Division 2 cricket County Championship side Northamptonshire have been captained in 2009 by the South African Test cricketer Nicky Boje and with him in the side have been fellow Springboks Rike Wessels, Johannes van der Wath and Andrew Hall. In a recent article in The Guardian Mike Selvey suggests fairly unequivocally that England and Northamptonshire spin bowler Monty Panesar has been the victim of a “lack of respect” from the overseas players at the county (all of them South Africans) and he hints that this has been manifested by chats about Monty between these players in their common language - Afrikaans. These chats have been overheard by visiting South Africans from other counties.
Now Selvey has his finely-tuned ear always to the ground when it comes to picking up the scuttlebutt in the world of cricket and I doubt that he would have reported the story unless he had pretty firm evidence that the gentle Monty’s difficult cricket year has not been helped by his being at times in an alien environment in his own county dressing room. The idea that in the once genteel environment of English County cricket, a place that over the years has welcomed players from all over the cricketing world, there is now the possibility of Afrikaner-speaking cliques demeaning fellow players is a pretty nasty thought. At Northants itself many of us will remember with pleasure the contribution that Panesar’s fellow Sikh, Bishan Singh Bedi, made for many years. Bedi was a popular figure at the County Ground in those distant days and he also had a foreign captain, the Pakistani Mustaq Mohammad for some of that time. It wouldn’t have happened in Mushie’s days, but perhaps times have changed and maybe it is now the smart thing to do when two or three Afrikaners are gathered together to put down a colleague. Possibly especially so if that colleague, like Monty, comes from a distinctly different background and wears a Patka.
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