November 2011, the first Test of a two-Test home series between South Africa and Australia. The respective captains were Smith and Ricky Ponting, with Smith winning the toss on the Wednesday morning and asking Australia to bat, which they did after a delayed start.

With Ponting out for eight in the 17th over, Australia were in big trouble at 40 for three. That was to discount Michael Clarke’s role. Clarke helped to make the forgotten Test widely memorable. He was last out for the men in the baggy green caps for 151, scoring more than half his team’s runs in their total of 284. 

As an illustration of his command he scored his runs relatively quickly – at a strike rate of nearly 86 – with the next highest Australian score Shaun Marsh’s 44. It was a kind of in-between total both captains could have made a decent argument about. Ponting would say he lost the toss and at 40 for three it wasn’t a bad comeback. Smith would have felt vindicated in his decision, given that his bowlers – four wickets for Dale Steyn, three each for Philander and Morné Morkel – kept Australia pegged below 300 after sticking them in.

Smith’s good humour faded fast. He lost his partner, Jacques Rudolph in the seventh over and although he scored 37, it was a procession. Kallis and Ashwell Prince scored ducks, Hashim Amla scored three, Mark Boucher and Philander four each, and AB de Villiers eight. There were four leg befores, three bowleds and a run out in South Africa’s 96 all out. The Proteas only batted for 24.3 overs, ending up 188 runs behind on the first innings.

Philander, who opened the bowling with Steyn in the Aussie second dig, had watched Shane Watson take five South African wickets in their first. Watson was often a handy customer with the ball, a good wicket-to-wicket bowler who worked the corridor of uncertainty with the skill of a vendor who works a slow-moving line at the traffic department. 

Halfway through his third over Philander bowled the in-swinger to Punter (as Ponting was called) and trapped him in front. Halfway through his next over, he had big cheese Clarke also trapped adjacent. Philander went on to take five for 15 in seven overs as Australia were bowled out for 47 in 18 overs. Suddenly South Africa’s 96 didn’t look too shabby.

Even more remarkable in the Test many have forgotten was the fact that this was Philander’s debut Test. He had no fear and no pre-conceptions. And no nickname. It was only a couple of years later that, while commentating, Shane Warne christened him “The Surgeon.” This became location specific in due course and Philander, with his cool forensic probing, began to be called the “The Surgeon of Ravensmead.”

Australia’s capitulation for 47 in the Test you might well have forgotten left the Proteas with a tricky chase. It was a tricky situation for the fans, too. The Test had started on the Wednesday and so much had happened on the Thursday that it was difficult to keep up. 

Clarke had gone to his 150 for a start. South Africa had lost ten wickets and so, too, had Australia. All in all 23 wickets were lost on day two, which might also account for why the Test has been forgotten: it moved so quickly that it was impossible to remember.

In precise terms, the tricky chase required South Africa to score 236 to win. At the end of Thursday’s play they had already lost Rudolph in their chase but were handy over-night at 81 for one. On the Friday morning, day three, in other words, Smith and Amla resumed, needing just over 150 runs to win. Fans who had booked tickets for day four on the Saturday and day five on the Sunday began to realise that the Test had moved beyond them.

When Amla was out for 112 with the total on 222 in Friday’s middle session, victory was all but assured. Come to think of it, it was a bit like a middle session. The South Africans never looked even remotely bothered in their chase. Smith got 101, Kallis got two not out and an incredible victory built on a fine eight-wicket debut from Philander was assured. 

While we were waiting for play to start on the Wednesday morning, I fell into conversation in the press box with Peter Roebuck, who was writing for the Sydney Morning Herald. As a writer, Roebuck was authoritative, keen-eyed, smart and sometimes bracingly opinionated. 

He didn’t talk to you, as much as pull you along in the wake of his thinking. On that day, I can’t be absolutely certain, he was in good form about Mitchell Johnson. He complained that that although Johnson was lethal on his day, there was always the problem that “Mitcho” didn’t really know where his deliveries were going. Neither did the batsman, and neither did you. It was entrancing. It was fun. But was it Test cricket?

On this occasion Roebuck and I also spoke about the Gerald Majola affair, which had yet to reach its conclusion. I pointed out that Cricket South Africa would need to deal with the fact that Majola paid himself a double bonus as a result of South Africa hosting the IPL successfully in 2009, sooner or later. 

Roebuck listened without ever giving me the impression that he was involved with the subject. He might simply have been being polite, as he waited for a subject with which he could fully engage, like the slow decline of Zimbabwe, about which he was almost comically passionate. It was always difficult to tell with Peter.

With the forgotten Test rolling to a conclusion on the Friday afternoon, I filed my stories for my newspaper, the Sunday Times, and caught a flight back to Jo’burg. I was in the garden that Saturday afternoon – possibly playing cricket with the youngest of our three sons – when my wife told me something odd. She’d just heard on the radio news that an English cricket writer who had been covering the Test at Newlands had jumped to his death out of a fifth-storey hotel window. Did I know who it was?

I was clueless. I didn’t really think of Roebuck as English, although he was English, of course. I thought of him as happily international, the ultimately cosmopolitan cricket correspondent. It was only after I’d paused and made a few phone calls, that I realised it was him.

