“I have strived to lead the team with dignity and authenticity during exhilarating highs and devastating lows.” – Faf du Plessis
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
RARELY is a player defined by one innings. More rarely is that innings in his first Test. Even more rarely does he stay true to the example he set in that innings for the rest of his career. Faf du Plessis is that player.
A mould was cast in Adelaide in November 2012 when he batted for almost eight hours over two days to score an undefeated 110 to save the match. That mould has yet to be broken, and no-one who has since played for South Africa has fitted into it anywhere near as well.
But Du Plessis is no longer the captain that player became. On Monday he relinquished the leadership of South Africa’s Test and T20 teams. That followed Quinton de Kock succeeding him as the ODI captain last month. The presence of Du Plessis the player is also fading: he was rested for the ODI and T20 series against England. South Africa won neither of those rubbers, Du Plessis’ supporters will highlight to those who have been crowing for his removal as a prerequisite for progress.
Of the 524 words attributed to Du Plessis in a Cricket South Africa release, these hit home hardest: “I have strived to lead the team with dignity and authenticity during exhilarating highs and devastating lows. I have given my everything during my tenure. I have never been one to throw in the towel and do believe I am putting the team first and believe we have to stick through the tough times to get to the good times. In a perfect world I would have loved to lead the team in the Tests for the rest of the season as well as the T20 World Cup, but sometimes the most important attribute of a leader is to be selfless.”
Du Plessis captained South Africa 112 times from December 2012. He won 18 of 36 Tests, 28 of 39 ODIs, and 23 of 37 T20s. That’s 69 victories, a success rate of 61.61%. Or better than Graeme Smith’s 57.39% and Shaun Pollock’s 61.34%. He won 21 of his 31 bilateral series across the formats, eight of them away — five in Asia and two in Australia. He is the only South Africa captain to take a home Test series off Australia. But, as with Smith and Pollock before him, there is a time for even the best to go.
That time is now. South Africa having lost 11 of the last 15 completed matches they played under Du Plessis — a sorry story that started in May last year at the World Cup. The initial alarm had sounded in February when Sri Lanka became the first Asian team to win a Test series in South Africa.
“The last few weeks of rest away from the game have given me a lot of perspective on the great privilege and honour I have had in representing and leading my country in the three formats of this wonderful game,” Du Plessis was quoted as saying. “It has been a rewarding, sometimes tough and other times a lonely road, but I would not replace the experience for anything, because it has made me the man that I am proud to be today.
“When I took over the leadership I did so with the commitment to lead, perform and, most importantly, to serve. As the team heads into a new direction with new leaders and a young crop of players I feel it will be in the best interests of South African cricket to relinquish the captaincy in all formats. This was one of the toughest decisions to make, but I remain fully committed to supporting Quinton, Mark [Boucher] and my teammates as we continue to rebuild and realign as a group.”
That Du Plessis was captain all the way until Monday is testament to his hardiness. He has, in little more than nine months, played under three head coaches. He has endured the retirements of AB de Villiers, Hashim Amla, JP Duminy and Vernon Philander, and the partial retirements of Dale Steyn and Imran Tahir. He has seen a selection panel dissolved. He has had to put up with suits who know good whisky when they drink it but have no taste for doing right by the game. He is the first South Africa captain to have to recast his role in the shadow of a director of cricket. He has spent the last of his time at the helm putting up with the shrieking of idiot opportunists who can’t see past the fact of his whiteness.
“After the 2019 World Cup I made the decision to continue in my role as captain while the team went through a rebuilding phase following the retirement of some key senior players and a complete overhaul of the coaching staff that we had worked with until then. It was important to me that I stayed to help the team find its feet and plot a new way forward while assisting in identifying the next generation of leaders within the players’ group during a time of turbulence in South African cricket. The last season of my captaincy has been the most challenging to date as I had a lot of off-field issues that I devoted my energy towards.
“South African cricket has entered a new era. New leadership, new faces, new challenges and new strategies. I remain committed to play in all three formats of the game for now as a player and will offer my knowledge and time to the new leaders of the team.”
None of which is to meant to cast Du Plessis as perfect. His message to black South Africans last month after Temba Bavuma was dropped during the Test series against England — “We don’t see colour” — clanged with tone-deafness for the new era he acknowledges. Any South African who doesn’t know race remains the defining factor of our hopelessly unequal, far from democratic society is cocooned in privilege and, thus, in wilful ignorance.
Du Plessis’ defence of his overly defensive tactics while Mark Wood and Stuart Broad, England’s last pair, were smashing his bowlers to all parts of the Wanderers amounted to reminding his inquisitors that they didn’t have similar questions for Joe Root after Keshav Maharaj and Dane Paterson had done the same at St George’s Park. Wood and Broad started their raid after England had been reduced to 318/9 in the first innings of a match that had yet to unfold significantly. They took their team to 400 and put them in control of the narrative. Maharaj and Paterson came together after South Africa had crashed to 138/9 needing another 152 just to make England bat again. They added 99, but Root had no pressing need to end the stand. Could Du Plessis honestly not see the vast difference between those scenarios?
Only De Kock scored more runs in Tests for South Africa last year, and no-one made more for them in ODIs in 2019. But Du Plessis has gone 14 innings, all of them in Tests, without scoring a century. If he wasn’t the captain would he still be in the XI?
That there is exponentially more good than bad to say about Du Plessis as a player and a leader is plain to all but those who attack him with ulterior agendas. There is also this, and it outweighs everything else: he is a decent man. And he deserves decency in return. We will be fortunate to see his like again.
First published by Cricbuzz.
Bulletproof Truth 