Telford Vice: Boucher the loser in Battle of the Marks

Mark Boucher. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

"He's a prick," was how a New Zealander described Mark Gillespie yesterday.

"He's a prick," is how a South African on tour has been describing Mark Boucher for weeks.

Clearly, Seddon Park was not going to be big enough for both of them on day two of the second test yesterday.

An hour before lunch, a sneering Gillespie's removal of Jacques Rudolph brought a sneering Boucher into the fray.

There were four balls left in the over. The first was defended stoically. Boucher drove at the next, and missed a smirking away-swinger. Then a mean bouncer, true, straight - and ducked. The last ball of the over brought a grim little tuck to square leg for a single.

Tumbleweeds bowled along Victoria Street, where the saloon keepers took refuge under the bar counters and somebody's gran swore blind she had just seen Gary Cooper drinking a flat white at a little cafe.

With the sun high, noon came and went; then lunch.

Early in the second session Gillespie over-pitched and Boucher did the done thing and drove crisply through the covers for four. It was a stroke unfurled more than it was played. It was a thing of grace and timing. It was not a typical Boucher shot, which tends to be wrought with murder in mind.

Seven Gillespie deliveries later, none of them magnificent, Boucher engineered his own dismissal. He found a way to steer the ball from the inside edge of his bat on to his pad and from there on to his leg stump. Though impressive in its own way, it was an ugly way to get out. It was typically Boucher.

Gillespie uppercut the air in celebration at taking his fifth wicket of the innings. Did he remember that, on his debut in Centurion in November 2007 he also bowled Boucher via the inside edge on his way to claiming five wickets?

Five for as many as 136, it was, on a juicy, green monster that helped Dale Steyn inflict multiple fractures to the face of Craig Cumming with a single nasty, brutish, short delivery, and on which South Africa won by an innings inside three days. But five wickets are five wickets and all you other pricks can go get stuffed.

Almost four years on, Boucher stalked off towards the boundary much as he would have done then, shaking his head and muttering dark oaths as he went.

At 35, the end of his career looms large and, probably, unpleasant. Cricket is all he has ever known as a way of passing time profitably. He is tough and proud and unwilling to understand that the time is close when he won't be the Proteas' first-choice wicketkeeper.

At 32, Gillespie has been thrown a chance to be remembered for something other than a pile of wickets in the Plunket Shield.

It is to be hoped that he and Boucher have a beer together sometime. They might find that they have much in common.

Telford Vice is a freelance cricket writer in South Africa.