Outwardly Roebuck was oracular, but inwardly he was a tortured soul. He had strange relationships with young men, who he frequently befriended. There were Zimbabwean youths living in his house outside of Pietermaritzburg and the relationship between him and them seems to have been ambiguous, financially one-sided and possibly sexual. 

He’d jumped from his hotel room window when police banged on his door after the Test. One of the young Zimbabweans had made accusations against him. I seem to remember thinking at times during the Test that he was a little agitated. This said, memory isn’t a precision instrument; we trawl the past with a net full of holes. 

I wasn’t at Newlands to watch Roebuck, I was there to watch the cricket. Maybe he’d just lost a packet on the fourth race at Kenilworth when the outsider he placed a hefty sum on ran seventh?

The Roebuck tragedy took some of the colour and fun out of the forgotten Test. It was one of the most peculiar matches I’ve ever seen. It was odd, for example that such a low-scoring match, with two totals under a hundred, should contain three centuries. Smith and Amla’s hundreds were impressive. But Clarke’s big hundred was from another planet entirely.

It was odd that both sides should be bowled out within a day and almost beyond the realms of possibility that a team like Australia should be bowled out for 46. Then again, they had lost the Ashes at home earlier that year.  

It was nicely judged by Gary Kirsten, the Proteas coach, that he should give Philander his Test debut on his home ground. Such confidence was repaid by Philander, who took eight wickets to earn a man-of-the-match award. Philander was given confidence by watching Watson. The two were very similar, right-arm-over, wicket-to-wicket bowlers, with Watson only ever taking three five-fers in his 60-odd Tests.

The Newlands Test was also the beginning of the end of Kallis’ long innings, an innings that brought him 45 hundreds in 166 Tests. I’d watched Kallis play in another peculiar Test in Benguluru – it was then Bangalore – in early 2000. It was the second of a two-Test series, South Africa, under Hansie Cronje, having won the first Test in Mumbai. If you recall, that was the tour in which Cronje flirted with bookmakers, leaking them information and bullying the younger members of the side to under-perform.

India batted first in Bengaluru, scoring 158. In response, Gary Kirsten scored 79 and Nicky Boje 85 after having come in as night-watchman the previous night. The really strange partnership, however, came from Kallis and Klusener, who put on 164 for the fifth wicket. Both scored nineties, saying later that Cronje had jokingly approached them about fixing but they had fobbed him off. It ended up being one of Kallis’ all-time best quotes because he later said before the King commission, “We said we were not interested and told him to get lost but used slightly stronger language.”

Klusener played well within himself but Kallis creaked along like an over-loaded ox-wagon. His 95 took 432 minutes and 359 balls. That’s a five-and-a-half-hour innings, which means that he was scoring about 17 runs to the hour. It isn’t Kevin Pietersen-type scoring, certainly. 

I’ve always felt that Kallis’ excessive caution in Bengaluru in 2000 suggested that he had strong suspicions about his skipper. It was an innings calculated to ensure that South Africa didn’t lose, which they didn’t. Although Mohammad Azharuddin scored a scintillating hundred in the Indian second innings, it wasn’t enough. South Africa won by an innings and 71 runs when it was still possible for a South African side to win India. This is no longer the case.

Kallis was Newlands. He was educated down the road at Wynberg Boys’ High. During his early years in the Western Province Nuffield side he was nicknamed “toddler.” Although very technically correct, he lacked power as a younger player. Keith Richardson, his headmaster, remembered that he struggled to hit it off the square. At the end of his long Test career, that was no longer the case.

There was once a kerfuffle about whether to name a grandstand at Newlands after Kallis. In their infinite wisdom the Western Province Cricket Association board decided not to, which is a little like failing to name a spacesuit after Neil Armstrong, or an auditorium after Louie. The cricket-loving public of the Western Cape have long since got used to such japes by the Western Province board. They just shrug their shoulders and walk away. 

There have been so many administrative wrong turnings at Western Province down through the years that one doesn’t really know where to start. Remember then chief-executive, André Odendaal, not backing coach Richard Pybus when he wanted to move some long-in-the-tooth players on, one of those difficult-to-do-things the job sometimes requires.

Suddenly a playing issues was transformed into a racial one, as Odendaal failed to back one of the most successful coaches the union had ever had and have certainly never had since. 

Remember the long-running Paul Adams saga, when the board backed him but the players wanted him to go. Remember CSA under Thabang Moroe activating their step-in rights; remember once president, Nic Kock refusing to sign off on the controversial Newlands commercial developments because he believed it would bankrupt the union. The board gave him an ultimatum, sign or go, and he wouldn’t sign, so he went.

A month ago a high-powered Cricket South Africa delegation visited Newlands. It was four-strong, and contained the CSA chief executive, the chairman of the board and the chief finance officer. They flew down from Jo’burg because they feared that Newlands was in such a poor state that it wouldn’t be able to host the Test against India starting in the New Year. They worried, too, that MI Cape Town’s matches in the 2024 SA20 would be jeopardised. 

