What the Proteas’ surprising world championship victory should teach us
TEST cricket is, we are constantly told by those who know more than we do, is the purest form of the game. This implies that TV-friendly cash machines like the Indian Premier League and its T20 imitators are mere hit-and-giggle pastimes with an obscene price tag.
This will be hard to believe for anyone who watched the raw emotion on display after Virat Kohli had ended the Royal Challengers Bangalore’s 18-year wait for the IPL trophy. Let us rather agree that Test cricket is the pinnacle of the game. As is Test rugby, and as are golf’s four majors and tennis’s four Grand Slams.
Most armchair critics will tell you that they understand the difference between the demands these pinnacles of their sports make of their aspiring champions, but they don’t.
It is not just that the technical ability of those involved is so much better than the average spectator can imagine, even those – or perhaps especially those – who played the game at some lower level themselves.
"He would be lucky to break 200"
As a quick example, during the recent US Open golf championship at Oakmont in a rainy Pennsylvania, one of the commentators was asked what score he thought a 10-handicap golfer would record if he had to play the course with its existing set-up and under the same weather conditions.
For non-golfers’ benefit, a 10-handicap golfer is a better than average amateur player, and his handicap tells you that he could be expected to record a score of 80 shots (or what is called “10 over par”) for an average 70-par layout.
Would he be able to break 100, he was asked. His answer shook me: “He would be lucky to break 200.” Which reminded me of a conversation I had years ago with a 3rd Dan karate sensei, who suggested that there was less difference between a white belt (complete beginner) and a 1st Dan black belt than there was between a 1st Dan and a 2nd Dan.
But that is just the technical side, which, as any professional sports person will tell you, is of less importance than the mental fortitude required. And once you start dealing with a team sport there is the all-important team dynamic to consider.
South Africa is currently the reigning world champion in two of the three sports that most schools consider important
South Africa is currently the reigning world champion in two of the three sports that most schools consider important (sorry all you swimmers, hockey players, basketballers and so on).
Why is this? Why have we been so amazingly successful in these two areas when in many other spheres the country is clearly going backwards?
Part of the answer is an unusual Afrikaner from Despatch in the Eastern Cape. Years ago, Rassie Erasmus transformed a demoralized Springbok team with straight talk, a refreshing attitude and a refusal to bow to the official insistence on quotas. He appointed Siya Kolisi as captain, not because he was Black, but because he was – in Rassie’s opinion – the best captain.
If Rassie felt that the best team for a particular match required a line-up of 10 White players and five Black players, that was what he would choose (and vice-versa). And over the years the South African public has become used to this. When Handre Pollard is brought onto the field as a substitute for Sasha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, nobody notices that it’s a White player replacing a Coloured one.
Because that isn’t what’s important: it’s a player with a particular skill set replacing one with a different skill set that was better for the team at the start of the game but is no longer needed.
Rassie Erasmus’s Springboks were South Africa’s first colour-blind team, and they showed how strikingly successful this approach could be.
At the time that Kolisi’s boys were lifting their first World Cup, South African cricket was blundering along in the same old-fashioned way that had led to so much heartache, with quotas in full bloom.
There were demands (from officials and politicians only, it should be noted, never from the players) that there should be more players of colour in the team. First, Vernon Philander wasn’t “Black enough”, then Keshav Maharaj, and then the madness reached fever-pitch when it was claimed that Kagiso Rabada didn’t count because he had been to a Model C school.
So it wasn’t surprising that when Temba Bavuma was named as captain over Aidan Markram, there was pushback from certain quarters that he was a “quota” choice.
How satisfying it must have been for those two players to create the huge partnership that broke the Aussies’ hearts at Lords and brought South Africa a vastly unexpected Test Championship.
If rugby, and Rassie, showed the way, cricket’s belated conversion to colour-blindness must now open everyone’s eyes.
Quotas are poison and should be consigned to the dustbin – along with anyone and everyone who claims they are, or have ever been, the solution.