Sometimes you need to look below the “big name radar” to see where the game is won and lost, and Neil Manthorp sees potential in left-arm spinner Paul Harris, who been to Australia before, but not for cricket. Besides his surfing experience, he tells the Weekender about his "friendship" with Dale Steyn:
“Actually, that’s a myth. We’re not good friends at all, I just pretend to get on with him because he’s bloody fast and I don’t want him to hurt me in the nets. Fortunately, he’s very gullible so it wasn’t hard to convince him that we were mates,” Harris says, deadpan.
“He can be a bit hot-headed — much like me a few years ago. I think I know my way around his control panel, I know which buttons to push. He needs calming down more than firing up but there was one time, against New Zealand, when he was a bit flat. So I walked over to him and slapped him, hard! He was furious, really pissed off. But he couldn’t kill me so he killed them — they were 97-7 at lunch,” Harris says, chuckling.
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