They weren’t worried for nothing, as we used to say at high school many years ago. I watched a match in this year’s SA20 in February between MI Cape Town and the Pretoria Capitals. Other than the fact that the stadium announcer seemed to be gobbling amphetamines as he shouted at us, it was great fun being at Newlands again. 

I hadn’t before seen either Phil Salt or Will Jacks in the flesh before. I was impressed with both. Anrich Nortje, with the moustache he grew in November, bowled his thunderbolts. KG Rabada looked out of sorts. Theunis de Bruyn dropped a catch, or was it Rassie van der Dussen? It was a great game – and one I remembered rather than forgot. We went home happy.

But we did notice the condition of the stadium, which looked forlorn and grubby. The small scoreboard didn’t work. The shade cloth on the brewery side of the ground had been removed from its scaffolding, so provided no shade. The underpass from the railway lines was flooded and full of litter. I was aghast. 

I was further aghast that the only person who seemed to notice the hopeless state of the ground in the general post Covid-19 hysteria was Judith February, the former member of CSA’s interim board. She wrote about it in the Daily Maverick and I was grateful.

The state of the ground didn’t get better, it got worse. Why wasn’t Ashraf Burns, the president of the association, out there getting the stadium into good order when it mattered? Given the parlous state of the ground, why was his board not mucking in?

When WP posted a loss of R8.8-million for the 2022/23 financial year, CSA began to get truly alarmed. By the time the CSA delegation flew down with a R28-million rescue package it wasn’t a moment too soon. 

The first six million of that package went to the refurbishment of the ground. Stands were painted. Light-bulbs in the floodlight pylons were replaced. The small scoreboard was spruced up. The India Test has been rescued. So has next year’s SA20. But why was this allowed to happen in the first place? The entire WPCA board should resign.

There’s a nice symmetry to playing against India early in the New Year because the self-same Test back in early 1997 was witness to one of the finest catches South African cricket has ever seen. It happened in the second Test of the 1996/7 series and involved the great Sachin Tendulkar. South Africa batted first, with a century to Gary Kirsten and not out tons to Brian McMillan and Lance Klusener. The home side stockpiled 529 for seven declared. 

India’s chase started disastrously. At one point they were 58 for five when VVS Laxman trudged back to the pavilion. Tendulkar, though, was still there. With Laxman’s departure he was joined by Azharuddin. 

The two put on 222 for the sixth wicket. We talk of bowlers’ being unplayable but that innings from Azharuddin was so eye-catching that he was the unplayable one. There was nowhere to bowl to him. Most batsmen would hit you courteously to mid-off if you pitched it up six inches outside off-stump. Azharuddin, who was always spicy, flicked you for four through mid-wicket. 

He scored his 115 in 110 balls and notched up 19 fours in the process. It was so carefree that he could have been playing beach cricket at Kommetjie with a sundry cast of holiday-makers, youngsters and old fogeys like me.

After Azhar’s dismissal, Tendulkar watched partners come and go. The follow-on was avoided. When Tendulkar was on 169, he hit McMillan to the deep square-leg fence. McMillan was bowling round the wicket, and although Tendular’s contact was good, he didn’t quite get on top of it. Bacher, as I remember it, was in no-man’s-land, neither on the boundary nor 15 metres from it. The ball arrived in a flash and, out of reflex, he stuck out his right hand as the ball went over his head. It stuck, and Bacher tumbled over, having taken a magnificent catch reminiscent of some of the catches by his uncle, Ali, when Ali fielded at short-leg for what was then the Springboks.  

Tendulkar was so dumbfounded, he stood his ground, one hand on hip. He stood for a little longer as the inevitability of Bacher’s incredible catch sunk in. Eventually he wandered off, heavy-footed, the last India wicket to fall. 

South Africa batted a second time, declared and then bowled India out cheaply in their second innings for 144. South Africa won the Test by 282 runs. Newlands was a picture, like a ship at sail on the sea, and the ground was packed to capacity throughout the Test. It was before the cricket-watching public of the Cape became jaundiced about how successive Western Province boards ran their ground into the ground.

Newlands has been the stage to so much other than the forgotten Test of 12 years ago. Remember the “Over of Fire” Kallis had to endure there from Steve Harmison? Remember Brian Lara’s 116 against South Africa in the opening game of the 2003 World Cup? South Africa lost the match by three runs and if ever there was an innings designed to be a party-pooper, this one was it?

And who could ever forget the 399-run partnership between Ben Stokes and Jonny Bairstow at Newlands in early January, 2016? It wasn’t a great passage of play for the Saffers – Chris Morris’ 28 overs cost him 150 – as Stokes scored 258 and Bairstow 150 not out. 

I understand this makes for painful reading and listening but consider this. Stokes scored his runs in a 198 balls, with 30 fours and 11 sixes. That’s not pleasant for anyone whose blood is green but you have to take your hat off to Stokes. That was one fine knock.

So that’s a quick potted and (very idiosyncratic) recent history of Newlands for you. I hope it has made you understand how great a ground it is and how close it was to becoming like the Newlands Rugby Stadium next door. That future for the ground seems to have been avoided, for the time being at least. But it was a close run thing. Too close for comfort, in fact.