The Leading Edge

Now starring in his own disaster movie: Dale Steyn

Steyn is too inspiring a figure to go gently in this sorry fashion

28 April 2019 - 00:01

Here's the original pitch for this column, as sent to the editor earlier this week: "Dale Steyn's return to the Indian Premier League illustrates why the tournament must come off the cross and be accepted as an important and respected part of the global game."
The scene had been set by the most cinematic SA cricketer of the age. He had been parachuted in as an injury replacement for Royal Challengers Bangalore, a team he last played for in 2010, in the days when nothing seemed to go wrong with his body. RCB had lost five of their first six games this year.
What would Dale do?
He had a catch dropped off his first delivery, then took four wickets in two games - three of them in the powerplay, or as many as RCB had claimed in the powerplay in all the games they played before he arrived - and helped them win two on the trot.
A side that not even Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers could turn into a convincing facsimile of a decent team had, it seemed, been transformed by a 35-year-old skater punk tattoo collector who prowls the empty streets at night in search of burgers and milkshakes. It helps that he can bowl a bit, too.
"I just think they needed somebody of senior stature to help them, to look up to," Steyn told the Hindustan Times. "In batting, you have two of the greatest batsmen the game has seen in ABD and Virat Kohli.
"There are great bowlers, but in terms of IPL you are always looking for someone who has done phenomenally; maybe to not just lead the attack but in terms of thinking, planning and everything like that.
"It's nice to come in and it just feels like there's almost a father-figure around .
"There are a lot of young fast bowlers who have immense talent but don't know how to use it. In the last two games the guys have really come out of their shell and bowled phenomenally. It feels like there's almost a relief . they don't have to take any blame."
From anyone else this would have sounded like pompous pontification. From Steyn, who knows how to deliver a writable and therefore readable line as well as he knows how to bowl a sniping away swinger (note to media managers: make your players sound more like him and the press will forgive them almost everything and invent praises they don't deserve), it was what makes the game go round.
Then came Thursday, and with it the words "Steyn", "shoulder" and "injury" ranged uncomfortably closely together in too many sentences. And suddenly we were in a movie we had been shot in before.
Not the boring IPL-bashing movie, now playing in an irrelevant argument near you. Truth is, Steyn wasn't at the tournament long enough for anyone who wants to blame the best thing that's happened to cricket since the googly for the fact that he is now in a race to be fit for the World Cup in England, which starts late next month.
And if you want to criticise the IPL seriously, start with how it is able to pay players exponentially more than their national boards do for exponentially less work. Then ask, honestly, why "national" teams are considered any more authentic and important than the fabrications of the IPL's marketing department. Only answer: they are as fake as each other.
No, we're talking about another movie: the Pain in Steyn, a franchise three films old - shoulder, shoulder, heel - that started in 2015. And now, and again, shoulder.
It can't end like this. We can't be left staring into the kind of abyss some of us stared into for who knows how long after Lance Klusener and Allan Donald and Edgbaston and 1999 and all that.
Steyn is too inspiring a figure to go gently in this sorry fashion, too emblematic of what it means to have so much fun doing what you're good at to simply whimper away.
Not even Quentin Tarantino would make us watch that. Surely...

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