My friend Alan Guy – a talented guitarist and singer – put a video up on Facebook in 2016 of a song he wrote, ‘Your new boyfriend looks like Jacques Rudolph’.
Rudolph saved a Test against an attack that included Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. Yet, for all his skill as a cricketer, he was their peer for a day, not a career.
No shame in that, of course, but it did mean it took someone who truly loves cricket to come up with that song.
To describe Morne Morkel as being in the same category as Rudolph would be incorrect, though it would not be pushing it to say that, generally, they exist along a continuum.
Consider how often you have heard Morkel described as a ‘not a’. Not a Dale Steyn. Not a guy who bowls full enough. Not a guy who bats as well as he could.
It was, and remains, a hard rap. Certainly, Steyn never denied the big guy’s influence. Morkel was also a man who improved over time and with competition.
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When the Proteas last won in Australia, he was a spectator. Having carried South Africa on a horrid tour of India, the sort of overseas tour that they hadn’t had in a generation, there was no place for Morkel, even in Steyn’s absence.
With Australia having no answer to the consistency of Kagiso Rabada, Kyle Abbott and Vernon Philander until the final Test in Adelaide, the onus was on Morkel to get back into the team.
Fast bowling dream teams don’t tend to last long. Steyn couldn’t get his body right, and an English county gave Abbott the chance to ensure his finances would remain right for longer than Steyn’s absence.
Morkel came back in.
By the time of last year’s English tour, Rabada was suspended, Philander was injured, and Morkel was again leading the attack. As England finally won at home against South Africa again, Morkel was a constant threat, making excellent use of line, length and angle.
Morkel will go to his retirement safe in the knowledge that Australia were not able to break that run of losing series at home to South Africa.
His best performance was arguably the Adelaide Test of 2012. From the moment he knocked down Michael Clarke’s middle stump early on Day 2, the fightback was on. He was not its main figure, but the man who started and finished it, facing out of the last balls on Day 5 from a desperate Peter Siddle, with Faf du Plessis.
In Alan’s song, the line after “Your new boyfriend looks like Jacques Rudolph” starts, “But I prefer Morne Morkel…”
By chance, Morkel came across it on Twitter in 2016 and was kind enough to praise the song, completely unprompted: “Don’t know who you are, or where you from but you are a funny man! Well done!”
The world knows who Morkel is. Like Rudolph, he is not peerless. But the select group of people above his level of talent point to just how good he is, and how much he’ll be missed when that must be changed to the past tense.
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