White Lightning's thunder becomes a sad whisper

Amid the wreckage of defeat lay a great fast bowler's shattered career. It was beyond repair or redemption and it had all the life and poignancy of a child's ragged teddy bear staring from the ruins of an earthquake.

Allan Donald is a fast bowler now in name only. South Africa might not be quite out of the World Cup but it is difficult to envisage Donald playing any part if they have a future, which they can achieve only through a combination of their own renaissance and others' mistakes.

Donald bowled 5.5 overs in the semi-final defeat against New Zealand at the Wanderers on Sunday. He was supposed to be the side's most potent weapon performing in their Coliseum: White Lightning in the Bullring.

When Stephen Fleming struck his 19th and final four through the covers the numbed silence among the normally baying throng was broken only by the sound of nails being hurriedly hammered into coffins. Donald's line had been all over the place, he had conceded 52 runs, he was at least a yard slower than in his mighty pomp.

Everybody who watched sensed that White Lightning's thunder had been stolen forever and 330 Test wickets and 272 in one-dayers counted at that moment for nothing.

Nobody in the South African camp said so. The man is too much of an athletic icon to be dismissed lightly. But Eric Simons, the coach, put a toe in the water: "A guy with Allan's experience can always come back. It depends how badly he wants it and what he's going to do about it."

But the truth is that a man with Donald's experience and age may never come back. He will be 37 this year, which is the fast bowler's equivalent of being in a wheelchair drooling at the mouth. And Donald was, almost purely, a fast bowler, a fiercely competitive athlete, the best of all South Africa bowlers, with hatred in his eyes which dissolved into kindness as soon as he left the pitch.

It was a pity that he chose to have one last World Cup after retiring from Test cricket last year. He could not resist it in his own country. The tournament has not been kind to him: dropped for the quarter-finals in 1996, part of the infamous semi-final, last ball run-out fiasco in 1999, and now this.

Fleming's 134 was the greatest innings of his career but it also finished a great career.

* An effigy of the India captain Saurav Ganguly was burnt in Calcutta yesterday as fans vented frustration at their team's poor start to the World Cup. In Bombay, fans burnt posters of Sachin Tendulkar, Ganguly and Virender Sehwag, while black paint and oil were hurled at the home of Mohammad Kaif in Allahabad.