In praise of Morkel

Morne Morkel has taken his 300th Test wicket and it's so appropriate that he has got there when 300 Test wickets isn't the shiny landmark it used to be. When Fred Trueman, Dennis Lillee or Imran Khan got there, for instance, it really was a culmination, ordaining a kind of unsaid knighthood on the grandest, heftiest careers. Decades of spirit spent, bones altered, endless recalibration of actions, skills lost, found and invented, matches won and lost - at the end there was nothing more to give, nothing more to explore.

These days it's more a late staging post on the way to the modern stat of greatness-as-endurance: 400 Test wickets. And just as the landmark isn't what it used to be, Morkel didn't quite turn out the bowler everyone thought he should have been.

The next Test - if he plays - will be his last. Done, at just 33 and at a time when athletes are stretching their careers longer than ever. Yet even now, at the very end, it is impossible to escape the sense that, any day now, Morkel's career will actually kick off, that if he just does this right or tweaks that, or once that bowler leaves or this coach comes in, he will become the bowler that we think he should have been. As if for him as the author of his career, stray thoughts and notes, bright passages, little characters and plots are all present, and not incoherent either, but the book is not yet ready.

It is by no means an insubstantial career. Three hundred wickets might not be as big a deal as they used to be, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it isn't a big deal at all, or that you can have had anything less than a stellar career to get to the mark. Morkel has had that, Morkel has owned moments and days, and Morkel has been everything fast bowling should be.

The juddering duel with Michael Clarke that, unlike a lot of Test cricket, can stand in isolation as a piece of sporting theatre, with no need for context. Anyone with the loosest grasp of the sport, or even just a passing interest in human nature under conflict, could have tuned in and been hooked. It often gets overlooked (a theme, recurring, with Morkel) - because when Dale Steyn and Sachin Tendulkar tango, where else will you look? - but Morkel in support (another theme, recurring) that day was riveting in his own right.

Here's the but.

He didn't get Clarke's wicket in that spell. And though he was the one to get through Tendulkar that day in Cape Town, because the heat of the moment had passed, not everyone remembers. So much great bowling so often but so little to show for it so often. Lucklessness has been a theme, as he himself once conceded when asked about the defining Morkel images of hands on head or hips, ruing.

Last summer in England he was immense and it appeared for all money as if this was it, the moment when he became the lead guy, the fast bowler everyone thought he would be. But even with 19 economical wickets in four Tests, most were in agreement that he was unfortunate not to take more, given how well he actually bowled. S Rajesh even put a figure to it: he should have taken 27 wickets. Then throw in the no-ball wickets, about which he can at least still self-deprecate.

It is a compelling trope, the luckless fast bowler. Sometimes it is enough to prolong careers (Hi, Ishant Sharma), sometimes not (Bye, Mohammad Sami), and that's probably all that needs to be said of it. You either believe in it, or you believe that if you're unlucky for long, well then, maybe it's not about luck at all.

Instead, far more appealing is the idea of Morkel as an enlightened fast bowler, acutely aware of the many ways a fast bowler can mess it up, and how much has to go right for the bowling to be right. For Morkel, it wasn't ever as simple as just bowling a fuller length, which was among the most common pieces of advice he heard. He wasn't a natural swinger of the ball, and when you can extract the bounce that he did, why not squeeze as much as you can out of that? Anyway, bowling does not exist in binary - fuller length is right, shorter length is wrong.

Unfortunately, it's not even as simple as being angrier, as was Steyn's advice. Anger is a complicated business, primarily because it can defeat you before it can even be directed anywhere else. It's nice, though, that in all the heat and mud - and anger - of this series, Morkel has worked quietly to the sides of it all. Can you imagine Steyn playing here? He would have been right in it, veins bursting, muscles straining, fists pumped and eyes ablaze.

Morkel had too much going on inside for all this, and enlightened is he who has understood how fragile it all is (and to that end, this interview is a must-read). He obsessed about his run-up and was never happy with it. Not everyone can just run in and let go, and one of Morkel's most endearing traits was that you could see the care he took with his run-up every ball. And why, when he did take a wicket the celebration was sometimes reined in by the constant worries of having overstepped. We know intimately that fast bowling is difficult, but when somebody like Kagiso Rabada is melting through cricket fields like butter through hot pasta, it's easy to think the whole thing a breeze.

Another reason for the unfinished-ness is that Morkel is leaving when he shouldn't be. Since the start of 2014, only Rabada has taken more wickets for South Africa. This has been the phase where he's most been that bowler, and yet he has still slipped by, not unnoticed exactly but on the margins of some fearsome pace attacks. His career-best match haul - 9 for 110 - arrived in Cape Town, one Test from the end of his career, in a Test from which no cricket will ever be remembered. Give Burt Reynolds a ring, Morne, whose finest screen performance was lost in the absolute bomb that was Striptease.

Something or someone has always been more pressing: to be in awe of, Makhaya Ntini, Shaun Pollock and Steyn; to miss, Steyn; to celebrate, Rabada, and now Lungi Ngidi; to regret, Kyle Abbott; to deconstruct, Vernon Philander. Morkel's been there all through until now, when he won't be.

That's sad but not entirely surprising. He cares about the effect his career has on his young family, and is open enough to talk about it. He must know that with the arrival of Ngidi and the push for transformation, he is no longer guaranteed a place. He'll also know not only that this is how life happens, but that, thankfully, there is more to it.

Three hundred, then, might be an appropriate landmark for him, although given that he once said his "aim was just to help the bowler at the other end" here is what should be a cherished stat, from Shiva Jayaraman. With Morkel bowling at the other end, Steyn picked up 93 wickets at 19.24 and Philander 48 at 20.70 - considerably better than their own already impeccable career numbers. Steyn's tribute, turning up at Cape Town wearing a Morkel t-shirt, could be no greater.