Steve Smith's Men by Geoff Lemon

Author:Geoff Lemon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Published: 2018-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

EXCREMENT MEETS VENTILATOR

At the end of the coastal road from the south, Table Mountain is waiting. It’s been waiting since long before there was a city to watch. Now it looms silent over Cape Town, refusing to be drawn on endorsement or disapproval. It permits the city on its skirts but no higher. Wind scours it at night, howls of exultation, tracking the curve of highways round its flanks in a mad ribbon ballet. Below them, strands of light in matching circles make a neckpiece for the king. Slopes climb until they become vertical, deep green fading into greys and reds to the crumbling top. Clouds clamber, fog ascends and trails, then both are stripped by sun and breeze to start days bare and new. The summit is omnipresent, a thing of impossible bulk, watching so close over every shoulder it startles you on turning around. A stone rolled from the top would surely hurry straight into the sea.

Its dangling peninsula ends in the Cape of Good Hope, target for any sailor to go round. Cape Town’s centre feels like a European city tacked onto the coast. White locals and travellers burble out from pricey venues, black drivers circulate for fares. Money makes its own apartheid: in the residential streets of each city, see the high walls, the barbed wire, the armed guards, the mirrors and cameras and lights in blinding array. Every house is a compound set in defence. As white Australians with an exchange rate on our side, we fitted right in and felt ill at ease with the fact. This is Africa, Danny, after all.

Cape Town means drama for Australian cricket. Bowled out for 47 after rolling South Africa for 96. Ryan Harris winning a series with four overs to go. Peter Roebuck’s death at the Southern Sun Hotel. This time, Kagiso Rabada was appealing his suspension, meaning a new hearing in front of an independent judge. This brought not the slightest surprise. ‘South Africans’ knee-jerk response to any attack, legitimate or not, is resolute defence,’ wrote Telford Vice for Wisden Cricket Monthly. ‘This has been true since 1652, when Europeans arrived on our shores to stay and considered the place theirs. They were, of course met with resistance.’

The cricket team was an exemplar. ICC bans don’t get overturned; charges are levied based on convention rather than the letter of regulations. But one team fights them as an expression of grievance. Faf du Plessis contested his mint-based tampering charge not on the basis that he didn’t do it, but that everyone else does. In Durban the argument was that de Kock hadn’t said anything on the few available seconds of leaked video. ‘Our strike rate is zero per cent at the moment with trying to challenge these cases, it will probably stay at zero,’ said du Plessis of Rabada.

His team scrambled to defend its strike bowler nonetheless. The South African internet lit up with #RabadaMustPlay. Philander stirred that pot with the midnight Twitter action of a man at the wrong end of twenty Castle Lagers, likening Smith to a footballer diving for a penalty.

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