Neuigkeiten » erence to win back to back away series in Eng

Hawthorns thirst to be tested ahead of the AFL finals series will see the premiers head north with enthusiasm to play Sydney on Thursday night.Just dont expect another public rev-up from coach Alastair Clarkson ahead of the table-topping clash.The four-time premiership coach took a step outside of the ordinary last week, publicly baiting opponents Port Adelaide to ensure a strong showing from his side.Wingman Isaac Smith said while Clarksons spray got the desired result - a 22-point win at Adelaide Oval - he didnt think it would be necessary ahead of their SCG date.We wanted to make sure when we rocked up last Thursday we rocked up to play, he told reporters on Monday.Behind closed doors he was ... not chilled out but he was just the normal Clarko.He gave us the facts and made sure that we were ready.Hopefully he doesnt need to do that every week.Smith says the high-stakes of preserving top spot on the ladder should be all the motivation any team should need to perform.Its one `v two on the ladder and it should be a cracking match, he said.Games like this are the ones you want to play.Its great to be playing footy against the best teams at their home ground because its a genuine challenge.Id tune in on Thursday night.Sydney were the last team to claim the points against Hawthorn, six matches ago at the MCG.Smith was close to Hawthorns best in their round nine meeting, with 26 touches.He acknowledged the importance of claiming a regular-season win given the sides have met in four of the last five finals series.If you win youve probably got the psychological edge the next time you go in, he said.But I dont think its the be all and end all.Hopefully we meet again in September because they always seem to be great challenges. 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Walcott is available for Saturdays home match against Southampton as Arsenal looks to extend its two-point lead at the top of the Premier League. The Gunners are currently the second highest scorers in the league but Wenger insists Walcott will add something extra to his team. For 21 years South African cricket fans lived in a twilight world of implausible allegiances. They supported Manchester United or Spurs, Wales when they played rugby. Some went the other way, giving the traditional New Years fixture between Western Province and Transvaal at Newlands a cachet it probably didnt deserve.Some of us - count me in this group - invented traditions and affiliations on the flimsiest evidence. Embarrassing as it now sounds, I supported Mike Gattings England as they romped through Australia in 1986-87, because I was born in Hendon, a suburb in north-west London.A year later, huddling around a small black-and-white Philips television set, I watched Will Carlings England defeat Australia 28-19 at Twickenham. A South African cricketing alternative wasnt yet in sight, and so I cheered when Simon Halliday scored Englands victory-clenching try. I had to support someone. What else was there to do?At the time I lived in a post-graduate digs in Cape Town, nursing my bursary with exaggerated care. Most mornings I went out onto the balcony of our flat to look at the harbour, where nothing much was going on. Once a week a big white Safmarine container vessel from Hamburg or Southampton moored in port, but for the most part the basin was dead, save for the trawler fleet and the odd careworn freighter.Squeezed tight by the trade, cultural and sporting boycott, Cape Town was not the chichi paradise it has become. If anything, the sleep from which it suffered seemed to be getting deeper. This was no place for an adventurous young man.Three years later I was living in London, stringing for a leftie South African weekly. They asked me to cover a match at Lords between a Transvaal Invitation XI and the MCC. The visitors were a good young side, but there was something vaguely clandestine about it all. Lords was empty that chilly midweek day, the concessions closed. The contest was devoid of tradition or large meaning. Cricket on the moon.A left-arm seamer called Graham Yates had Mike Atherton caught and bowled, and a young prodigy called Victor Vermeulen - later to tragically break his neck diving into a swimming pool - caught the eye.With Gattings ill-conceived rebel tour to South Africa a thing of the past, much of the cricket-loving world was waiting to see if South Africa would be readmitted to the ICC. It was surely too much to ask that they might also sneak into the 1992 World Cup.A couple of heady months later I discovered that the problem for a homesick South African adrift in London was that there was nowhere to watch your team when they were miraculously readmitted to the world game. The lightning 1991 tour to India had come, and gone and in search of World Cup cricket from Australasia, I pounded the Kilburn High Road, finding nothing but camping shops and dingy Irish pubs. Surely one of them would show cricket? Cold