Wednesday, November 7, 2001 After the Pollocking comes the bollocking. The Indian newspapers have given their players an awful earful this morning. That's only to be expected, but as well as burying their boys, they should be praising the man who did the damage. This was yet another outstanding performance from a great player who has got even better in the past year.

The general view on Bloemfontein was that India's batsmen played like millionaires and gave their wickets away. But it takes two to tangle, and the bowling stats told a rather different story. Most of the seamers in the match were expensive. Jacques Kallis can normally keep the runs down by aiming at first slip (basically, he's Alan Mullally with a better batting technique), but Sachin Tendulkar got wise to that and Kallis went for 143 off his 37 overs. South Africa's fourth and fifth seamers, Makhaya Ntini and Lance Klusener, were even more spendthrift, going for 142 off 30.4 overs. The Indian new-ball bowlers, Javagal Srinath and Ashish Nehra, did their best to keep up with 153 off 38 and 130 off 25 respectively, or rather disrespectedly. Nantie Hayward did better on his Test comeback, going for a presentable 3.31 an over, but he managed it only by pitching short and wearing a necklace so chunky that the batsmen probably got distracted.

And then there was Pollock, straight as a die, upright as a stump, conceding only 3.02 runs an over and quietly helping himself to half the Indian wickets. Even he was costly at first on a pitch that was stuffed with runs (don't believe what Sourav Ganguly tells you about it being not easy to bat on). Tendulkar did the unthinkable and smacked him around: off 40 deliveries from Pollock, he made 33 runs. Laxman had a go at him too, stroking 18 off 17 balls.

But slowly Pollock's persistence and precision paid off. He lost a couple of battles, yet never looked like losing the war. First he polished off the tail to finish with 4 for 94, then, in the second innings, he showed that he had begun to work the big guns out. Laxman managed only four runs off 28 balls from Pollock, Tendulkar eight off 19, Ganguly none off 13. That's a full 10 overs to three major players on a spanking pitch for only 12 runs. It's called pressure, and India couldn't handle it.

As captain, spearhead, slip fielder and lower-order salvage artist, Pollock bears the heaviest burden of any cricketer since Imran Khan. It's as if Glenn McGrath had to do Carl Hooper's job as well as his own. Yet Pollock's record in the past year, from one Bloemfontein Test to another, is phenomenal. In 14 Tests, he averages 19.88 with the ball and 48 with the bat. His captaincy, anonymous at first, has blossomed to such an extent that South Africa have shaken off nearly all the defensiveness which was Hansie Cronje's one flaw (until his other flaw emerged). In both forms of the game, they are now playing with much of the swagger of Steve Waugh's Australians - treating new-ball bowlers with gleeful disdain, making individual hundreds inside 150 balls, winning high-scoring matches in three and a half days. Even Gary Kirsten is threatening to become fun to watch.

Among South African sports-lovers, there has been plenty of excitement at the prospect of seeing the world's best player in this series. Well, they are seeing him. His name is Shaun Pollock.

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