A philosophical question: does England’s one-day international series in South Africa really count as an overseas tour? The first match takes place on Friday, the last on the following Wednesday. Two of the games are at the same ground in Bloemfontein and the other within day-tripping distance – you can get to Kimberley in less than two hours on the bus. It will be the briefest, slightest cricketing incursion an England team has made to the country. Perhaps, in a modern age of peripatetic players and bite-size schedules, any tour less than a week in length could be reclassified as an “intervention”, or possibly an “extended sleepover”.
Such a drive-by affair would have been a sci-fi fantasy to the first England team to make the journey, in the 19th century. When Major Robert Gardner Warton set sail from Dartmouth to Cape Town in 1888, with a party of seven amateurs and seven professionals, it was practically a pioneering expedition. The potential folly of the endeavour is perfectly captured by Richard Parry and André Odendaal in their overarching history of England’s tours to South Africa, Swallows and Hawke, which was published last year.
