“I don’t think I should ever limit myself in terms of dreaming. A dream is, in the end, just a goal. Whether you achieve it or not doesn’t really matter.” – Wiaan Mulder
Telford Vice | Cape Town
TWO big men sat side by side on a couch in a clubhouse on a hot afternoon in Potchefstroom in late September, 2017. There are as many big men in Potch as there are hot afternoons. But this was different. One of the men was Linda Zondi, then South Africa’s convenor of selectors. The other was Wiaan Mulder.
Both leaned forward, elbows on knees. Zondi spoke quietly but intensely for several minutes. Mulder listened intently and nodded. You couldn’t have cut the eye contact with a lightsaber, but the mood was serious without being sombre.
Outside, a South Africa training session in preparation for the Test series against Bangladesh, Ottis Gibson’s first engagement as coach, had just ended. Mulder didn’t play in either of the matches, but the fact that he was with the squad in Potch was Gibson’s doing.
“Young Wiaan Mulder came in, I saw him, I liked him, I spoke to the selectors about him,” Gibson would say a few weeks after he had been at the Wanderers to see Mulder score 79 for the Lions against the Warriors in a first-class match in which he had already taken 4/70. “It was a good opportunity to get him around us in the Test series so he can get a feel for what international cricket is all about.”
Mulder left Potch to play another first-class match, against the Titans in Centurion. He took two wickets and scored 127 not out. Less than a month after that, in October 2017, he made his international debut in an ODI against the Bangladeshis in East London. So that’s what Zondi was telling him: “Hang in there. Your opportunity is coming. Not long now.”
South Africa have had 24 Tests and 43 ODIs since Mulder’s debut, but he has featured in only three Tests and 10 ODIs. He’s played 77 matches of all kinds in that time. Rassie van der Dussen, his Lions and South Africa teammate, has played 136 games during the same period — almost twice as many.
Why, considering South Africa’s search for a quality allrounder since Jacques Kallis’ retirement more than seven years ago, hasn’t Mulder played more international cricket? It’s a fair question in the wake of his performance in the Test series against Sri Lanka. Mulder didn’t have much opportunity to enhance his reputation as a batting allrounder. But he took nine wickets — more than Lungi Ngidi — at an average of 20.55 — better than Ngidi or Anrich Nortjé — and bowled like he belonged: with grit and gumption. Mulder broke three stands of 50 or more and took all but one of his wickets in the top six. He dismissed Dinesh Chandimal twice in the only Test he has played against him. James Anderson has clashed with Chandimal six times in Test cricket, and got him just once.
The reason Mulder hasn’t played more frequently lurked between the lines of the praise Mark Boucher had for him after the series: “Wiaan was always there to make the breakthroughs. He’s been away from the game for quite some time, so he’s very hungry to go out there and perform. Let’s hope he stays on the park. He’s someone who is so keen to learn. His attitude is great. I see a big future for Wiaan. He’s young and he’ll learn, and we’ll keep challenging him in that regard.”
Mulder turns 23 on February 19, so time is on his side. But already he has had a career’s worth of back and ankle injuries, often caused by a bowling action that sends different parts of his body in competing directions. He’s fixing that, getting stronger, and doing something about his bigness.
“At my under-19 World Cup [in 2016] I weighed 106 kilogrammes,” Mulder told Cricbuzz. “I’m about 83 kilogrammes now.” Soon after the Bangladesh series, that difference of 23 kilogrammes started disappearing. “In the team room we had a skinfold test, and then I had to get on the scale. I looked at what it said, and I was like, ‘That’s the last time I eat pizza or pasta’. That’s what I ate for the whole Bangladesh tour.”
Excess baggage “definitely contributed”, Mulder said, to his slew of injuries. But it wasn’t the most important issue: “I never spent time in the gym in high school. So I just couldn’t manage the load when I got into first-class cricket. It put extra strain on my body. The biggest factor was that I wasn’t strong enough to manage it all.
“Currently I’m not struggling with any back pain, which is quite rare considering the amount I’ve bowled. It’s being managed better. I also used to train too much. When I felt something wasn’t perfect I would just keep working at it. So I used to bowl way too many overs.”
Then there’s his action, which he is remodelling under the experienced eye of Gordon Parsons, the bowling guru at the Lions, his franchise. “My front arm still falls away a bit, and a lot of my energy is still not going in the right direction,” Mulder said. “That forces my front knee to bend and my back leg not to drive through straight. My energy is moving in different directions to where I’m trying to bowl. I’d say I bowled a lot quicker when I was under-19, with my funny action. I’ve lost pace but I’m more consistent.” And he isn’t hurting himself. “That’s the whole point. Hopefully I can get it back up there [in terms of pace], but do so injury-free.”
Mulder first played for the Lions while he was still at school and without grinding out a season or three in provincial cricket, the franchises’ feeder system. Not quite 14 months after his franchise debut he was in South Africa’s dressingroom. Now, slimmed down and bulked up, which is not a contradiction in the finely balanced world of elite sport, he’s where no South Africa team has been since 2007.
