Dale Steyn

Dale Steyn has genuine ambition

Dale Steyn doesn’t want to be the guy who gets a standing ovation for three wickets in a Twenty20 match. He’s prepared to put in the hard yards. This is what he said before this Test series:

”There’s a lot of guys who can bowl 150km/h when you give them the ball when they’re fresh in the morning, but can they do it late in the afternoon when it’s boiling hot and they’re bowling their 20th over for the day? I want to be able to do that and I want to be the only guy who is able to do that. I want to be in your face all day, not for little periods of time, that is pretty much my inspiration. I want the opposition to walk off and say: ‘Shit, that was tough’.”

He then spent a bit of time whinging about the fact that South Africa are only playing two Tests against Australia and only three against England next summer.

It’s impossible not to warm to the man. This is how he came to be named Lord Megachief of Gold 2010.

Mohammad Amir – don’t mourn the loss of a future great

“Please don’t let it be the kid,” said Nasser Hussain at the start of all of this. He spoke for most of us.

We wanted Mohammad Amir to be innocent, but it turns out that he wasn’t and believing that he might have become a future great makes no sense now that the facts are in.

He won’t be a future great and there is a very good reason for that.

A test of character

Cricket, and Test cricket in particular, is a test of character. In fact, over the course of a career, it’s a test of everything. The great players weren’t necessarily the only ones with extraordinary skill at their disposal. They were also the ones who gave themselves the best chance of proving how good they were.

Take Dale Steyn for example

He is currently considered the best bowler in the world. Is that simply because he’s the most skilful? No, it’s not.

Some bowlers have had better opening spells, but Steyn stays strong all day. Other bowlers have taken more wickets in an innings, but Steyn bowls well almost every innings. Some bowlers have had fewer setbacks, but Steyn has responded better to the ones he’s had.

He’s had bad days and injuries and he’s wealthy enough that he doesn’t need to play. Yet he does. He hasn’t got lazy; he hasn’t got fat; he hasn’t grown dispirited or disillusioned; and as far as any of us know, he hasn’t accepted money to bowl any no-balls.

Failings

Being persuaded to fix elements of cricket matches is a failing. It knackers your career even more comprehensively than other failings, like lack of skill, lack of fitness or wealth-induced complacency, which is what keeps so many promising cricketers from achieving their potential.

We are not going to mourn the loss of Mohammad Amir, because even if he was pressured into doing what he did, he doesn’t seem to have resisted strongly enough. He was found wanting.

Dale Steyn doesn’t have a loosener

It’s yet another amazing thing about Dale Steyn that he’s pretty damn likely to slice in and arc the first ball of the day past the batsman’s outside edge. He doesn’t really do looseners.

Our own approach to starting work is more like that of Peter Gibbons, who explains how he likes to just ’space out’ for about an hour at the start of his working day.

“I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”

Dale’s the keen guy at work. The guy who’s really eager and ‘tries’.

But it’s okay to be that guy in his line of work, because his line of work is massively cool.

Dale’s a fast bowler.

Dale Steyn versus Sachin Tendulkar in an abbreviated title bout

There’s a great Test series taking place in South Africa at the moment and we’re gutted that we’re missing so much of it because of the Ashes.

It’s like when you get carried away ordering takeaway. The leftovers won’t keep for a week, so you’ve got to make some tough decisions about what gets eaten and what doesn’t. However, while we’ve had a hell of a lot of Ashes, we’ve always got room for Dale Steyn and Sachin Tendulkar.

While Morne Morkel’s a 5-90 then 0-90 kind of a bowler. Dale Steyn’s more 3-50, 4-80, 5-90. Off-days are very rare and he’s been slashing at India almost constantly for three Tests now.

In many ways, Tendulkar is similar. Test hundreds 50 and 51 against this bowling attack in its home conditions tells you pretty much all you need to know about the man.

If we have one minor gripe, it’s that it’s only a three-Test series. Wait. Did we say ‘minor gripe’? We meant ‘colossal ball-aching issue that just about makes us want to cry’.

