South Africa fight fatigue and rust

Any sport you would care to name is fair game for public discourse in South Africa. As long as that sport is international football. The years of dreaming, hyping, planning, funding and constructing are almost over: the start of the 2010 FIFA World Cup is mere weeks away, and a nation can't wait to exhale.

Along with everything else, cricket is struggling to get a word, a thought, a headline, in edge-wise. That it is able to do so at all is a miracle. The miracle's name is the Indian Premier League, and its relentless brassy blare has ensured that an admittedly tiny part of South Africa's sporting consciousness remains attuned to matters of bat and ball.

The ICC World Twenty20? It's out there somewhere in soft focus, an event that would seem to matter less than the colour of the boots that Cristiano Ronaldo will wear at the World Cup. (They're a puke-worthy purple, don't you know, with an illegally orange swoosh glaring down the side.)

In fact, World Cup fever is running high enough in Mandelaland to stave off that hardy perennial bleat: will the World Twenty20 provide South Africa, at long last, with some ICC silverware?

No. That's the short answer if we take seriously Graeme Smith's seemingly defeatist mindset about his team's chances.

"We'll have some players flying in from India and some players flying in from South Africa," Smith said in the days before his squad's departure for the Caribbean.

"We've only got five or six days to get ourselves ready for the tournament. It's not ideal, I guess, to go a World Cup with this kind of preparation. We've just got to knuckle down. These are the cards we've been dealt. At international level excuses don't work very well. We've just got to get in and hopefully play well."

Has Smith not realised that the playing field will be levelled by the fact that almost all of the teams winging their way to the West Indies face similar challenges? Not that anyone on the southern tip of Africa seems to care enough to ask that question.

So by the time the news of Graeme Smith breaking a bone in his hand for an alarming fifth time in little more than a year was properly digested, the confirmation that he would be returned to fitness in time to lead his men in the Caribbean was almost upon us. The fact that Wayne Parnell would miss the tournament because of a gammy groin barely blipped on the South African radar. Even less Justin Kemp's injury enforced absence.

That all of those players were crocked in the service of their IPL teams - and were therefore unlikely to have been injured before the World Twenty20 had they not been in India - has been balanced at least in part by what the IPL has revealed about the state of readiness of other South African players.

Dale Steyn and Jacques Kallis, for instance, are in bristling form. Kallis appears to have put aside his epic disdain for anything that smacks of urgency at the crease, while Steyn's confidence is such that he reaches for the unplayable delivery almost at will.

Albie Morkel has been a consistent threat with the bat, but less so with the ball. Herschelle Gibbs is bottom of the class, a befuddled shadow of his previously dominant self. And that's where the lesson must end, because that's about all we know about South Africa's World Twenty20 squad from watching the third edition of the IPL.

Mark Boucher, AB de Villiers, Charl Langeveldt, Morne Morkel and Roelof van der Merwe have all struggled to get game time for their various franchises, and most of the time for reasons that are about as clear as the bug-bedevilled night skies of Ahmedabad.

So South Africa will take a squad to the Caribbean in which the term "rusty" might refer to rather more than one of their brightest fast-bowling prospects.

"Match time is obviously more valuable than sitting on the sidelines, but the guys who aren't playing that much are keeping themselves busy with practice matches," former South Africa coach Graham Ford said. "It's not an ideal situation, but some of the other countries are in the same boat."

That's notably true of Sri Lankan stalwart Sanath Jayasuriya and England's Eoin Morgan, of the Mumbai Indians and the Royal Challengers Bangalore respectively. Not forgetting all the absent Pakistanis.

Much of the Caribbean has been gripped by drought, and Ford felt the likely conditions at the World Twenty20 could make for an unusual tournament.

"It looks like the pitches will be slower than usual, so spin bowling and how spin bowling is played will be unusually important. The conditions might lead to low-scoring games, which is a departure from the norm and could prove to be hard work for the fast bowlers. Good, hard pitches are what you want for Twenty20 cricket."

But he was in little doubt that the thrills and spills that seem hardwired into the Twenty20 format would allow the event to rise above all that.

"I don't think 20-over cricket could ever get as boring as the 50-over game. On top of that, the quality of the cricket we've seen in 20-over games has improved dramatically. It's still a batsman's game, but it's been wonderful to see how imaginative the bowlers have become to counter the big hitting. And the speed of fielders across the ground is so much better than it was just a few years ago.

"What it all comes down to is that if you don't have explosive players in your team, you're not going to win."

The third edition of the IPL has shown us again that cricket isn't short of players able to deliver the big bang. And, like they do everywhere else, fireworks go down a treat in the Caribbean.