Northerns looking for final win
Posted on Tuesday, April 09, 2002 - 12:03

It is 17 years since Northerns last played in what is now a SuperSport final. In those days it
was the Castle Currie Cup and played at Berea Park with Lee Barnard as the captain and John
Reid the manager/coach. It was the era dominated by isolation, the rebel tours and the
Transvaal mean machine led by Clive Rice with the burly Bajan Sylvester Clarke laying waste to
most of South Africa’s top batsmen save those who played for Transvaal.

Jimmy Cook, Henry Fotheringham, Graeme Pollock, Rice and Kevin McKenzie. Up to that stage
of the 1984/85 season the scrap was usually the traditional north/south rivalry: Transvaal
against Western Province.

As Rice recently recalled, Transvaal had such "an awesome side.. ." almost as good as some of
the Test teams then playing.’

It was not an idle claim either; eight of the players turned out for South Africa in some of the
rebel ‘tests’ the next year.

Northerns also made an awful gaffe by preparing a green top for such a showcase game which
was over in two days: Clarke had figures of five wickets for eight runs off only 11 overs as
Northerns were routed for 61 failing by 22 runs to avert the follow on.

Although they batted with more care and attention to skill and techniques in the follow on
innings, they still failed by five runs to get Transvaal to bat a second time. The pitch had, by
noon, ironed out and although Clarke and Hugh Page collected five wickets between them it
was Rice and Page who sent Northerns tumbling towards defeat: three wickets fell for 31 with
Barnard making a pair.

"What a time to make a pair," he recalled. "It was my first as well. It was hard work batting at
Berea Park that day."

What possessed Northerns to prepare such a snake pit lie in the hope that Eric Simons, now
the Western Province coach with Vincent Barnes, would take out a Transvaal side of such
batting depth that they were able to recover from 109/6 to reach 232.

He collected 6/57 in a season when he managed 51 wickets at 14.25.

Clarke, however, bowled effortlessly in the first innings as a crowded Berea Park settled down
on a Saturday morning to watch what, in a sense, became the slaughter of the innocents.

The one playing link in the Titans side is that of Neil McKenzie whose father, Kevin, was one of
Simons’ six victims.

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