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Tears well up in the black bags under my eyes, staining the rims of my new prescription glasses. My best friend from high school hugs me as we take our seats before the first ball on Day One at Lords. He whispers in my ear, “We made it.”
Made it, we sure have. Like a batsman about to raise his bat, we are middle-aged men nervously approaching our own half tons.
There are a dozen of us SAffers taking up two rows of six seats in the Mount Stand and we’re surrounded by the CEOs of SA’s super streaming sports channel and betting companies, former Springboks and Proteas, and buggers in industries like asset management and venture capital that I should probably know more about.
It does feel like an accomplishment getting here. The stop at a deli outside the nearest St John’s Wood Underground station to buy OJ, cheese, rolls, and some prosciutto has just set me back close on R900, and days before that I’ve spent a small fortune on new glasses so I can see what’s happening out in the middle and a big fortune on getting a last-minute visa.
I didn’t know we needed a visa for England, and so a pricey travel assistant fast-tracked my application just a week before, where I’d seen Herschelle in the British embassy queue and knew that I was in good last-minute, loskop company.
I was paying the price for telling the missus that the travel assistant was actually quite attractive, had justified a week in London to watch cricket and engineer some face time with my online bosses, and successfully absconded from exam week in a wet and miserable Cape Town.
So yeah, we made it. And we’d all made our mistakes and sacrifices to get here. And now it was time to watch some cricket.
Day One was frenetic, with lots of enthusiasm and 14 wickets. I weighed up the day as having 10 good moments and four bad ones, as we ended up four down at stumps and still facing a considerable deficit. The Pimms flowed and the banter was world-class: “Come on, Schultzy, have a dop with us! I’m your Only Fan!”
Our motley crew was also spotted on TV early on in our pink Proteas supporters shirts – so that also had to count for something.
I watched most of our innings from a TV in the Harris Gardens where my mates got pissed and I collected plastic cups that could be returned for one pound each. The story goes that a few years earlier, a mate of ours paid for his holiday to Italy doing the same shameless thing. I was happy seeing my mates so happy and didn’t mind making a fool of myself.
The home of cricket is like Newlands, but the calamari is better, pork is called slow-roasted Italian hog, and the stewards make you walk in two directions around the stadium so you don’t bump into each other. Sure, it’s First World. But we’re catching up.
We ended the night watching The Book of Mormon in the West End. Some of the drinkers were snoozing before intermission. That show from the creators of South Park is a sacrilegious satirical masterpiece. Go see it if you’re in town.
Day Two was an exercise in patience: Sitting still and watching each delivery. You can’t scroll up when you’re mildly disinterested, and by now, I felt the team needed my full attention. Just after lunch, we were all out and by the end of the day, we had the Aussies eight down.
Chants of “Oh, KG Rabada” to the tune of Seven Nation Army were the war cry that went with more beers. London mates crawling out of the woodwork to find us and curry for dinner with whoever didn’t get lost in the throng of crowds leaving Lords. I hugged and cried with a Rhodes mate whom I hadn’t seen since he saved my life when I OD’d in Joburg in 2010. You can’t put a price on that kind of conversation.
Day Three was hard work. Sitting in the anxiety of the Aussies putting on 50 runs for the tenth wicket partnership, and that all too familiar feeling that this pain of being a Protea fan was announcing itself again like a pinched nerve on the body part of your choosing.
The more it hurts, the more you hope, the more reason flies out the window. I was thinking about how much my happiness was tethered to the outcome of this sports match, the so-called ‘Ultimate Test’, and I was preparing myself for the inevitable.
The sun then started shining on the Land of Hope and Glory, and by stumps, Aiden and Temba had steadied the ship, and I’d returned some 40 quids worth of cups. I had dinner with my bosses at a quintessentially British restaurant in SoHo called The Wolsley, where the menu was almost entirely in French. I played it cool when chatting about the potential of more work when I knew how, back home, the bills were piling up, and there was a lot riding on this meal.
I stayed with a mate who’d left Rhodes a stoner and joined the British Army to fight in Afghanistan. He now played golf with clients and invested in crypto. I shacked up with a wingman who’d accrued some points with Hilton after his years traversing the globe managing client relationships for a Cape Town asset management company. And on Friday, Day Three, I walked in the rain with 2% battery on my phone, fumbling my way to a South African artist’s residence in Kensington.
Each day began with a 6 AM wakeup and train journeys and Tube rides and that thin film of grey London soot that sinks into your pores. By midnight each night, when I crawled into bed that I wasn’t paying 200 quid a night for, I was shattered but content.
I can’t recall where I was for the times that we’ve won, but I can remember all the times that we’ve lost. The Bosch Water Polo pavilion in Std 7 when Brian McMillan needed to hit 22 runs off 1 ball as the rain came down. That time Biff retired, and we lost the series at Newlands. The Klusener Donald run-out in ‘99 when… ah, fuck it, our failures have been regurgitated plenty and there’s no need to repeat them here. But memory has a cruel way of keeping an acute score of the bad times and leaving us with a vague recollection of our well-being during the good.
So when Day Four dawned and it was still 69 runs and 80 pounds to get into the ground, I wasn’t convinced. I’d spotted a sneaky way in under the retractable belt barrier cordons (you know, the stuff they use for the straps on our Sealand bags) the day before, but maybe I was getting too old for those kinds of shenanigans? So I bought my artist friend breakfast in Kensington and watched as a crane delivered a 100-foot tree into Lewis Hamilton’s front yard (he was my friend’s neighbour, that’s how I know).
I raced to watch us get the last 30 runs in a pub called The Princess of Wales with a mate from school who’d promised he’d get me safely to Heathrow later on. And with Di long gone, Trooping the Colour (King Charles’s birthday celebration) was now happening nearby in Horse Guards Parade.
Planes flew overhead emitting chemtrails of red, white, and blue, but the only guard I was interested in seeing was how few batsmen would still need to take guard against a rampant Mitchell Starc. We were already five down and I’d witnessed far more potentially calamitous collapses in my torturous years as a Proteas fan than this.
And then Kyle Verryne hit the winning runs on a TV in a pub with the sound on mute. I downed my Guinness Zero and hugged John and didn’t know how to feel.
I stacked up all the painful losses against the relief of this victory, and it didn’t balance itself out, if I’m honest. Perhaps the happiness is still to come. Friends phoned, and the memes flooded my WhatsApp, and I ran out of data as we boarded the train to Heathrow.
We stopped in Southall, where the Underground signage for the station was also written in Hindi. “That’s because a lot of Indians live here”, John informed me. He used to live here, so he knows lank. Everything suddenly seemed so welcoming as another speed train for Heathrow whizzed past without stopping.
Alone at the airport, I noticed a billboard for booze that read ‘Spirits Available on Request’. I thought of one of our best mates from Rhodes who’d passed away and remembered that it will be two years tomorrow since he left us. And how, maybe, spirits such as he are available on request. And maybe he was watching us together, having a lag to himself, having a laugh with us.
I’m on a small plane to an island in Greece as I write this. I think about where I’ve come from (my home in Bainskloof), where I’ve been (Lords, the home of cricket), and where I’m going (who can say). And I think of Nathan Fielder, in his plane at the end of Season Two of The Rehearsal.
I’ll reference his closing lines to end this missive, if only to connect with the one fan who knows what I’m talking about, and because I know how much Seth loves flying. Nathan is travelling over the sands of the Namibian Desert when he assures himself by saying, “So if you’re here, you must be fine.”
Thanks Justin!
