Watching sport, for the most part, is relatively humdrum. You can trudge to grounds, subscribe to TV channels, listen to commentary for decades and only see relatively few things that genuinely thrill you. But when those things arrive, by god it's worth it.
Furthermore, you can go to sport for a lifetime and not witness, at first hand, an 'I was there moment.' A genuine epochal occasion that people speak about for years after, and their eyes widen when you tell them that you saw that in the flesh. Manchester United and Liverpool's wins in the 1999 and 2005 Champions League finals. Super Saturday at the 2012 Olympics. The 2012 Ryder Cup.
For English cricket fans, alongside various Ashes victories, one of those 'I was there' moments was the Test match against South Africa, at Trent Bridge in 1998. Or, more memorably, 'Atherton vs Donald.'
In those days, Test cricket was not quite as well-attended as it is now, the swell in popularity that occurred a few years later only on the horizon. I mention that because, late on the fourth day of this Test match, Trent Bridge was around half full, and since cricket isn't exactly the noisiest sport in the world, that meant you could hear quite a lot of what was going on in the middle. And in this case, what was going on in the middle was a fantastic amount of needle and frustration, vocalised by one very angry South African.
With South Africa needing wickets and England requiring runs to win the match, the match was poised fascinatingly enough as it was, but then Allan Donald, the first great South African bowler of the post-Apartheid era, ramped things up several notches by deciding that raw pace was the way to remove Michael Atherton, who had resigned the England captaincy earlier that year. And that raw pace would, largely, be aimed at Atherton's head.
There's something that happens watching live sport when both the result and the physical well-being of one or more of the competitors is in danger. That's why boxing is so popular, why big hits in rugby produce cheers and people complain about the physicality disappearing from football. Not being a contact sport, this sort of thing doesn't appear all that frequently in cricket, but when it does it produces a thrilling spectacle. Donald seemed keen to either knock Atherton out or bowl him out, and wasn't overly-fussed which one came first.
Donald bowled ball after ball at Atherton's ribs, chest and head, the course of action for most would be to duck out of the way, a course of action not available to the doughty Lancastrian because of the back condition that hampered his career. Thus, Atherton had to either sway out of the ball's path, hit the thing which, when the ball is travelling at 90mph, is not a simple task, or allow it to hit him. All of these occurred regularly, inspiring more and more frustration from Donald, frustration that could be heard in the stands through a series of increasingly furious outbursts that can't really be repeated in polite company.
That frustration only increased when Atherton was caught behind, having gloved the ball to wicketkeeper Mark Boucher, only for umpire Steve Dunne to turn down the appeal. Donald roared like a betrayed lion, unable to comprehend what had occurred. It got worse later in the spell when Nasser Hussain, the batsman at the other end, edged to Boucher who dove to his right and dropped the simple catch. “NO!” bellowed Donald, and it's that moment, almost more than any of the actual cricket played, that sticks in the mind.
It's something of a cliché to say that an occasion like this felt electric in some way, but clichés are often so because they are true. On that day, a fairly gloomy late summer evening in the Midlands, two of the great competitors in sport produced just that electricity.
Nick Miller
Nick is a freelance writer for F365, ESPN, Guardian, BR and Eurosport amongst others.
Memory added on November 9, 2014
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