Boeta bows out to reflect on career

BOETA Dippenaar slipped quietly off planet cricket two weeks ago, though he remains on standby for the length of the Knights' Miway Twenty20 campaign.

In the meantime, he'll orbit around commentary and consultancy work, no doubt spending a little of that free time reflecting on a career less stellar than perhaps it might have been, a series of pleasing minor explosions rather than a big bang.

Dippenaar made his first-class debut in the middle of matric exams, England's Devon Malcolm playing the role of the mean invigilator. Malcolm hit the 18-year-old on the shoulder with a quick delivery and then proceeded to rough him up. Dippenaar responded by hooking him for six, hitting him for four and then cutting him for another. Many took notice - including those outside of his home town, Bloemfontein.

Four years later and Dippenaar was playing international cricket - at least three years too soon, he thinks now. His test career was one of exquisite frustration, his ODI career better and more satisfying. Indeed, his ODI numbers are compelling: 3300 ODI runs at an average of 44 make for impressive reading.

Still, there is a sting in the tail. He only scored four hundreds in his 101 ODIs and might have done better.

"My role was more clearly defined in ODIs," he told me this week. "I could bat at the top of the order and bat through the innings.

"My personality doesn't enjoy surprises and I was settled in the one-day side, which wasn't the case in tests. I remember being told the night before the Adelaide test in 2000/1 that I was batting at three. I got four and nought and I was nowhere. You see the net schedule and you are down to bat at seven so you assume that how it's going to be in the match."

He acknowledges he probably should have imposed himself more but self-assertion doesn't come naturally. Coaches didn't seem to know how to handle him and he saw a lot of them, too, ranging from Graham Ford to Eric Simons to Ray Jennings.

"International cricket is an incredible place when you perform - it's a lonely place when things don't go well," he says. "I probably would have gone a bit mad if it hadn't been for my wife Charleen."

Still, there are no complaints. Dippenaar doesn't blame anyone but himself, although he adds that the way one is handled can affect one's cricket. It clearly did in his game, to the detriment of his composure and his career.

He remembers getting into an altercation with Jennings, who was trying to dragoon him into playing a test against England on the morning of the game when he thought he was 12th man.

"Couldn't you have told me last night," asked Dippenaar.

"So you don't want to play," said Jennings. "I didn't say that," replied Dippenaar.

You rather feel the exchange might have stood for Dippenaar's test career as a whole, over which there hung a cloud not so much of incomprehension as puzzlement.

When he did explode, he could be very, very impressive. Like the occasion he reeled off a century against England at St George's when Freddie Flintoff was bowling meanly and with menace.

Writing about it afterwards, there was a sense that Dippenaar had put all his false beginnings behind him.

"That was my best innings in test match cricket. I felt the same. I thought: 'this might be it'."