Dale Steyn: Lord Megachief of Gold 2010

It was MS Dhoni in 2009. It’s Dale Steyn in 2010.

Sachin Tendulkar ran him close, hitting seven Test hundreds, but it can’t be a batsman every year. Graeme Swann took more Test wickets, but 44 of them were against Bangladesh and a spattered Pakistan side that barely ever looked like limping to 200.

Dale Steyn, however. Dale Steyn has been an unqualified success. The Test figures (and who cares about any others?) are 60 wickets at 21.41 in 11 matches. Those are statistics from a long gone era, but that’s barely half the story.

Strike rate

So far, in his Test career, Dale Steyn has taken a wicket every 39.7 balls. Shane Bond and Steve Finn are in the same ballpark, but they can only boast of 133 wickets between them. Steyn has taken 232.

He is, quite simply, the most destructive bowler of modern times. In the all-time list, only George Lohmann has taken 100 or more wickets at a faster rate and he played in the 1890s.

Here, there and everywhere

Lohmann played on a grand total of nine grounds over the course of his Test career. Dale Steyn played on 11 in 2010.

He went through England at Johannesburg; India at Nagpur; West Indies at Port of Spain; Pakistan at Abu Dhabi; and through India again at Durban. If Dale Steyn played a World XI on the moon, you’d bet on him getting a five-for. Even if there weren’t any fielders.

The Nagpur demolition was the most memorable. We’re brought up to believe that you need great spinners to succeed in India, but after South Africa had made 558-6, Steyn went and took 7-51, unzipping his flies and urinating in the face of conventional wisdom.

So that’s why he’s Lord Megachief of Gold?

No, not really. Dale Steyn is Lord Megachief of Gold 2010 because he makes every Test match he plays in exciting.

When wickets aren’t falling in a Test, the match isn’t progressing. You can score as many runs as you like, but TEST CRICKET IS ABOUT TAKING WICKETS. Steyn drives Test matches. Without him, they’re far less likely to go somewhere.

Plus, he means it. He bloody means it. During the Cape Town Test against England in January, we wrote:

“If you saw Dale Steyn’s celebration when he dismissed Kevin Pietersen on day four, that was quite something; that was a fast bowler on the verge of combustion, so full of adrenaline-fuelled power that he could have towed the continents back into place to reform Pangaea.”

He is hell-bent on taking wickets and it shows. That is watchable in itself. In the same match, he bowled the most spectacular spell to Paul Collingwood with a new ball. It was mystifyingly unsuccessful, but as a passage of play, it was as memorable as anything that’s happened all year.

No-one is doing more for Test cricket than Dale Steyn right now.

Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel add chilli, thyme and allspice

Any sign that fast bowling’s back in fashion is good, but does the victim have to be the West Indies? Dale Steyn took 5-29 and Morne Morkel took 4-19. Great stuff, but you feel bad for who’s on the receiving end.

It’s like eating lamb. It’s delicious, but it’s best to tuck in without thinking about the woolly people who have lost their lives so that you might enjoy your barbecue.

Why can’t fish be tastier? Fish are the vegetables of the sea. Eating fish doesn’t lead to much guilt despite the fact that we feel guilty for pretty much everything. Sometimes we feel guilty for nothing. We’ll just wake up with a sense of guilt hanging over us and resign ourself to enduring it for the rest of the day. Those are good days. The feeling distracts us from our default feeling of worthlessness.

By the gods of Olympus, Dale Steyn can swing a cricket ball

Stumps. Everywhere.

Shaun Tait might have notched 160kph this week, but Dale Steyn’s shown that if you add swing to the mix, you’re sorted. In fact, he didn’t even need to resort to scorching pace against India. It’s good to have scorching pace to fall back on when you aren’t swinging the ball this way and that and taking eight wickets in a day.

Not many fast bowlers take eight wickets in a day in India. That’s mostly because of the pitches, but Dale Steyn doesn’t rely on the pitch to take wickets. He swings the ball and puts it right up there where the batsman has a go at it. Later in the innings, he does exactly the same thing only with reverse swing. Bouncers are rare and lethal because of that.

