Greats on what it’s like to play in front of crowds with guns

Refusing a captain’s order usually guarantees a swift end to their stint in a side for a cricketer, but former Australian fast bowler Paul Reiffel was prepared to take that risk after finding himself in a position he never imagined on a South Africa tour.

It was either stand up to a directive from Australian skipper Mark Taylor or return to a position of purgatory, or in this scenario, fine leg for a match played in Bloemfontein listening to a fan in the crowd murmuring menacing threats.

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The Victorian is a cool customer who, in his post playing days, has made a career out of making testing calls as one of the world’s elite umpires.

But Reiffel was rattled with good reason when playing a tour game back in 2024 and that simplified his decision. Tubby could stick the order where the sun doesn’t shine, even if it meant his papers were marked as an Australian cricketer.

His Victorian teammate Merv Hughes could understand the “Pistol’s” reluctance to return to fine leg after a break.

And when Taylor turned to him, Hughes responded quickly. Not on your life or, more to the point, mine! Which is why an Australian touring team went the best part of a couple of days in the field without a fine leg.

Australia’s return to South Africa for a Test tour for the first time in eight years has evoked memories of some classic tales from tours past and few are as humorous to Hughes as the scenario his Victorian teammate found himself in back in 1994.

“So on the South African tour in ’94, we played a lead up game in Bloemfontein, which was Hansie Cronje’s home state,” Hughes told foxsports.com.au.

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“That tour was a weird sort of set-up. We played four one-dayers and then we played a three-day game against Orange Free State to get prepared for the Test match.

“We’re playing along in the second innings and Hansie … smashed us all over the place, though I think we ended up winning, but he got 200, I think.

“I can’t remember now if it was the first innings or the second innings, but Paul Reiffel was down at fine leg and there were people milling around behind him, (saying), ‘Hey Rifleman. Rifleman?’ And Pistol was having a few words … back and forth, and there were a few runs being scored.

“Then Pistol came in at the lunch break, or a tea break, and he was white. ‘What happened?’, we asked. He said, ‘Oh, it just went quiet and there’s a bloke pointing a gun at me’. And he reckons it is the biggest gun he has ever seen, so a .44 Magnum I went to, and they pulled the trigger (while pointing it at him) and it clicked over.”

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Then came the voice that haunted the Victorian quick in his sleep.

“Hey rifleman. Rifleman. You’re dead. And then they just laughed. They thought it was the greatest thing,” Hughes said.

“And Pistol came in (and said), ‘I can’t go back there. I can’t go.’ And Mark Taylor was captaining that side and he looked at me and said, ‘Will you go down?’

“(There was) not a chance. I said, ‘Stick that up your clacker. I’m not going down there.’ So I don’t think we had a fine leg over there for the rest of the game.”

The Aussies got off lightly in Durban, where Nathan Lyon was surprised by how sparse the crowd was, while Steve Smith was only mildly heckled when he came to the crease in his first Test since the Sandpapergate scandal.

But it is expected to be more testing in Gqeberha, formerly known as Port Elizabeth, and even tougher in Cape Town given what unfolded there back in 2018.

Stars from both nations are on the record as labelling the fans of each country the toughest they have played in front of given the heckling and name calling, with Brendon Julian telling Fox Cricket’s podcast The Follow On you need a thick skin.

“Oh man, it is brutal. I mean, you field on the boundary down at The Bullring (in Johannesburg) and that’s as tough as you’re ever going to get,” he said.

“You absolutely cop it and there’s nowhere to hide. Touring South Africa is not for the faint-hearted. And if you a bowler like Pistol, Merv or myself, we’re always on the boundary, so we’re the ones copping it.

“I always say to Tubby Taylor up in the middle there, ‘Oh, mate, you guys are fine. You’re not even hearing it. I mean, we’re just copping it down on the boundary.’

“But I think one good thing about the South African crowds is that I reckon you can win them over. And I remember fielding down there in a one-day series, and you know you smile along, and you have got to sign the autographs.

“If you don’t sign the autographs, you’re in deep shit. They’re just going to pile on you. So you can win them over. They love Aussies. And they love giving it to Aussies.”

As Hughes said, while there are similarities in the way the two countries approach their cricket, there is significant differences in the cultures, with the approach to gun use the most alarming to touring cricketers.

“The gun culture over there is so, so different. It’s so blasé. You tell some stories from over there and people say, ‘That didn’t happen.’ And I say, ‘No. It did happen,’” Hughes said.

