Going, going, gone: the ugliness of the player auction

“I blocked the daylights out of it, so not much.” – Jacques Kallis on what his SA20 base price might have been.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

JACQUES Kallis has never been excitable. Even when he faced Shane Warne and James Anderson — the bowlers who dismissed him more than any others in Tests — his eyes would remain startlingly untroubled. Maybe a touch glazed, more than slightly bored with it all.

Like they were in Johannesburg on Tuesday. For two hours, Kallis fished tiny cricket bats o...