Conrad regrets, but does not apologise for grovel comment

Eleven days after he took the spotlight off his team's achievements by choosing a racially charged term during a press conference, Shukri Conrad explained himself but stopped short of apologising.

"It was never my intention to cause any malice or not be humble about anything," Conrad told a press conference in Visakhapatnam on Saturday. "I could have chosen a better word, on reflection, because it left it open to people putting their own context to it.

"The only context I intended it to be was for India to spend a lot of time [in the field] and make it really tough for them. I've got to be careful what word I use here now because context could be attached to that as well!"

On November 25, on the fourth evening of the Guwahati Test, Conrad was asked why his team had batted for five hours and four minutes before declaring with a lead of 549 - 161 bigger than any that has been successfully chased in a Test in India.

"We wanted the Indians to spend as much time on their feet out in the field," Conrad said then. "We wanted them to really grovel, to steal a phrase. To bat them completely out the game, and then say come and survive on the last day and an hour this evening."

Forty-seven words of those 48 words are perfectly fine. The other - grovel - is not at all fine. It is associated with slavery, colonisation and racism, and it caused a storm when Tony Greig deployed it in May 1976 to describe what he wanted his England team to do to West Indies, who were enraged enough to win the series 3-0.

"It's really a pity," Conrad continued on Saturday. "Maybe what it did do was spice up the ODI series, and especially with [India] winning that now, the T20 series becomes even more [spicy].

"The unfortunate thing is, with all the noise that that word caused, I still think it's a perfectly good English word. But it left it open to too many interpretations."

The next day South Africa won by 408 runs - India's heaviest home defeat - to win the series 2-0 and seal their first Test series victory in the country in more than 25 years.

"What it did was take away the gloss of what was a really special win for our Test team," Conrad said on Saturday. "Being humble is a cornerstone of all our teams. It's unfortunate that the noise and the talk became around the coach. People shouldn't really even know who the coach is. It should be about the players. But I'd like to think that it's going to be put to bed now."

Yes and no. Conrad is correct in that grovel is a sound English word. But it denotes merciless bullying and something like psychopathic behaviour by those inflicting the grovelling. Does he want his team associated with that?

Grovel's cricket context was tainted by the stink of racism in Greig's comment, and has remained so. Greig was a white South African, a product and beneficiary of apartheid. Had he been born any other race he likely wouldn't have had a professional cricket career, or - like the brown Basil D'Oliveira did - he would have had to leave South Africa to pursue his dream. Greig also left South Africa; because he wanted to, not because that was his only choice. De Oliveira didn't have a choice if he wanted to play the game professionally, which was the preserve of whites.

Why "steal a phrase" from this dark and troubling episode when so many other, better phrases are available?

So Conrad, and no-one and nothing else, caused the "noise" he decried. That's what's unfortunate. That's the real pity. South Africa's coach stole their thunder.

Worse, Temba Bavuma was asked at two different press conferences about Conrad's choice of words. It is manifestly unfair that players should have to answer for what a coach has done. But what are the press to do when the mess is left to linger?

Even worse than that, potentially, CSA do not need the notoriously sensitive BCCI to take exception to what Conrad said. Or to feel his comments on Saturday don't go far enough to remedy the damage, or indeed make matters worse.

India are the paymasters of world cricket, and CSA discovered exactly what that meant in November 2013 when the BCCI slashed India's tour to South Africa from a dozen to just seven matches. That took more than USD20-million out of CSA's coffers.

What had they done to earn that punishment? No official reason was given, but source after source said it was retribution for CSA's appointment of Haroon Lorgat as their chief executive. Lorgat had beef with the Indians stretching back to the 2011 World Cup, when he refused to clear Eden Gardens as a venue for India's match against England. The BCCI even saw fit to warn CSA against giving Lorgat the job, saying his presence would damage the relationship between the boards.

Conrad deserves all the respect he has earned as South Africa's coach. He has helped a team who used to perennially underperform perform above themselves consistently. He has made his players believe they can win anything. He has made the cricketminded public believe in him and his players.

He has done this with an irresistible cheerfulness and a wisecracking spirit that makes him impossible not to like. He wouldn't want to throw all that away by being tossed - in the BCCI's eyes - into the same sorry bracket as Lorgat. The game in South Africa, which is emerging from a long period of financial gloom cause by mismanagement and governance failures, couldn't afford that happening.

Conrad has made South Africa his team, and told them to go out there and be themselves. That is a tightrope walk of note. Its success has been evident in India, where they were frequently the better side in their first four matches on this tour - they won three of them. But, in Saturday's deciding third ODI, they were flat and flaccid, and outclassed.

Quinton de Kock's 89-ball 106 and Bavuma's 48 - they shared 113 for the second wicket - were the bright spots of an innings that lost its way. The last seven wickets tumbled for 100 runs, and the last five of them for 35.

Kuldeep Yadav, who dismissed Dewald Brevis and Marco Jansen in the space of three balls in the 39th to stall the visitors' momentum, took 4/41. Prasidh Krishna overcame an ordinary first two overs, which went for 27, to finish with 4/66.

De Kock delivered an innings of poise and power to register his eighth ODI century against India. But a total of 270 looked anaemic in light of the 300-plus scores put up in all four innings of the first two matches in the series, and especially with dew making bowling under lights difficult. So it proved as India won with nine wickets standing and 10.1 overs remaining to clinch the series.

Yashasvi Jaiswal had just one half-century to show for his efforts in his other six trips to the crease during South Africa's visit. He hit his straps properly on Saturday with a shimmering 116 not out off 121 - his first ODI hundred, which gives him a full house of centuries in all three formats.

Jaiswal and Rohit Sharma had knocked off 155 of the target off as many balls when Keshav Maharaj had Sharma caught at deep square leg for 75 in the 26th. Out strode Virat Kohli to crack an unbeaten 65 off 45 and help Jaiswal get the job done with a stand of 116 off 84.

"We would have wanted to make it a lot more exciting today," Bavuma told the host broadcaster. "From a batting point of view we didn't have enough runs. It tends to get easier under lights, and we should have been smarter - we gifted wickets."

But it wasn't all bad for the South Africans: "We have definitely grown. India have quality spinners and it's never easy to put them under pressure. For large parts of the series we did that. I think if there were 10 boxes, we ticked six or seven of them."

Conrad ticked a big one on Saturday. At least, South African cricket will hope and pray the BCCI agree he did.