Jacques Kallis

Jacques Kallis is fitter than he looks

Jacques Kallis bowled a ball at about 90mph today. Generally speaking, he was bowling faster than Philander, Steyn and Morkel.

Despite looking more like a rugby player, Kallis has always been pretty slippery when the mood’s taken him. It’s astonishing that he can still do this when he’s 36-years-old. Few can do it at all at that age, let alone those who’ve played 400-and-odd international matches.

The average quick bowler covers about 15 miles a day during a Test match. Even the wicketkeeper averages about 10. Kallis doesn’t clock too many overs, but he does bat a bit. In fact, wait a minute – didn’t he hit 224 earlier in this match?

Maybe his new hair is impregnated with nandrolone. You thought it was vanity that led to his new mane, but it was actually a desire for an intrafollicular supply of anabolic steroids.

Jacques Kallis’s odd days

Every now and again, Jacques Kallis has an odd day where he suddenly starts thrashing the ball around like he’s been possessed by one of Shahid Afrid’s many personalities.

He holds the record for the fastest Test fifty off 24 balls. Yes, it was against Zimbabwe, but plenty of other people have played against Zimbabwe as well and they didn’t do that.

We’ve written before that Kallis’s reputation is somewhat unfairly etched in stone by this point in his career, but we’re a great fan of these odd days of his. We like them specifically because he has invested so much of his life into doing the exact opposite. It feels like a treat.

Today, he hit 54 off 41 balls after Australia had reduced South Africa to 43-2 on the first morning of the second (and final) Test. This included a six and a four off Nathan Lyon’s first over, which brought to mind the treatment he meted out to Bryce McGain a couple of years ago. His batting then had been calculated and vicious and we were secretly hoping for something similar today.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Jacques will have to spend the rest of the innings in the pavilion, munching cakes and smoothing his fair locks in the mirror.

Jacques Kallis would genuinely score more runs than you with his eyes closed

Yesterday, we wrote about Steyn and Tendulkar, but there’s another modern great on display in that match.

Like Tendulkar, Jacques Kallis seems to have reached an even loftier plane in middle age. You’ll need to go to another website to see the statistics about his recent form, but take it from us, they’re phenomenal.

In this innings, it was 64-4 and then 98-5; India were on one of those rolls where the match suddenly goes from nought to sixty in a split second; and he had a knacked up side muscle. None of this mattered. Jacques Kallis was going to score a hundred.

Comparisons are odious but informative and it’s worth noting that although Sachin Tendulkar has about 3,000 more Test runs than Kallis, the latter’s average is superior (57.43 compared to 56.54). For a man who’s only recorded one double hundred in his Test career, that average speaks of unparalleled consistency, even if it also betrays an occasional tendency to play the anchor when that role is unwarranted.

Throw in the “reluctant” acquisition of 270 Test wickets and an appearance in the world’s first 100% great advert and you’ve got a very special cricketer.

Today though, it was all about his immovability at a key moment in a crucial and difficult match. That’s worth more than the numbers.

Jacques Kallis went big

For once, this isn’t about that period when Jacques Kallis lost sight of his genitals for a few months. It’s about him hitting a hundred.

Once upon a time, hitting a hundred was an achievement. Nowadays you hit 170 and the man of the match award goes to someone who hit 230. Jacques has never hit a double hundred and we like him because of this. His Test batting average (54.85) isn’t bumped up by a handful of freakish innings. He’s put the work in day-in, day-out.

This has been an old-fashioned Test. It’s not about how many a batsman can make. It’s about whether he can make any at all. Test cricket is much, much better this way.

By the way, despite the title of this update, the phrase ‘go big’ is not King Cricket approved. We favour ’score more’. As in: “Jacques Kallis has scored his hundred. Now he needs to score more.”

We’re hoping that ’score more’ catches on, but we’re not hopeful.

Is Jacques Kallis a boring batsman?

Well, maybe a bit, but Jacques Kallis’s reputation seems to be etched in stone now and nothing he ever does will change it.

“He just accumulates,” said Nasser Hussain shortly after Kallis passed 100. ‘Didn’t he drop to one knee and thock the ball over the boundary at one point?’ we asked. Nasser didn’t answer, because he was on telly.

For pretty much his whole career, Kallis has been South Africa’s best batsman. For quite a long time, he’ll have felt (and probably been told) that he couldn’t get out. It takes a lot to undo that kind of mindset. He is still one of the finest batsmen and, technically, exercising restraint when you can play all the shots is an attribute in itself.

Kind of a boring attribute though.

The best advert featuring a cricketer EVER

There isn’t one part of this advert that isn’t amazing. It is the world’s first 100% amazing advert.

The slogan’s baffling and surreal and amazing. The picture’s less baffling, but still surreal and amazing. Even the boast ‘SA’s #1 Hand Tool Brand’ is amazing, because just how hotly contested is that title?

