Rogue Twit upsets Anil

There are still hundreds of millions of people in the world who haven’t got the faintest idea of what Twitter is, and never will. And never want to, or need to. And good for them. They have better and more important things to do, like gathering firewood and trying to keep themselves and their families alive.

Actually, to be fair, there are just as many life insurance agents and stoke brokers who don’t have a clue as there are nomadic, tribal foragers. As a matter of fact, in a recent survey of 50 ‘retirement villages’ in Europe, only 1% of residents said they knew what Twitter was. 68% said they had ‘no idea’ while 21% asked for the question to be repeated and 10% just looked blank.

I’m not sure the survey was 100% scientific.

You might still find a few people who don’t fully appreciate the strength and depth of Jacques Kallis’ mental fortitude and the conviction of his resolve, but those people probably also refute the existence of the fax machine never mind that the world is round.

During the IPL Kallis has been suppying a regular column to several newspapers in India. He has been forthright – unusually so – about a whole variety of topics including how the IPL could extend the careers of legends like Warne and Tendulkar well into their mid 40s and how the current format of the tournament is flawed.

He also spoke in depth about the introduction of the ‘orange cap’ to be worn by the tournament’s leading run scorer saying how, at first, he equated it to the race leader’s yellow jersey in the Tour de France and said he thought it would be ‘fun.’

In a later column, when he was the holder of the orange cap, he wrote that equating it to the yellow jersey was ‘ridiculous’ and added that being able to tell your grandchildren that you once wore the yellow jersey, even for a day, made the orange cap gimmick seem irrelevant and trivial. Cricket, he said, was about playing for a team - and winning as a team.

He wrote another column in which he explained how different teams preferred different strategies for their opening batsmen and that his approach was no more than a team instruction. He said that players like him and Rahul Dravid would love to ‘walk out there and have a swing’ but that wasn’t always in the team’s best interests.

So when a jolly funny blogger decided to set himself up as Anil Kumble on up a rogue Twitter account, and then laid into Kallis (on behalf of the Royal Challengers skipper) for being selfish and obsessed with the orange cap, you could have understood if Kallis had been a bit miffed. Even angry.

But no. He even wrote and submitted his next column without a word on the subject. ‘Water off a duck’s back’, he said. ‘I know the truth and the people who matter know, that’s all that counts,’ he said.

Then, right on deadline, he called the column administrator and asked if it was too late to add an extra paragraph. It wasn’t – just. So did he change his mind? Did the fake Kumble finally get to him? No. The real Kumble did.

‘Anil was pretty upset by it, actually, the fact that some people might actually believe that he said that. So the least I could do was mention that it was fraud.’