Time to walk the revolution talk

Not for Siya Kolisi the premature congratulations being lavished on Graeme Smith, Mark Boucher and Jacques Kallis. 

TELFORD VICE in Johannesburg

THE motorway exit to Centurion is still named after John Vorster, one of apartheid’s most brutal enforcers. The sun still hammers down on the scene with apparent hatred for all beneath it. The pitch, two days before the first ball is bowled in the men’s Test series between South Africa and England, is still the colour of the inside of a freshly halved avocado. But everything else has changed.

“There’s a real energy in the squad, a real positive feel to what we’ve been doing and how we’ve been training the last week and the information that’s been spoken about with Kallis and Boucher back in the team,” Faf du Plessis said on Tuesday. “Even with someone like myself, who’s played a lot of international cricket, the wisdom that’s in the dressingroom helps me as well.”

That’s batting consultant Jacques Kallis and head coach Mark Boucher he’s talking about, who along with Graeme Smith — the acting director of cricket — have pulled cricket in South Africa out of the terminal nosedive it was forced into by months of damagingly shambolic administration at board and operational level.

“The last six months it has felt as if there is more weight on my shoulders,” Du Plessis said. “I could see so many things happening off the field; not the right structures being put in place. That’s never an excuse for the type of cricket that we play. But it has been a breath of fresh air to have these guys back. Why have these guys not been here for the last 10 years? It’s so important to have people like that in an international dressingroom. When we played against the Australians [at the World Cup], you look at [Justin] Langer, [Ricky] Ponting, [Steve] Waugh … We want that.”

But how can we say conclusively that Smith, Boucher and Kallis have cleaned up the mess South Africa were in their Test series in India in October and at the World Cup when we have yet to see the product of their efforts? They’ve been aboard for so short a time — Smith’s appointment was announced on December 11, Boucher’s three days later, Kallis’ and bowling consultant Charl Langeveldt’s four days after that — and South Africa’s problems run so deep — batting, bowling, fielding, thinking, even the toss — that it is fatuous to think the issues have been solved at a stroke, or three, and even if the recent appointments bring with them 1,420 international caps worth of experience. Yet cricketminded South Africans do think they are the answer, and are saying so — perhaps because the hole the game has crashed into is so unprecedentedly deep that any way is up.

So it seems unfair that it falls to Du Plessis’ and his players to validate the narrative that everything is going to be OK now that South Africa’s relatively illustrious past has been called back. Except that, as the above attests, the team — or those members of it who have spoken to the press since the dressingroom revolution — have been cheerleaders-in-chief for the new deal. Du Plessis knows that push will come to shove as soon as 10am on Thursday: “Whatever we do before a Test series means nothing. We will get measured on the way we play. Now it’s about going out there and putting in performances on the field.”

It would be interesting to know whether Du Plessis’ true feelings about someone who was in a similarly bleak place 18 months ago, a man he calls his friend. A funny thing happened on the way to that friend being tossed onto the scrapheap of South Africa’s history: he led the Springboks to triumph at rugby’s World Cup. Does Du Plessis envy or admire Siya Kolisi, or perhaps harbour elements of both emotions? Maybe cricket should pause on its road to redemption and ask itself those questions, and should stop at Kolisi’s door and listen to his advice.

Du Plessis and Kolisi were having dinner together in Cape Town last month when a familiar figure spotted the latter and came over to their table. It turns out Jurgen Klopp, the Liverpool football manager, is a Kolisi fan. Who isn’t? Kolisi rose from a background exponentially less privileged than Du Plessis’ to conquer his world. He emerged from a system that was broken and played an important role in fixing it, and did so to the disbelief of legions who thought he was part of the problem. Not for Kolisi the premature congratulations being lavished on Smith, Boucher and Kallis. 

In the course of relating the dinner story to the press on Tuesday, Du Plessis was asked whether Klopp had also recognised him. “No,” was his comfortably modest response. Taking a Test series off England, which no South men’s team have done at home since January 2000, won’t change that. But it could be the start of everything truly changing.

First published by Cricbuzz.