So there is a story about Sarel Erwee, and how he used to hang with the South African middle‑distance runner André Olivier when they were children. Their fathers had played Currie Cup rugby together for Natal back in the 1980s but the kids’ game was cricket. They used to play it on the strip in front of the Erwees’ garage door, and they had three house rules. One was that if you hit it over the fence it was a six, another was that if you hit it into the flower beds it was a wicket, and the last was that before you started they both had to nominate who you they were going to be and then try to play like them, too.
Olivier always used to choose Allan Donald, and Erwee, well, he used to want to be Gary Kirsten. “Many times I would not be able to get him out,” Olivier told the journalist CS Chiwanza. “In the end, he would just retire and give me a go.” It’s a choice that raises all kinds of questions, the most obvious of them being: “Why?” He could have picked Herschelle Gibbs, Lance Klusener, even Jacques Kallis. But instead he went for Kirsten, the man who played some of the most bum-numbing innings in the history of the game: 275 off 642 balls at Durban in 1999, 210 off 525 at Old Trafford in 1998, 130 off 323 at Headingley in 2003.
