“I played him pretty well. Until a brain fart. A big one. Then I sat in the changeroom.” – Dean Elgar’s not quite haiku on his dismissal.
TELFORD VICE at Newlands
YOU can see the backside of opulence from the toilet windows at the rear of the upper floors of the massive curve of concrete and glass that hugs Newlands’ northern boundary. Cream walls of various sizes and green roofs of differing heights are ranged over an area that seems bigger than the ground sprawling behind you. You’re looking at the Kelvin Grove Club, which has given its name to one of the ends at what Faf du Plessis has taken to calling “the new home of cricket”.
No doubt the members would approve. Each “ordinary” specimen of that ilk pays R6 318 a year for the privilege of being welcomed through the grandly gabled facade of the manor house designed by Herbert Baker, British colonialism’s unofficial architect-in-chief, that faces away from Newlands. It’s the kind of club that is not nearly common enough to bother with making a Wikipedia page. You just don’t know what sort of ghastly riff-raff reads that stuff. And might think of joining. It doesn’t simply have a squash court; it has eight. Not only does it boast 11 tennis courts, eight of them are floodlit. Don’t forget the four croquet lawns. And the wine cellar. There are seven bars and restaurants, including one specialising in sushi and champagne. How utterly splendid.
When the club was founded in 1924, would it have accepted as members people like Dean Elgar or Rassie van der Dussen? Despite sharing a surname with a favourite of Victorian and Edwardian England who set pomp and circumstance to music, Elgar is a steak-and-chips fella from Welkom in the Free State gold fields, and as blue-collar in the flesh as he is at the crease. Van der Dussen’s pronounced Afrikaans accent would probably have been enough to blackball him — Afrikaans was the language spoken by the people the British, and their South African-born descendants, employed to manage the black workforce. They couldn’t very well be let into The Club. The same would have gone for Du Plessis, and none of the four black players in South Africa’s team for the second Test against England would have bothered trying to join. If they had, in 1924, the police would have been called.
But it was Elgar and Van der Dussen who bossed Kelvin Grove on Saturday, and there was nothing the sushi snobs could do about that. The Kelvin Grove End, that is. For more than three hours, and for 291 balls, they kept England’s bowlers at bay with batting that at times looked like what a couple of decrepit old men, having had too much champagne, might come up with on the croquet lawn. Sorry, one of the croquet lawns. But it served its purpose.
Elgar has made a career out of hanging tough, so his grit was no surprise. Expected, even. Van der Dussen came up hitting the white ball ball using authentic strokes but with nuclear power. Saturday’s innings, Elgar said, was proof that Van der Dussen was not a “trap en klap” player. The Afrikaans phrase defies translation, but is perhaps best rendered as “step and smash”.
And so they went, adding 117 runs. Until Elgar slapped an apparently innocuous delivery from Dom Bess, the debutant off-spinner, straight to Joe Root retreating from mid-off. It was a right-arm version of exactly the kind of filth that has earned Elgar 15 Test wickets. Small wonder he stood there and smiled like a loon. Talk about trap en klap. “I played him pretty well,” Elgar said. “Until a brain fart. A big one. Then I sat in the changeroom. It’s not right of me as a senior batter to play shots like that. But I’m a human with two arms, two legs and the other thing, so I’m also allowed to make mistakes.”
Batting had to be done at the Wynberg End as well, of course. But the hotter spot was 22 yards north. The surface has been fair to all who have batted and bowled on it, but there has been noticeably more zip and zap at the Kelvin Grove End — not least because a significant crack outside the right-handers’ off-stump has opened after two days under an intense sun. It’s also where most of Saturday’s important moments happened, including all three of Van der Dussen’s brushes with dismissal.
He was given out by Paul Reiffel despite edging the cover off a James Anderson delivery. Then he was caught off a Stuart Broad no-ball. Both times replays righted the umpires’ errors. And only Ben Stokes’ elbow juddering into the ground after he dived to take what would have been a fine catch — which spilled to earth — at second slip stopped Van der Dussen from falling to Anderson. In the same over that Board overstepped, Elgar had to hit the ball a second time after it spun back at him and his stumps. “That’s the game, hey,” Elgar said with a shrug about all that.
But England roared back into the contest in the last hour, removing Quinton de Kock, Van der Dussen — for 68, a consecutive half-century — Dwaine Pretorius and Keshav Maharaj for only 24 runs. “They got one foot ahead of us,” Elgar admitted.
This time, he didn’t say anything about his arms, his legs. Or the other thing.
First published by Cricbuzz.
Bulletproof Truth 