Ceci sent this majestic thing in.

She writes:

“This is an advert from a South African cricket mag.  It’s entirely un-photoshopped and is utterly mysterious. Why is Kallis looking so keen and eager?  Is sheep burying his hobby, or is it – like Steyn’s crocodile wrestling – the mark of a Saffer man; the number of sheep he can bury in an hour?”

Webco Tools’ website doesn’t quite live up to this promise, but it’s still pretty amazing. They know their target market, as proven by their use of images such as the one on the right.

Bet you’d like to bury sheep with her, eh?

Eh? Eh?

Oh.

Flintoff to Kallis

We don’t know about you, but we’re glad Aleem Dar turned down that blatantly out lbw appeal against Kallis. What followed was as electric as that innocuous-looking, ankle-high, three-holed square of plastic in the corner there.

It was proper fast bowling; the kind you just don’t get in the shorter formats; the kind that only comes about when the bowler v batsman duel suddenly becomes personal and that bowler can do whatever he bloody well wants.

It actually wasn’t a supremely quick spell of bowling in the literal sense – high eighties maybe – but watch it: it was fast bowling. It was the kind of bowling that seems so much faster and more intimidating because the bowler’s so unbelievably pissed off.

This was no less a batsman than Jacques Kallis too – easily one of the best Test batsmen in the world and most definitely someone who doesn’t surrender his wicket easily. He’d actually got himself in as well. He’d just passed 50.

Even before the non-dismissal Flintoff was firing. Yorker, bouncer, bouncer, no run, yorker onto the boot… Not out.

At this point Andrew Flintoff summoned down the angel of pure bilious rage and punched his lights out, stole his bag of rage and put it to use.

For some reason, Jacques Kallis opted to take a single off the last ball of the next over, bowled by Monty Panesar. The idiot.

Bouncer, left alone, beaten outside off.

And then it ended the only way these things can ever satisfactorily end: with a stump being plucked from its earthy home and sent barrelling along towards the wicketkeeper.

The only story of today’s play

Realistically, there was only one story from today’s play. We’re talking of course of Jacques Kallis’s new ‘comfortable’ appearance.

Now we like a fat cricketer as much as the next man – maybe even more than the next man – but we don’t appreciate Jacques Kallis’s late-to-the-party attempts.

Our idea of a fat cricketer is someone who truly devotes himself to the role. Ian Austin: there was a fat cricketer with true natural ability. He didn’t faff around with a slight physique for years. He got straight in there. He was fat from the off.

Mark Cosgrove’s another cricketer with gluttony and sloth in his big, big bones. He’s the kind of man who won’t even pay lip service to a fitness regime, because his lips are permanently occupied with cream cakes. Mark Cosgrove is actively working on gaining more weight. This is our kind of hero: one you can believe in and also laugh at when they try to do up their shoelaces.

Jacques Kallis is just a wannabe. Mark Boucher too.

We’ve just realised we’ve already written about fat South Africans, but no matter – it’s not something anyone’s ever likely to get tired of.

Jacques Kallis, interesting?

We don’t know what’s going on here. There we were idly reading a short piece about New Zealand quick, Mark Gillespie, when suddenly the writer makes the most outrageous claim imaginable.

Will from The Corridor – who knows what he’s on about – describes Jacques Kallis as ‘dazzling’. ‘Dazzling’ is not a word readily associated with the thick-skulled automaton, but we don’t doubt Will’s word. Will writes for a proper, grown-up cricket website where lying’s frowned upon rather than celebrated.

This will be an unwelcome development for The Atheist from Are You A Left-Arm Chinaman who once said: “As a rule, I like the players that everyone else loathes. Jacques Kallis and Rahul Dravid: champions among younger and more exciting men. Show me a solid forward defence played to a harmless half-volley, and I will show you a happy Atheist. Everything is in its place, and the world is as it should be.”

Don’t drop Jacques Kallis

Because paradoxically we end up having to watch even more of him.

The South African selectors felt they could do without the world’s most willing batsman and least willing bowler for the Twenty20 World Cup. Jacques Kallis was a little irritated by this and resigned the vice-captaincy. He also claimed to be ‘thinking over his international future’ which is a way of threatening the selectors when you’ve clearly no intention of going.

Anyway, returning to the side for this Test series against Pakistan, Kallis has been showing the selectors his worth in no uncertain terms. Innings of 155 and 100 not out in the first Test have been followed by 59 and 107 not out in the second Test.

So South Africa’s selectors have been proven wrong then? Well, no. They dropped him because of a ‘nightmare’ schedule in the next 18 months, saying they wanted to keep one of their most important players fresh. That decision seems to have been vindicated.

Resting players from full-blown international events so that they’ll be fresh for other ones is crap. The match where the player’s rested isn’t as competitive as it should be and assuming the other players need resting as well, the next match is effectively weakened also.

THAT, friends, is international cricket as it stands today.