Hodge: it is a flat and uninspiring name, easy to underestimate, not as common as Smith, Brown, Botha or Williams, but as boring.
Thomas Hardy wrote a poem about "Drummer Hodge", killed in the Anglo-Boer war, destined to rest forever under alien stars. It is the name of someone anonymous in the ranks, not an outstanding achiever.
Perhaps they thought the same about John Berry Hobbs, before he established himself as a batsman for Surrey, and long before he became the greatest run-scorer the game had ever seen, and the first professional batsman to be knighted (as Sir Jack Hobbs).
Perhaps they thought the same about a bowler called Shane Warne, when over a decade ago he took one wicket for over 100 runs in his first test match.
Captains never seem to learn. Before the first test in Perth last week, Graeme Smith made derogatory remarks about the alleged fragility of the Australian middle order. It's true the media demand that coaches and captains say something before a game, and they tend to oblige either with platitudes, or the kind of whistling in the dark that we got from Smith last week.
Smith's remarks were inevitably going to sound arrogant unless we won the test match. What he said must now be haunting him, along with midnight visions of his batsmen writhing in the thrall of Warne, his fielders dropping catch after catch, his bowlers taking one wicket per session, and he himself failing to build a big score.
Above all, he will be haunted by the name Hodge. For it was Brad Hodge, coming up to his 31st birthday, who scored an unbeaten 203 in the opening test against SA at Perth. It was his maiden test century, and he delivered when his country needed him to deliver. He had to. As Hodge told Reuters: "The standard in Australian cricket has lifted and you have to score big scores just to get into this side." Most haunting of all for Smith, Hodge was dropped on the way to that double century when he was on 13.
Sure, there was injustice in Charl Langeveld's delivery that was ruled a no-ball when Jacques Rudolph made a spectacular catch off Aussie captain Ricky Ponting - but the injustice was outweighed by our own incompetence.
The cost of dropping catches is not only measured in the runs made by the batsman who escapes. It is also seen in the erosion of confidence, and in the tension caused by frustration.
For me the shattering of our team's confidence came much earlier than that, when Justin Kemp and Ashwell Prince were battling in the first innings against Warne. Neither of them had a clue what to do, and one sensed the self-belief of the entire team draining away as these two scratched and hopped about the crease like blind men.
Hodge's remarks about how difficult it is to get into the Australian team must raise the issue of how easy it is to get into ours. The competence under pressure of Shaun Pollock and Mark Boucher, as they saved us in our first innings, is not being backed by the precocious talent of more junior players.
By the time they came to the party in the second innings, it was the glory of a salvage operation. I write this before the selection of the team for the second test. It seems clear that Ashwell Prince is the player least deserving.
