What is it that provokes the enmity from South Africa cricket fans towards Australia? Is it the over-sized stadiums, those totems to their debauchery? Their five World Cup wins in the men’s game? The fact that they can call cricket their national sport? The mythology of the Baggy Green? That they can’t pronounce Marnus Labuschagne’s surname correctly?
The truth behind the antipathy is perhaps pretty simple: we are them. Rather, they are us. Or some distorted version of us reflected back from across the Indian Ocean as if from a funhouse mirror. They play how we play. Like us, they’re victims of British imperialism as well as perpetrators of human rights abuses. Are we cousins? Siblings? The best of frenemies?