Mulder spoke on the same day the squad left for Karachi, and he didn’t try to curb his enthusiasm: “I never thought I’d be going to Pakistan in the near future! It’s flipping exciting! I can’t wait to get on the plane and go and play cricket where there’s been very little international cricket played for a very long time.”
That doesn’t mean Mulder doesn’t know Asian conditions. He has played two first-class matches in India — he scored an undefeated century and took three wickets in an A match in Mysore in September 2019 — and five list A games in Sri Lanka. As an under-19 international he had three Tests in Sri Lanka and 14 one-dayers in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. “I wouldn’t say I know what’s coming, but I think it gives me a better insight that I’ve been to the sub-continent before,” he said.
He is trying to bring that type of clear thinking to his internal conversations abut batting versus bowling: “I’m not over-thinking any of the cricket stuff, because that is a weakness of mine. I love batting a lot. I really enjoy bowling as well, but I would like to contribute more with the bat. In the long run, if I can get more runs and bat more than I bowl, then I think I’ll get the most out of my potential. There will be a time where I have to step up and score runs, otherwise my spot [in the XI] will be under pressure at some stage.”
He’s also trying to keep his interpretation of a changing dressingroom nuanced: “It’s quite a different feel to when I started. My first game, there was Morné Morkel, Dale Steyn, AB de Villiers, Faf du Plessis, JP Duminy, Hashim Amla, Vernon Philander … Being among those guys was, like, wow. You’re in awe all the time. I felt more anxious than I am now — I’m still very anxious — but I think I’ve grown a lot in the last three years mentally. In this team there’s a lot of young guys, so it feels more like you can make an impact.”
Listening to Mulder, it’s difficult not to imagine him pinching himself with each sentence that leaves his lips. Despite his physical struggles, which have added to the challenges all players face on their way to the top, his zest makes him sound as if he’s watching a movie in which he is also starring. The words tumble from him. Not in a torrent but in a stream of what, in a less jaded age, might be called joy. As they should do from someone who is living a life that might yet be worth scripting.
“I don’t think I should ever limit myself in terms of dreaming. A dream is, in the end, just a goal. Whether you achieve it or not doesn’t really matter. But it’s something to work towards. I dream as big as I can. I want to make an impact and contribute to the Test team winning. That’s a big goal of mine — to have a big impact, especially against big opponents. I think that’s what changes the game; if you can make an impact when you’re playing against Australia, India, England, New Zealand, Pakistan; those type of guys.”
Mulder’s movie started long before he played his first game for South Africa, but that episode made a striking scene on its own. He was playing a first-class match for the Lions against the Knights in Kimberley when the call came for him to join the national squad. He would be substituted in the franchise XI, he was told. “I tried to get a not out overnight because then the guy who’s replacing me would get a chance to bat,” Mulder said at the time. He was 18 not out at stumps that day.
Off Mulder went to bigger things, and on debut he trapped Mahmudallah leg-before. Ten days earlier he had dismissed the same player the same way in a tour match. Coincidence? “I remember that was a weakness of his — he was falling over a little bit at the crease. I wouldn’t say I bowled a magic ball and got him lbw. It was more like I tried to bowl one stump straighter. And on those two days it worked. On other days, it might not.” So, no grand plan befitting of genius? “No. I don’t think there ever is. It’s more simple than that.”
But it hasn’t been that simple for Mulder. He grew up in Roodepoort, which was established around what turned out to be an unprofitable gold mine, and went to primary school there. Laërskool Florida is a place of little fanciness where shoes are optional and the lingua franca is Afrikaans, Mulder’s mother tongue. It was a long way from there in every sense to his high school, St Stithians in Sandton, one of Johannesburg’s leafier suburbs which proclaims itself home to Africa’s richest square mile. Saints, as the school is known, speaks English exclusively. But it is also among the 25 schools that have supplied all 111 of South Africa’s Test players since readmission in 1991. Kagiso Rabada — who was three years ahead of Mulder — and David Terbrugge have also walked Saints’ corridors.
“It was a calculated decision from my parents, but they wanted to give me the best chance to make something happen,” Mulder said. Fair enough. But how did he cope with what must have been a culture shock? “That was very difficult in the beginning academically, especially the first two years. I did OK, but coming from not speaking any English and going to school barefoot, that type of thing, to quickly having to change to everything being in English was hard.
“I wouldn’t say St Stithians is a posh school, but it’s a private school. You don’t turn up barefoot at their primary school. I had to adapt quickly and learn that I could do certain things. I had to work really hard on my English.”
Impressive though that is, Mulder is not alone in this regard. Every black South African who goes to a school like St Stithians has to make a similar leap, as do many of the brown South Africans who are first-language Afrikaans speakers. Happily, for Mulder, he had help. Her name is Justine Webber. “I had an awesome English-speaking girlfriend,” he said. “I’m still with her. She guided me through all the English I had to learn and where I was going wrong. If it wasn’t for her I probably wouldn’t be where I am now. She’s an absolute super star.”
Who can say whether Mulder will have a career worth turning into a movie. Not that it matters. Though he is smaller than he was, his role in South Africa’s team, and in his own life, is set to get bigger.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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