“How do you manage to have fun and look so angry at the same time?” – the best question yet asked of Dale Steyn.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
EVEN stripped down to his numbers, Dale Steyn, who announced his retirement from all cricket on August 31, 2021, was a bowler among bowlers. His Test strike rate was 42.3, a smidgen higher than SF Barnes’. And of those who have delivered at least 2,000 balls in Tests, it was better than Waqar Younis, Fred Spofforth, Shoaib Akhtar, Malcolm Marshall, Fred Trueman, Mitchell Johnson, Dennis Lillee and Imran Khan. His average of 22.95 puts him ahead of Ray Lindwall, Shaun Pollock, Michael Holding, Clarrie Grimmett, Hedley Verity and Courtney Walsh.
No South Africa bowler has taken more Test wickets than Steyn’s 439. Seven from other countries had been more successful at the time of writing, but they had played between 31 and 73 more Tests than he did.
When he called time Steyn was the sixth fastest bowler to reach 200 and 300 wickets, and fourth in terms of those who made it to 400. None of the men above him have played for South Africa.
No bowler, from anywhere, could dislodge him from the top of the Test rankings for 263 weeks from 2008 to 2014. He was one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the year in 2013 and the Almanack’s Leading Cricketer in the World in 2014.
But it’s as a complete person walking among us that Steyn stands out. As a young unknown he would arrive extra early at Centurion to raid the dressingroom supplies: he couldn’t afford milk for his breakfast cereal. At the same ground in November 2007 his bouncer broke Craig Cumming’s facial bones in 23 places. With Steyn, contrasts are stark.
He is at once a thoroughly modern exponent of the game and a throwback to a time when players were more or less like everyone else. You could engage with him as you would with mortals. Because, after everything, that’s what he has remained.
“How do you manage to have fun and look so angry at the same time,” a little girl asked at a sponsor’s engagement in 2012. It remains the best of the thousands of questions asked of Steyn.
How indeed? That child was never given a proper answer. No-one was prepared for profundity from junior civilians among reporters in a shopping mall. Cue self-conscious laughter all round and the next enquiry before Steyn could consider the issue. Maybe he didn’t care to know. Perhaps because that would have required him to think in too real terms about the tightrope he walked.
For many he was too short, at 1.79 metres, and too slight to be a proper fast bowler for long enough to make a lasting impact. He got ahead of that curve by training so hard that not even his penchant for late-night junk food could dent his conditioning. You might say he needed after-hours calorie bombs to keep his body from exploding.
He made his debut in December 2004, bowling Marcus Trescothick for his first Test wicket and in the second innings bowling Michael Vaughan, too. Only in November 2015, when he suffered a significant groin injury in India, did he fall off the tightrope. Two broken shoulders and a torn tendon in his heel followed in the next 26 months.
He would never really get back onto the high wire. But he will always be up there in other senses. And with us.
First published by Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
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