“South Africans don’t just go away and die. We fight for what we believe in and we are very strong.” – Keegan Petersen
Telford Vice | Cape Town
IF you watched Keegan Petersen in the Test series against India, you know he’s a serious man. The diligence, the stickability, the unflusterability, the beautiful care he showed marked him out as someone not to be dismissed as a lightweight.
Or someone to dismiss easily. He faced more than 100 balls in half of his six innings, and never fewer than 22. He batted for at least an hour four times, and for 59 minutes in the second innings at Centurion. He was at the crease for more than four hours in the first innings at Newlands, and for more than three hours in the second dig. In the first innings at the Wanderers, he was there for three minutes short of three hours.
He was much more than there. Petersen scored important runs in a team not expected to score many. He did so on pitches that did not favour batters, and against a gun attack. He scored his runs unvarnished: see the ball, hit the ball, run, rinse, repeat.
Precocious players pose for pictures after they have crafted a noteworthy stroke. Petersen is many things, but he is not precocious. He plays a shot, takes the runs he has earned, and plays another. Or defends and defends and defends until there is an opportunity to pierce the field. There is nothing ornamental about his batting. If Jacques Kallis was Baroque, Petersen is Mr Modernism: the Bauhaus batter. Everything needed is in its right place, for as long as it’s needed. Then it isn’t and we start again. It is a perfect economy of requirement, intent and movement.
“It keeps me switched on somehow,” Petersen told Cricbuzz about his approach to batting. “It’s nice … well, not nice. But it does make me feel that I have to be there all the time, in the present. And I have to work for everything. That makes you appreciate it more.”
That’s not to say watching Petersen bat is dull. Anything but, because there’s a lot going on. It takes flinty intelligence to play like he does and not only survive but prosper. If you think properly about what you’re doing it will look easy. Even, or especially, when it isn’t. You can see Petersen’s smarts not only in the choices he makes, but in the modesty of his movements. He’s got this. The emotion comes after he has finally been dismissed. He and Bjorn Borg would have plenty to talk about.
This comes from having played 97 first-class matches before you crack the nod. And from making your debut, in St Lucia in June, three months before your 28th birthday. It comes from having lived some life, and taking it to the middle with you. It’s the knowledge of what matters, and what doesn’t. And it never stops evolving.
“In the first Test [against India at Centurion, where he scored 15 and 17], I batted like I would in domestic cricket, and I thought success is just going to come. After that Test I knew I had to work harder than I usually do to get the runs. It made me realise that it’s a step up. You are playing against the best team in the world, and they don’t give you much. I had to work for every run.” If that makes it seem Petersen learnt a lot about his game during the series, prepare to be surprised: “Not really. I’m always going to be the same.”
He is no stranger to hard work. Since readmission in 1991, only seven players have waited longer — in terms of first-class caps — to earn a Test call-up for South Africa. Stephen Cook is at the top of the list with 165, and Stiaan van Zyl just behind Petersen with 96.
“I was fortunate to start playing first-class cricket when I was still a kid, fresh out of school [at 18, in February 2012],” Petersen said. “So there were guys ahead of me. I played with the previous generation and I played with a lot of guys. Like Jacques Kallis. His last game for the Cobras [in February 2014], I was part of that squad. It’s been a long time, but I wouldn’t have done it any differently. My journey has been my journey and it’s unique. Even though I had to learn my trade for longer, that’s fine. I’m happy it came when it came.”
The all-time record for a South African late bloomer is held by Peter Kirsten, who had played 270 first-class games by the time he walked onto Kensington Oval in Bridgetown on April 18, 1992 — less than a month before he turned 37 — as one of 10 debutants. The exception was the captain, Kepler Wessels, who had 24 Test caps for another team whose colours are green and gold. But that was, of course, different: apartheid, isolation, and all that. Speaking of that other green and gold side, Mike Hussey was 176 matches and 15,313 runs into his first-class career when he made his Test debut for Australia.
Some of Test cricket’s belated beginners stick it out at the top. Some who haven’t had to pay as many dues do not. Petersen is only five Tests in, and has scored three half-centuries, but it’s difficult to believe he will not be among those who last. He’s the business. It shows in the way he hasn’t been satisfied with being given his chance — he has taken it, too. That hasn’t been true for Zubayr Hamza, for instance, who has class to burn but was able to score only 181 runs in 10 Test innings in 2019 and 2020, and was dropped. Aiden Markram, too, plays like a dream. But he made just 76 in six innings against India and can consider himself fortunate to have been retained for next month’s series in New Zealand.
Of course Petersen isn’t immune to dips in performance. It took him only 10 innings to score a first-class century, but he needed another 19 trips to the crease to make his second. Four innings later, he scored an undefeated 225 — which he followed with centuries in his next two games. First, he had to find his way again; like he did after he came back from the West Indies series with 44 runs in three innings. How do struggling players return to form?