“We were over there in ’94 and you would go into a beer garden and you’ve got to walk through a metal detector. (You think), ‘That’s interesting.’ And you go to a nightclub and there’ll be a bouncer behind a big cabinet, like a set of drawers, and they check in over there and they go and get a ticket for their guns.

“They don’t want people carrying guns into the nightclub and you think, ‘That is a wise move’. So the gun culture over there is completely different.”

Not surprisingly, it can leave tourists feeling a little wary. Not for nothing is there a stereotype about driving in Johannesburg, where a red traffic light carries the same meaning as a green one. Go. Go. Go.

As Tim Paine wrote in his autobiography The Price Paid, the Aussies do not tend to stray far from their hotel in Sandton, an upmarket shopping strip, when not playing or training in the city.

“You can dine in restaurants around an open square named after Nelson Mandela, but it is the only time you ever need to leave the hotel,” Paine wrote.

“It sounds a little over the top, but Jo’Burg is like that. The locals don’t walk around the streets and they have security like you wouldn’t believe. There’s a lot of serious crime about.”

Aussie great Jeff Thompson is as knockabout as they come and while the lightning quick bowler never played in South Africa given his career coincided with the country’s Apartheid ban, he worked there as a commentator on a few occasions.

“There is some weird stuff that goes on … and it is a bit uneasy running around there,” he said in a chat at the SCG recently.

“And I’m mad. I do mad things. But I just think, ‘How can you be bothered walking around here looking over your shoulder all the time?”

The Rifleman story aside, some of Hughes’ favourite stories involve former South African all-rounder Brian McMillan, who had a clear larrikin street.

Earlier this week during a special feature series on the Sandpapergate saga, we relived the experience former Australian captain Allan Border had with ‘big Brian’ on what was the Australian’s final Test tour in 1994.

“We had had a bit of a ding-dong just before lunch in the first Test and I was sitting there and then McMillan came barging into our dressing room, just wearing a towel. But he had a bloody big Magnum with him,” Border told foxsports.com.au

“He pointed it at me and said, ‘What did you f***ing say to me?’ And, of course, I shat myself and told him I could not remember what I had said. But then he started laughing. It was a funny moment and he was a good bloke.”

But it was not only Border who McMillan set his sights on, with Australian icon and Fox Cricket favourite Shane Warne another to come to the attention of the burly all-rounder after giving him some lip during a match at Adelaide Oval.

When quizzed about the tale during a recent chat at the SCG, Hughes broke straight into a South African accent.

“A lot of people go missing in South Africa every day. Another one won’t make a difference,” Hughes said when mimicking McMillan.

So what actually happened? As with all good stories, the detail is in the eye of the person telling it and we will leave it to Warne to fill in the blanks on his moment in the cross-hairs of McMillan.

“We played in Australia and I was bowling to Brian McMillan and he struggled with the flipper … and he was standing at the non-strikers end and I said to him, ‘I can’t wait till you get down that end, because I am going to give you another flipper, and I know I am going to get you out,’” Warne said in a chat with Mark Nicholls.

“The next over, he still wasn’t on strike and he said, ‘You know what, Warney? In South Africa, a lot of people go missing every day and one more won’t matter.’ And I said, ‘OK Brian’ and started to panic a bit, because he said it in this deadpan way.”

Warne’s teammates made sure they put the champion leg spinner on edge leading into the infamous moment that occurred with Border.

“Obviously McMillan was sort of talking it up a bit … but the story in Adelaide was that Warney was giving the big fella a hard-time and it was Shane Warne’s brother who was in a gym to a spa or a sauna with the South Africans and one was talking to another and saying, ‘What do you think of this Shane Warne mukka giving you a hard time?’” Hughes said.

“So on the trip over, I’m asking, ‘If someone asks you out for a fishing trip, Warney, will you be going?’ Nup. ‘Golf?’ No. ‘A hunting trip?’ Nup. And he was a big man, Brian, a big boy. Just massive.”

What followed was McMillan barging into the Australian rooms with a gun and while Border was the target, Warne was packing his daks.

“All right you Aussies. I’ve had enough of you blokes,” Warne said.

“And we were like ‘Jesus. Sorry, Brian. Sorry, Brian.’ Those were the sort of things that would happen. We would go out on the field and just give it to each other. We all had an unbelievable time. That ‘94 tour was as good as I’ve ever been on.”