Friday, 5th October 2007 at 12:08 am

Jacques Kallis makes his point

Feverpitcher is reminded of the one-day international in which an under-fire Nasser Hussain made a one-day hundred in England, and celebrated with a none-too-subtle gesture to the media box, the inhabitants of which had made a collective point of suggesting the then England captain wasn’t worth his spot in the one-day squad. This was a far more refined gesture, but it made a similar point: with two splendid hundreds in the same Test, Jacques Kallis reminded us all just why he’s the greatest South African batsman of the modern era.

There’ll be suggestion from certain quarters that measured hundreds at strike rates of around 50, are further evidence of Kallis being unsuited to the 20-over game, a format he missed out on after being left out of the Twenty20 World Championship. The reality, however, is very different, as any decent judge of the game will agree - mastering challenging Pakistani conditions not once, but twice in the same game, only illustrates the value of Kallis’s wicket, and the role he’s had to play so often as the bedrock of a perenially brittle top order.

No one has hit more sixes in one-day cricket than Kallis, who can take an attack by the scruff of the neck when required; all too often, though, the Kallis role is one of salvation, rather than the luxury of carefree attack. Kallis in an Australian top-order would be a far more free-flowing batsmen; with South Africa, caution is borne of his understanding that he needs to succeed for the sake of the team.

But a man who can conquer the vagaries of a slow Pakistani turner is a great batsman indeed, and had he been part of the Twenty20 side, dropping out shy of the semis almost certainly wouldn’t have happened. Retrospective vision is almost always 20-20 (sorry, couldn’t resist that), but another glorious Kallis performance simply underlines the man’s class - in every form of the game.