Amidst the merriment at Lord’s after South Africa won their first ICC trophy of the century, and heartfelt messages and apologies to Temba Bavuma for underestimating him, came the queries to Grok about the sporting fairytale.
Some were bizarre like Americans wondering what the fuss was all about, but Grok, an Artificial intelligence tool, was bombarded with a few posers with bleedingly obvious answers.
One such concerned a dressing room snap of Temba Bavuma and Marco Jansen, posing with the Test mace, prize for all the efforts in ringing in South Africa’s biggest ever cricket trophy.
Like their world winning rugby team, the Springboks, the Proteas too have a wide variety of frames, and none more than the photographer’s delight of the tallest and shortest of their freshly minted world winners, Temba Bavuma and Marco Jansen.
While lines like “the long and shirt of it is that South Africa are WTC champions’ had run their course on Saturday, a viral picture of Bavuma and Jansen standing side by side, invited a query that might have stumped (or lbw’d at least) Grok, if it was a real human with eyes and a tongue to utter words.
The Twitter account @Whhyz that claims to be from Italy and calls itself a crypto degenerate, asked the machine-taught Grok, under the Bavuma-Jansen pic, “Who is taller?”
To anyone that could see, even if they had never heard of cricket, the answer would be obvious. Grok, considered a marvel of prompt engineering, after a time lapse of 2 minutes, answered with a straight face: “Marco Jansen is taller than Temba Bavuma. Based on available information, Jansen stands at approximately 2.06 meters, while Bavuma is around 1.62 meters. This height difference is evident in their joint appearances and aligns with cricket profiles and fan discussions.”
While the contrast between the beanpole all-rounder and the 5’4 Bavuma makes for an iconic picture, the South African captain has faced cruel trolling and body shaming over his stature and height in the past. For South Africans, an evolved sporting nation that is a consecutive World Cup winner at rugby, varied bodytypes are nothing new, given Springboks have always had skilled athletes of various dimensions.
RG Snyman (6 feet-9) and Cheslin Kolbe (5 feet-7) of the World champ Springboks team, are massive stars back in South Africa, and their specific skill sets plenty admired.
The WTC triumph has given cricket its world winning equivalents, and elevated Bavuma’s leadership credentials to widespread acceptance, making the former memes look silly and quite brainless. The captain played two crucial knocks in both innings in the WTC win, and has been the highest run getter for South Africa over the last WTC cycle.
