Is Rory Kleinveldt the archetypal South African pro?

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As you may well have seen, Michael Lumb and Riki Wessels shared a 342-run partnership in a one-day game last night. Even more dispiritingly for the opposition, they did it as openers while batting first.

You could easily have been forgiven for thinking that the game was essentially over even before the fall of that first wicket, but Northamptonshire bounced back well, even if they couldn’t ultimately chase down Notts’ final total of 445. After falling to 206-5, Rory Kleinveldt came in and made 128 off 63 balls. He was batting with a runner due to a calf injury – although with 10 fours and nine sixes, there wasn’t an awful lot of running to be done.

Rory Kleinveldt is very, very South African indeed. If we try and imagine the archetypal South African county pro, he is in his early thirties, a solid seam bowler and capable of lower order batting that demands the description ‘muscular’. Muscular means fairly sloggy but somehow not suicidally so – enough to average about 20.

You’d expect such a player to have played a small handful of international fixtures and while you may sort of remember them being in the team, you won’t recall any specifics.

The ageing South African pro is also liable to be carrying a bit of extra heft. You would never call him Rory Kleinsvelte.

13 comments

  1. Apparently went he arrived from the airport at the start of the season, he walked straight into indoor nets smoking a bit fat cigar

  2. As comedian Steven Wright almost put it…

    …”it’s a Kleinveldt…

    …but I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.”

  3. “Kleinveldt”, from my limited German, means “small expanse of savannah”.

    Not sure where I was going with this. Rory Kleinveldt is the size of a small expanse of savannah maybe?

    1. The German word “Welt” means “world”, Balladeer. The Dutch/Afrikaans word “veldt”, contained within Rory’s name, indeed means savannah.

      Personally, I wouldn’t want to have to paint a small world, a small savannah or Rory Kleinveldt. I can foresee practical problems in each of those projects.

  4. I return from my labours today with cognitive dissonance about this piece and its headline.

    KC’s exposition leads me to believe that the answer to the question is (and indeed should be) a resounding yes.

    Yet Betteridge’s law of headlines tells me that the answer to the question has to be no.

    I cannot reconcile these two statements. Do we have a philosopher or mathematician in our midst who can help to disambiguate this matter? Otherwise I might struggle to sleep tonight.

    1. Shark Car Lease

      Avoid them at all costs on your holidays – service a bit snappy, jawsdropping prices etc.

  5. TROTTY BOWLING FOR WARKS.

    Successful so far in stemming the flow of madness from Wessels & Lumb – just the four from the opening set of dobble.

  6. I’ve just spent a solid two minutes trying to decipher a Michael Vaughan tweet, in which he confuses “precedent” and “president”.

    My only question is: why?

    1. #justsayin #propercricket #brewo’clock #undeclaredfinancialinterestsinblatantmarketingtweet #twat

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