and tired, eventually I found one, dragging my girlfriend inside. We nursed our beers and watched, aghast, as New Zealands Gavin Larsen and Chris Harris tied us up in knots. It was a hopeless case, an excruciating comedown after the magic of beating Australia in South Africas opening World Cup game at the SCG.The best thing about the 92 World Cup was the overwhelming sense of gratitude. People were so happy that they cried. Steve Tshwete, the minister of sport elect, cried on Kepler Wessels shoulder in the SCG dressing room, while Kepler cried himself. Ali Bacher cried. People you wouldnt have thought of as criers had a good blub.One Sunday afternoon two years later, walking on the turf at Lords after South Africa had won the first Test by 356 runs, I cried. They were vaguely embarrassed, private tears but the game had been so emotional, so memorable - Fanie de Villiers torturing Craig White, Jonty Rhodes swatting Angus Fraser into the Mound Stand for six - that I didnt know what else to do. We were back. It aroused emotions too subtle and rare to name.Later during that series I watched the best innings Ive ever seen from a Soouth African in the post-readmission period: Daryll Cullinans 94 in a losing cause at The Oval.dddddddddddd After Lords, the teams went to Headingley, where Peter Kirsten and Graeme Hick scored tons in a drawn Test. Back in London, de Villiers, the hero of Sydney earlier that year, was foolish enough to hit Devon Malcolm square on the helmet. You guys are going to pay for this, Malcolm is reputed to have said. You guys are history.With four ducks and six single-figure scores, Malcolm gutted the South African second innings. Riding the steep bounce with courage and delicacy, only Cullinan stood firm. Some South Africans jabbed their bat down on yorkers after they were bowled; the top order scuttled back to the pavilion like the three blind mice. Cullinan was last out to Darren Gough, England galloping home by eight wickets on the fourth day to square the series.The next time South Africa played England was in Centurion, the ground close to the Jukskei River and a magnet for rain. A debut went in that first Test to Shaun Pollock, a rangy fast bowler, who, when he batted, hit the ball with careless aplomb.A year later a South Africa cap was given to Herschelle Gibbs at Eden Gardens in Kolkata. There have been more important players for South Africa in the last 25 years - Jacques Kallis grim charm, Makhaya Ntinis unflagging energy - but no two players pleased the aesthetes through the nineties and across the cusp of the fresh decade like Pollock and Gibbs.Behind this all, a darker current. On that very tour of India in 1996-97, Bacher foisted the Mohinder Armanath benefit game on a weary party at the end of the tour. The players were furious and eager to get home. Their flirtation with the possibility of throwing that game came to fruition on their next tour to India, where Hansie Cronje seduced Gibbs and others to underperform in the five-match ODI series, besmirching the sport.Until a revisionist history of the world game in the 1990s is published, well never know quite how rife match-fixing was. It is safe to say, however, that other boards handled their scandals entirely differently.On the field itself, a theme was taking shape. South Africa were losing or drawing Tests at home they might have been expected to win, while they were winning away when they might reasonably have been expected to lose. Pollock came to the fore in taking five for 37 against Pakistan in Faisalabad in 1997 (Pat Symcox scoring 55, 81, and taking 3 for 8 in the Pakistan second innings) as the hosts couldnt manage the 145 needed for victory. In 2000, Cronjes men won Tests in Mumbai (with a largely pace attack) and Bangalore. Tests were later won in Karachi (2007) in a victorious series, as well as in Ahmedabad and Nagpur on consecutive drawn series in India.South Africa have always been handy at winning away and the golden period was forged when Graeme Smith and Mickey Arthur managed to cocoon the side from increasingly dogged political interference to win back to back away series in England and Australia across six months in 2008. There have been big series wins (take the 5-0 drubbing of West Indies in 1998-99) but no more cherished prize sits on the mantelpiece of the South African game.For all the moments of magic - who will ever forget de Villiers, legs akimbo, tossing the Glenn McGrath lob into the air in 1994? - South African cricket is a protean, difficult-to-understand beast, with an almost perverse ability to confound. How, for example, can a side as well-rounded as the 1999 team to the World Cup in England contrive to lose it? Perhaps Winston Churchills famous quote about Russia brings us closer to understanding. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. In South Africas case that key is surely to be found in an increasingly settled country, less at odds with itself than it once was. We live in hope. ' ' '