Airway obstruction alert

Stranded in an empty stadium at Edgbaston on June 17 1999 and agonising over the tied cricket match that ended SA’s championship hopes, someone had a vision of the future: it’s World Cup 2011 and Alan Donald’s punching the air and high-fiving with ecstatic colleagues. There’s light at the end of the tunnel! But wait. What’s that uniform he’s wearing? New Zealand?

It’s an image that keeps twisting through my head as I accept that another World Cup is over and it‘s four years before another attempt at what is fast becoming the rainbow nation’s impossible dream.

It’s just a game, just a game, just a game.

The sun will come up.

You still own your house.

Hindsight follows SA’s crushing quarter-final defeat on Friday. Did they learn anything from the earlier defeat against England? Did the omission of perennial street fighter Mark Boucher and the IPL’s second highest paid mercenary, Albie Morkel, rob the team of much needed bottle in the lower order?

It was a day of if onlys. If only we’d won the toss, if only Amla’s bottom edge hadn’t connected McCallum’s boot, if only newcomer Du Plessis hadn’t run out De Villiers. If only, if only …

South Africa has never won a knockout match in the ICC World Cup competition. The rain got us in 1992, Brian Lara in 1996, Donald dropped his bat in 1999, in 2003 we didn’t even make the play-offs, but Boucher/Shaun Pollock botched the Duckworth-Lewis calculations and in 2007 brave cricket was stupid cricket. Given the record of 0 wins from 5, achieving 3 wins from 3 to win WC 2011 requires something or someone very special.

Including Friday’s debacle, Jacques Kallis has been involved in four of these losses. At the famous Edgbaston game he got 53 from 92 balls while chasing 213 to win. In the key game against Sri Lanka in Durban in 2003 he got 16 from 19 balls. Then in the Caribbean in 2007 he uncharacteristically walked down the wicket to be bowled by Glenn McGrath for 5. On Friday he was out for 47 off 75 balls, his dismissal (caught on the boundary when the team needed 114 runs at about 4 runs an over) precipitating the collapse. It’s one thing accumulating runs and posting records. But statistics do not always reveal match winning capability — the times those runs or wickets turned a critical game on its head. I wonder if Ricky Ponting or Sachin Tendulkar would have blown it four times. Or Jesse Ryder? In the context of the quarter-final, Ryder curtailed his natural aggression to build a patient match-winning innings. He would have been my man of the match.

Back to Donald. Not his fault. It could have been Gary Kirsten or Eric Simons. This is a professional game, loyalty is in the cheque book. It’s something to bear in mind when you next pull on your green Protea’s supporter T-shirt and devote a whole day to supporting the local team. The marketing forces behind cricket want us to believe that it’s nation upon nation, a modern war of warriors who’d bleed for their country, two teams holding their hearts and singing the national anthems before they go head to head in battle. In the shambles that is the aftermath of South Africa’s exit form WC 2011, it’s not hard to imagine a gleeful Kallis jumping off his seat as Bangladesh make the play-off rounds in 2015 or Graeme Smith in earnest discussion with his English compatriots as they concoct a dish for the future South African team to choke on.

Hopefully the Proteas will have dispensed with the services of head doctor Henning Gericke (I would seriously like to know how he helped JP Duminy). Instead they could employ someone to teach the team the intricacies of the Heimlich manoeuvre.

As for me? Next time I’d rather go to the beach and then catch the result on the radio. That way I’d avoid having to watch Donald jumping round.

It is just a game.

The sun will come up.

You still own your house.