All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

245 Stephen Jefferies year contract with Hampshire to cover for Malcolm Marshall. Like many of his generation, Jefferies was denied the opportunity of playing Test cricket, but his form was good enough for him to be selected to play for his country against a variety of unofficial sides that came to South Africa during the 1980s. The South African sides of the period were a match for anyone: in his first match Jefferies’ team-mates included Barry Richards, Graeme Pollock and Mike Procter. Jefferies held his own in this august company: in the eleven representative matches he played between 1982 and 1986 he took 39 wickets at 29.82. The two teams that assembled for a Currie Cup match on Boxing Day 1987 at the beautiful Newlands ground included some fearsome quick bowlers. The home side fielded Garth le Roux, whilst the visitors opened with Sylvester Clarke and a promising 21-year-old named Allan Donald. However, it would be the slightly lesser pace of 28-year-old Steve Jefferies that would hit the headlines. Under a new Currie Cup format there were now two sections of three teams, with the three playing the other two in the section home and away, and the teams in the other section once. The group winners would then go forward to the Final. Both teams had played one match. Orange Free State (OFS) had beaten Eastern Province in a match notable for Allan Lamb’s career-best 294, whilst Western Province had the better of a draw with Natal, finishing on 71 for five chasing 79 to win. Western Province had a good Cup record having won it several times, most recently in 1985/86. OFS had never won it. They were heavily dependent on Lamb who, playing his first season back in his own country for six years, topped the national averages and was the season’s highest run-scorer. While he averaged 87.80, no other OFS batsman averaged 30. Put in to bat and making only 134 OFS didn’t help themselves by losing their first two wickets to run-outs. Most of the damage was done by the off breaks of Dave Rundle. Jefferies only took one wicket but it was a useful one, West Indian Alvin Kallicharran, who was coming to the end of a long and successful career, bowled for one. Thanks to half-centuries from Terence Lazard (one of only seven batsmen to make a triple-century in South Africa), Lawrence Seeff and Peter Kirsten, Western Province passed OFS’s score with only one wicket down. With their captain, big-hitting allrounder Adrian Kuiper, also making a fifty, Western Province achieved a substantial first-innings lead. Four years later Kuiper would make a solitary Test appearance in South Africa’s inaugural post-apartheid return to the fold. Circumstances denied him the chance of a substantial Test career, although he did play in 25 one-day Internationals. OFS’s second innings was even more lamentable than their first and they never looked like making Western Province bat again. Jefferies opened the bowling with le Roux who was coming to the end of a career in which his pace-bowling had brought him 838 wickets, including 372 wickets for Western Province at the impressive average of 18.98. However it was the swing and movement of Jefferies that did the damage. Fifty for three at the close of the second day quickly became 64 for nine next morning as,