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My friend tells me that you've never really watched Test cricket unless you've sat through the first ball of the first over on the first day of the match with a beer in your hand.
It's the breakfast of champions, he says. Cereal in a glass without all that annoying mixing of grains, adding of sugar and having to shovel it down with a spoon. Just pull the tab off a can, pour, drink and you have all the carbohydrates your body could wish for in a day as well as the beauty of the morning beer buzz that Sheryl Crowe says she likes so much.
Not that the current Test series needs a beer buzz to liven it up. Not a jot. Not on your half-pissed nelly, mate. As Test cricket goes, the (deep breath, there's a long title coming) Castle Lager/MTN Test Series for the Basil D'Oliviera Trophy, this has been a cracker of a tournament thus far, whipping through the emotions, taking them on a ride from high to low, making them jump through loops and leaving them an exhausted mess on day five.
Day five, indeed. How many Tests have gone to five Tests recently and how many have been in some doubt until the fifth day?
How many?
Well, er, not all that many, actually.
I had the figures down here somewhere, but I left them on top of the pile of papers that included the United Cricket Board's forensic audit and it seems to have gone missing. Funny thing, that. But then, statistics, facts and audits - who needs them?
Damn damning things that they are.
Back to the beer buzz, then. Well, the Wanderers was abuzz, kind of, yesterday on the first day of the fourth Test - a crucial, series-deciding Test one must remember.
It could well be the last full Test of the tour if the rain gods pay their usual visit to SuperSport Park, and soak the place for five days.
If they soak it for just the middle three days, then we could still have a Test on our hands if things go our way: like generous declarations on both sides, a leather jacket and a bookmaker.
There is no Darren Gough, though. A man who arrived for the fifth day of the Test that Hansie built with a beer buzz in the morning from a monster of a night before.
He admitted that he had managed to get so hammered the night before that he was still tiddly when he woke up the next day. Nasser Hussain,
being the kind fella he was, made Gough, who will land on these shores soon, bowl his fair share of overs to punish him for having a good time. If Gough hated the fact that both captains had decided to play hard and make declarations, it was nothing compared to the reaction of one of the English journalists in the press box, who banged his laptop and the desk in the press box in anger and
declared it to be an abomination against the spirit of Test cricket.
When, later on that day, it looked as though England were on the brink of winning, he was heard to exclaim the virtues of the two captains for making a mountain of a match out of a molehill of a draw and wrote of a glorious day for the sport.
The anaesthesia of the morning beer buzz helped my friend get through what was a difficult morning for South Africa yesterday. England rode their luck like a bucking bronco, and Shaun Pollock should have had a wicket with the first and second balls of the match that my friend - who had by that time been joined by a few more willing participants, including me - had his first beer of the match for.
By the fifth over, we had cracked the second beer of the day and bitched about how quiet it was.
"Hmmm, yes. It's quiet, too quiet. Something's going to happen," said one. "Bet you Dale Steyn gets five today."
We waited. Nothing happened, apart from the buzz settling in like a swarm of contented bees around and in our heads. "Hey, look, a waiter," said one of us. "Bet you something will happen if we send him to fetch us beer." And lo, it did.
Trescothick got a Kate Moss-thin edge to a ball that went across him from Dale Steyn and Mark Boucher caught it sweetly. The Steyn fan took a long sip and grinned his "I told you" grin. "Must have been the beer," we all smiled and ordered more from the waiter, a man called, I kid you not, Gift.
But, it didn't work again by the time I had left them at lunch. Standing at the bar in the private balcony in the Centenary Stand called, er, "The Balcony", they were still trying to drink themselves a wicket. "If it doesn't work, we'll just have to come back tomorrow and try to get a wicket again." Test cricket is not, they said, for sissies. Neither is drinking beer at 10:30 in the morning, but some brave souls have to do it.
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