Jacques Kallis
Perhaps the most surprising sentiment in Australia’s much-discussed ‘secret’ dossier about their South African opponents is the observation that Jacques Kallis ‘never gets the wraps he really deserves’.
Really? Hardly a day goes past when he’s not compared to Sir Donald Bradman or Sir Garfield Sobers. That’s some pretty fancy (w)raps he’s being swathed in.
Not that they are undeserved. Kallis has spent half his career batting on South African pitches, the friendliest to pace in the world, and still has a batting record superior to Ricky Ponting’s. Kallis has vied for the ball with some of cricket’s slipperiest pace bowlers yet his bowling record is little inferior to Brett Lee’s. Ponder that a moment: Kallis equals Ponting times Lee. Einstein could hardly have conceived of an equation so compelling.
The comparison with the greatest appeal, it would seem, is between Kallis and Sobers, first of all because it attracts the world’s feral abacuses to their respective Test figures. Their averages – Kallis’s 12,641 runs at 57 and 280 wickets at 33, Sober’s 8032 runs at 58 and 235 wickets at 34 – are separated by a fag paper.
The comparison is made additionally enticing by involving two brilliant opposites: Sobers all prowling grace and feline elasticity, with his 360-degree bat-swing and three-in-one bowling; Kallis all looming bulk and latent power, constructed like a work of neo-brutalist architecture. Yet what they are just as much opposites of are their respective eras. Sobers was the most explosive cricketer of a more staid age, the more mercurial because of the orthodoxy and rigidity round him; Kallis is the most remorseless and unyielding cricketer of an era more ostentatious and histrionic. Sobers was a cavalier among roundheads; Kallis has steadily become a roundhead among cavaliers.
The immortal Amarillo Slim once counselled players of Texas Hold’ Em to ‘play fast in a slow game, slow in a fast game’. It’s not the worst advice for cricket. By altering expectations, batsmen out of step with their peers force bowlers to aim for different lengths, and challenge captains to set different fields. In Kallis’s era, strokeplay has taken on almost compulsive qualities. Batsmen are playing shots from the get-go; bowling ‘dry’ has become a standard counteroffensive. The pacific Kallis craves no such ego gratification. His strike rate of 46 has barely altered during his career. It is a steady, sober, almost God-fearing sort of strike rate: nothing fancy, flashy or greedy. Kallis has no need to swank. He knows he will get there in the end.
Kallis has profited from cricket in ways Sobers never did and never could have. But Kallis has by some measures had the more demanding popular task. Everyone loved Sobers. Such athleticism. Such élan. If wraps for Kallis have always been in ready enough supply, it is also true that he has been more readily appreciated than adored.
In a sense, he has never quite outgrown his origins – nor has he wished to. His formative years were in a South Africa deprived of international cricket competition. He never saw Viv Richards swagger. He never saw David Gower glide. He was coached by his father Henry, and his intensely functional methods have a touch of filial piety to them, as well as an intense respect for the game.
Today he achieves a remarkable record, by playing Test cricket at fifty different venues – only the third cricketer to do so, after Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar. Yet he remains very much a homebody, wedded to the south of Cape Town, and the familiar sights and sounds of low-key, suburban Mowbray, which he apparently knows down to the last street sign and post-box. His is the cricket of a similarly high boredom threshold; he has never tired of the playing, practising and travelling that has been his lot for so long.
At thirty-seven, Kallis is at last feeling the passage of time and has taken steps to cope. He has assimilated the disciplines of T20; he has guarded his body against excessive bowling loads; he has had his scalp fetchingly reupholstered.
But some things have changed despite him. This is the first tour Kallis has begun without his old mucker Mark Boucher, invalided home from England in July with a desperate eye injury. Their double act – spikey Boucher, bashful Kallis – had for years been a source of wry amusement to their fellows. ‘What are you drinking, Jacques?’ ‘Oh, whatever Bouch is having.’ ‘What would you like to eat, Jacques?’ ‘Bouch?’ If Australia are planning to ‘really test him out’ during this series, as their dossier recommends, it might be as simple as placing a menu in front of him.
Given that Kallis is in all probability on his last visit here, the cricketer whom Ponting rates as ‘Australia’s number-one opponent’ could also feel some pressure to burnish his record against them. Down the years, Australian teams have done well to prevent Kallis being quite the same calibre matchwinner he has been elsewhere. His record against Australia is, to be sure, perfectly respectable: twenty-six Tests, 1722 runs at 39.14 and forty-nine wickets at 38. What it pales in comparison with is Kallis’ record against all other comers: 10,919 runs at 61.34 and 231 wickets at 31.41. Three of Kallis’s four Test centuries against Australia have been in losing causes. Nor has he ever taken more than three wickets in an innings against this country.
Today is a noteworthy event in the annals of South African cricket. It is the first time the team has entered a Test match as the format’s undisputed number one. The Proteas fell upwards into the slot just over three years ago when Australia slipped downwards by losing to England at the Oval, but had been dislodged by India before they played their next Test. This Test commences with their regained mantle secure. If Kallis were to mark that event with a performance against Australia worthy of his stupendous accomplishments, some truly royal wraps would be his for the asking.
The Australian, November 2012