The beauty of toil

Watching VVS Laxman struggle as the ball darted around off the seam at Peshawar last Friday, my thoughts turned, oddly, to Gary Kirsten, who had confirmed his retirement plans only a few days before. Kirsten is the antithesis of Laxman, whose batting is all wrists and touch to Kirsten's toil and grit.

Laxman looked listless and out of sorts at Peshawar, as he is prone to do when the ball wobbles around, denying him the luxury of hanging back in the crease and working those deft angles. If there is a weakness in Laxman's batting, this could be it: the sublime artist that he is, he is easily disorientated when freedom of expression is denied to him. For Kirsten, it is almost a strength, because for him, the beauty is often in the struggle.

It is easy to be seduced by the splendour of Laxman's art - at the top of his game Laxman exists on a plane that is barely comprehensible to those who live a life of logic and propriety - but the dazzle of the enchanter can sometimes blind us to the worth of the blood-and-sweat battler. Kirsten has never bothered about looking pretty. He crouches in his stance, shuffles in the crease, and aims to squirt the ball square of the wicket in a manner not oozing elegance, but suggesting purpose and bloody-mindedness. Laxman's batting uplifts the soul, Kirsten's touches the core of it. Laxman and Kirsten are a world apart, yet there is a common strand: both belong to vanishing tribes. Laxman is a touch-artist with the charm of the ancient, and Kirsten an honest grafter, whose true value is somewhat obscured in an age that is in thrall to the lavish strokemaker.

I found myself imagining Kirsten playing on a pitch like Peshawar's, where the pace bowlers found swing in the air and movement off the pitch. It was just the kind of pitch that underlines Kirsten's true worth. It was the kind of pitch on which Kirsten would play and miss, chop a few shots off the under-edge, take a couple of blows on his body and, somehow, hang on - because he has the invaluable virtue of being able to erase the memory of the previous ball as he shapes up to play the next one. In a sense, he is a cricketers' cricketer: his team-mates and his opponents are better positioned to admire his qualities than the spectator.

On South Africa's tour of England last year, Graeme Smith, the fresh-faced and demonstrative captain, captured the imagination with back-to-back double-hundreds, yet Kirsten perhaps played the innings of the series on a difficult track at Headingley. He came in at 2 for 2 on the first morning, and after South Africa plunged further to 21 for 4, forged significant partnerships with Jacques Rudolph and the newcomer Monde Zondeki to take his team to 342. The ball jagged around in the morning and bounced inconsistently in the evening, and Kirsten was reduced to strokelessness in the second session, scoring only 15 from it - but he gritted it out to flourish in the last session. His second-innings 60 was no less valuable after South Africa had lost both their openers with 31 on the board.

I remember vividly Kirsten's two hundreds in the Test at Calcutta in 1996-97 that set up a comprehensive win for South Africa. The Test is remembered in these parts, though, for Mohammad Azharuddin's 77-ball 109, scored with an injured arm. Even in the South African innings, Kirsten was outshone by strokeful hundreds from Andrew Hudson in the first innings and Daryll Cullinan in the second. On his second tour of India, Kirsten scored vital half-centuries at Bombay and Bangalore to help South Africa win a rare Test series in India.

But his defining innings on the subcontinent came in a low-scoring thriller at Faisalabad, where South Africa found themselves reduced to 98 for 7 midway through the first day. Six of Kirsten's top-order colleagues fell for single digits to the combined wiles of Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Mushtaq Ahmed, before Kirsten and Pat Symcox revived them with an eighth-wicket stand of 124. The most anxious moment for Kirsten came the ball after he had taken a single to complete his hundred: Azhar Mahmood trapped Paul Adams leg-before, and it was suddenly revealed that two of the three scorers had Kirsten on 99. The chief scorer had the final say, resolving the matter in favour of Kirsten, who had missed out on a hundred by two runs in the first Test of the series at Rawalpindi. In the last innings, Shaun Pollock grabbed five wickets in 11 overs to bowl South Africa to a memorable series victory in Pakistan.

Faisalabad yielded him one more hundred in October last year, but it was in the previous Test at Lahore that Kirsten's true character was revealed. On the first afternoon of the Test, Kirsten lay in a pool of blood after edging a pull off Shoaib Akhtar into his face, and he looked out of the Test, if not the series. Yet with his team in trouble in the second innings, he was back on the third day with a bandaged cheek. The first ball he faced was a screaming yorker from Shoaib that he dug out, and the next two were short and sharp - the first hit him on the thigh, the second on his back as he ducked into it. Yet his fourth scoring shot was a fierce pull off Mohammad Sami, and he repeated the dose a few overs later. I had been stirred by stories of Mohinder Amarnath pulling Malcolm Marshall for six upon resuming his innings after a blow on his jaw. Kirsten's courage was no less.

Statistics wouldn't put him up among the greatest, although an average of 45 doesn't paint a bad picture. Among current players, he is behind only Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara in Test aggregates, and with 21 hundreds he stands 16th in the alltime list, with a better Tests-per-hundred ratio than Viv Richards, Javed Miandad, Allan Border and Geoff Boycott. But it is futile to measure Kirsten by his records. You wouldn't rewind a tape of his batting to enliven a rainy evening, but to save your skin on a dodgy pitch, Kirsten's name would be among the first on your teamsheet.