Indian fans might not agree right now, but the cricket world needs Dale Steyn. Great bowlers are a rarity and Steyn’s proving himself great.

Next time someone calls you ‘a Steyn on this planet’, take it as a compliment.

What strikes you about Dale Steyn?

If you told us that we had to use a tired cliché to describe the effort that Dale Steyn puts into bowling or you’d force us to do a dance in front of other humans, we’d hang our head, sigh softly and mutter “sinew-straining”.

Dale’s certainly wholehearted. Perhaps too wholehearted. The staring eyes betray a love of caffeine the like of which we haven’t seen since everyone in the office got caught in a nasty espresso-drinking cycle last year (you needed the pick-me-up in the morning after yet another nervy, sleepless night).

Whatever it is, Steyn skitters in, looking ever-so-slightly-deranged, and whips the ball through with a bit of away swing. It’s not a bad stock ball. Only Ian Bell was really up to it, but Steyn lodged a mirror image of the delivery in amongst his stumps by way of a reprimand.

The four best bowlers over the next five years

Picking the bowlers was much harder than picking the batsmen and all-rounders. We’re not going to pretend that we’re 100% happy with what we’ve come up with because that would be dishonest and we save the dishonesty for getting out of social events.

Dale Steyn, South Africa, age 26

We’ve still not quite worked out how someone so spindly can be so quick. The fastest bowlers do tend to be whippy, flexible beasts, but even allowing for that, Steyn still looks a bit malnourished. Being quick AND being able to swing the ball makes him more rounded than other bowlers.

Mohammad Asif, Pakistan, 26

There are a lot of variables here. As long as Mohammad Asif can stay fit and stay out of trouble and as long as Pakistan actually get to play against other people; as long as all that happens he’ll take wickets by the big-receptacle-load.

Ajantha Mendis, Sri Lanka, 24

You have to do something a bit mental to get batsmen out on today’s pitches. Even if people work out the mental deliveries Mendis uses at present, he seems like the type who’d just invent another one. Will get lots of wickets with slow, straight deliveries that will confuse batsmen predicting sorcery.

Ishant Sharma, India, 21

Has been a bit ropey of late, but anyone who can make mincemeat out of Ricky Ponting when they’re 19 doesn’t need to improve too much. Ridiculously, he’s still only 21.

Also, just a note to say that the bowler we’re perhaps most excited about, Mohammad Aamer, is more of a bowler for the next 15 years, not the next five. We’re giving him time.

As for the Aussies, they’re all good and all about the right age, but none really stands out. It’s more that we couldn’t pick one in particular than that we couldn’t pick any.

Get to know the South African team

This is a guide to a few of the newer South African players. You shouldn’t cut it out, nor should you keep it. You should read it once, sigh and think to yourself: ‘I already knew all that. I remember when this site was good.’

Paul Harris

Paul Harris is a South African spin bowler. Don’t let his competent record fool you. He’s still a South African spin bowler.

Like all South African spin bowlers, he’s 29 already, even though he’s ‘new’.

Hashim Amla

You sort of remember him from when England toured South Africa in 2004, when his beard was all the more lovable for the short periods of time it was inside a batting helmet. It wasn’t a great series for Amla.

Unfortunately Hashim Amla has rather pushed on. In his last ten Tests – against New Zealand, West Indies, Bangladesh and India – he’s bearded three hundreds and averaged 58.8. It’s customary at these times to remove any scores against Bangladesh, so let’s do that.

Now he averages 64.4.

Hopefully this form won’t last and having hit a hundred in each of South Africa’s warm-up matches, Amla’s clearly frittering away his reservoir of runs at the wrong time. The hirsute fool!

Dale Steyn

Think James Anderson with another 5mph of pace and no bad days.

Morne Morkel

Morne Morkel’s one we’re looking forward to seeing. He’s fast and ludicrously oversized. Not ludicrously oversized in a lanky Steve Harmison way, more in an undue pressure on the pituitary gland kind of way.