“You’ve just got to go back to what what you learned when you were a kid, go back to the basics and hope that it will come right. Eventually it does. But you are going to fail. There’s no two ways about it.” How did he know when he was on song? “I don’t know. The scoreboard will tell me.”
There was no flippancy in that answer, just a sobering seriousness that was apparent in a different way when he joined the Zoom call for this interview: he did so three minutes earlier than the appointed time. Up popped an image far removed from the cauldron of Test cricket. Casually clad, he sat on a couch. Family photographs were on the wall behind him. Happily, the bio-bubble had burst and something like real life had flooded into the void. “It’s what we long for, just a bit of normality.” It’s never that simple for people in the news. We spoke three days after the end of the Test series. How many interviews had he given? “Since then? I’ve lost count.”
So he would be forgiven fuzziness on how he came to be stationed at leg slip after one delivery of the third day’s play at Newlands. Not a chance: “Dean [Elgar] is going to hate me for saying this, but it was my idea. I told him the ball before that. I’m like, maybe we should just have a leg slip. He thought about it and said, ‘Okay go.’ And then the very next ball it happened.”
Marco Jansen pitched the delivery on leg stump. Cheteshwar Pujara tried to deflect it downward, but the bounce undid him. Still, it needed a lightning dive and a stabbing right hand for the airborne, horizontal Petersen to take the catch. That’s what experience does: it reminds you, sometimes subliminally, about what has worked in the past.
Pujara and Virat Kohli had come together the previous evening after India had slipped to 24/2 in their second innings. They had added 33, and built the lead to 70, when Petersen, sensing the import of the moment, pounced. “The game was in the balance at that time because we knew that they were the big wickets. We had to make a play somehow, and I just felt at the time, with Marco bowling … he’s uncomfortable to face for anyone. He’s tall, lanky, and he unsettles a lot of guys. So I just had a feeling that I had to be there at the time.”
Trusting that feeling is another matter, particularly in a match against the No. 1 ranked team with the series on the line. And it can’t be easy finding the confidence to speak up when you’re a junior member of the side. It good to know, then, that the seniors are listening. “We try and help out Dean wherever, because he can’t captain every point of the game. He’s a really open guy and he won’t just shrug you off. He takes all of our suggestions on board. So when someone has a gut feel, they speak out about it.”
Could that be happening at least partly because a team shorn of all of their established batting stars have internalised that the buck stops with whoever is at the crease? The last of the big names, Quinton de Kock, retired from Tests after Centurion. It’s as if those he left behind are playing for each other more than they did when they could rely on De Kock, Faf du Plessis, Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers, Graeme Smith or Kallis to do more than their share of the heavy lifting. South Africa proved to themselves that they are more than the sum of their comparatively modest parts by rallying to win at the Wanderers and at Newlands. “The odds were against us, so that makes the victory taste more sweet. When ‘Quinny’ retired nobody expected it. We will miss him, but cricket goes on.”
It helps, no doubt, that what might be termed a likebloodymindedness prevails among the frontline batters. So it isn’t difficult to connect the dots between Elgar, Petersen, Rassie van der Dussen and Temba Bavuma. They share a brand of defiance that puts lumps in even the most jaded throats, and that doesn’t have to spark centuries to get the job done. This is as close to socialism as cricket gets, as epitomised by Van der Dussen grinding out an unbeaten 41 off 95 balls and in two-and-a-half hours to steer South Africa home in the deciding Test. “The 20s, 30s and 40s Rassie scored were massive for us,” Petersen said. “I think he’ll remember those innings better than his hundreds by the end of his career.”
There was more where that came from: “We’ve got strong characters in our changeroom. South Africans don’t just go away and die. We fight for what we believe in and we are very strong. Our captain is an extremely strong character and is the perfect guy to lead this group right now because it’s what this team and this country longs for. And we needed this win, to be dead honest.”
Petersen spoke from his father’s house in Paarl, where he spent a few days after the series. Dirkie Petersen, no mean player himself, was his son’s most important coach during his formative years and remains a valued source of advice and encouragement. But he has yet to see his prized pupil play a Test first-hand, what with the first two in the Caribbean and, because of the BCCI’s pandemic fears, spectators not being allowed during the India series. That had an upside.
“My dad is a nervous character, so he doesn’t really want to come watch. Because he goes crazy. But I’m glad I haven’t score a hundred yet because I’d like him to be there when it does happen.”
There is, as there is in everything Petersen does on a cricket ground, plenty in those few words: honesty about his father’s disposition, but a desire to please him nonetheless. And there’s this — when Petersen scores a century. Not if. Seriously.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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