The New Year’s Test, 1994. Australia had to win. Couldn’t lose. Until Fanie de Villiers begun hooping the ball about with that awkward, low-slung action.

Fanie de Villiers erupts in that Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground in ‘94 Fanie de Villiers erupts in that Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground in ‘94.
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Warney had run through the South African batsmen – seven in the first dig, five in the second. Come the fourth innings, Border’s men needed just 117 runs to go one-up in the series. Couldn’t lose. Until Fanie de Villiers begun hooping the ball about with that awkward, low-slung action. He picked up the first four wickets, Donald fractured the middle order, then de Villiers came back to root out the tail. When McGrath spooned one back to the Transvaal quick, the Australians had fallen six runs short. I was 13, sitting in the top tier of the Noble Stand as that carnage unfolded, as the Australian batsmen trudged to and from the sheds. It nearly ruined my summer holidays. So it was under an eerie pall of childhood angst that I sidled up to “Vinnige Fanie” while he was in these parts, taking the new ball for the South Africans in the XXXX Gold Beach Cricket series.

Fanie, I was at the SCG on day five of the 1994 New Year’s Test …

You were there that day? Yes, a lot of Aussies didn’t go. They thought it was a wrapped-up game …

Good memories?

The lasting memories for any sportsperson are to win games from behind. It’s huge. You know, we’ve played at Lord’s, the hallowed ground, and everybody says to win there is the best. If you win a game in three days it’s actually an anticlimax. But when it’s a fightback, when you lose 11 of the 13 sessions in the game but still win, then it’s a lasting memory. When it comes to emotion, that game ranks as number one of all.

Do you still have your remote control car from that tour?

My room-mate that tour was Pat Symcox and he took it. He’s still got it. He told me that when we turn 60 he’ll give it back to me, so we’ve got a fair bit to go before I can get it back! But he claimed it because he said he paid a hell of a lot of money with all the fines we had to pay – we had a deal in our room that any fine we would cut in half – so he reckoned he’d paid for that car 30 or 40 times over.

There seemed to be a lot of animosity between yourselves and the Australians on that tour …

Yeah, it started in the Queensland match, where Allan Border was captain. Obviously we were the new boys on the block and we didn’t have a feel for what we should be expecting, and that day I had a big problem with taking the wicket of Trevor Barsby. I finally got him out on 99, but I think that was the fourth time I got him out. No neutral umpires or anything and I thought there were a couple of dubious LBW decisions not going my way. The last ball before lunch I went up again for an LBW, not out again (the only way we were going to get a decision was if the ball went underneath the wicket), so I walked straight off, didn’t even collect my hat from the umpire. Outside the sheds Kepler Wessels was standing there with Mike Proctor and I said, “These bloody Aussie umpires, they’re all crooks.” Typical young guy who’s a bit emotional. Allan Border overheard and he retaliated by asking who the hell was I to slander the umpires. I was on my way to him, very aggressively, when Kepler got in between us and said to AB, “Listen, if you want to talk to anyone, you talk to me. Leave my players alone.”So that set the base of the tour. And we had a tough tour. If you look back, that’s a tour we should’ve won. The match after that Sydney Test was in Adelaide. I went in as a nightwatchman and batted right up until drinks in the afternoon and when I lost my wicket, six or seven wickets fell in about 20 minutes. The decisions from Darrell Hair and Terry Prue were absolutely ridiculous. So, until this day, we believe, as players, that that’s a Test we should’ve drawn and that’s a series we should’ve won. So, yes, a lot of animosity – quite a mental battle going on behind the scenes.