“If players know they have 10 bubbles, they could do them. But is it 10 bubbles? Is it two? Is it 40? We don’t know.” – sports psychologist Kirsten van Heerden on bubble life.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
HAPPINESS wears blue shorts. The eyes and the smile are soft. The hands hold, with care and respect, a stout yellow-belly rockcod as long as an arm. Beyond the boat a vastness of slightly ruffled, air force blue water stretches wide beneath a sky slung low with pearly clouds. In the distance a long, dark blade of land stabs the scene.
It could be the moment before the fish is returned to the ocean with amazing grace. Once found but now lost in its own freedom. Until next time. What happened before and after this instant is not recorded. But we know that the man in blue shorts standing in a boat and holding up a fish in a photograph posted on social media looks happy. And that he is Quinton de Kock.
“Can’t wait to get back on the water again!” De Kock’s caption didn’t stand out. What did was the date of his post: February 2; three days after the Karachi Test and two days before the second match of the series in Rawalpindi. The picture must have been taken some time earlier in Knysna, the quiet seaside resort on South Africa’s southern coast where De Kock lives, before he left for Pakistan. Was South Africa’s captain honestly longing to go fishing in the middle of his team’s most important series this season, and in the wake of a defeat that should have rung several alarm bells loudly?
It’s easy to leap to that question, more difficult to fathom how De Kock reached that point. Part of the answer is contained in how he has looked and sounded since the start of cricket’s bio-bubble bubble era: like the epitome of a lost cause in need of a patron saint. De Kock’s unvarnished humanity means nothing gets in the way of his instincts on the field. But it also means he struggles to hide how he feels. In the same way that a fish is a dazzling acrobat in water but, on land, in even the most caring hands, reduced to futile wriggling and gasping, De Kock’s slickness at the crease evaporates when he is sat behind a microphone looking into a camera beyond which lurks the press. What you get instead is that most precious of things: breathless honesty.
Here’s De Kock at the Wanderers on January 5, the day South Africa beat Sri Lanka with two days to spare to complete a 2-0 thumping: “Lots of small things get into your mind; things that you’re not used to in life. One day we could living kind of normally and the next you’re in lockdown. Where do we go from there? We’re stuck in a bubble, and we could be stuck in a lockdown in some place for a certain period of time, which is the worst case scenario. It’s very unsettling. I don’t know how long it can last for.”
And here he is on January 18 in Karachi, eight days before the start of that series: “Eventually [bubble life] will catch up with some players, from an emotional and mental side. You’re trying to keep yourself mentally stable and perform for your country at once. There’s only so much of that you can carry on with. But you carry on because people back home want to watch good cricket and want to watch you perform. I’ve only been home for a maximum of three weeks over the last five, six months. It’s been tough but I’m soldiering on. Going forward, two weeks quarantine is almost out of the picture because we play so much cricket.”
The context of those two online press conferences couldn’t have been more different. In the first, De Kock was a triumphant captain. In the second, he was looking forward to playing in Pakistan, a challenge no South Africa team had faced since 2007. So why, both times, was he a husk, empty of enthusiasm and parched of passion? Maybe because he had been in one bio-bubble or another, barring short intervals, since the first week of September. The bubble was an invincible opponent.
De Kock’s bio-secure blues started with arrangements for the IPL. Then came the home white-ball series against England in September and the Sri Lanka Tests in December and January. That done, it was off to Pakistan. In April, Pakistan will be in South Africa to play seven white-ball games. Another series, another bubble. South Africans still fuming about Australia’s late withdrawal from next month’s Test series over Covid fears will have to forgive De Kock if he doesn’t feel the same way — that’s one way to avoid quarantine and a bubble.
De Kock has been afforded another way. The franchise T20 competition at Kingsmead started on Friday. He is not involved, and his absence is conspicuous because South Africa’s other top players are in action. The South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA) revealed that De Kock is being given a break for mental health reasons. The bubble finally burst for him after the Test series in Pakistan. His parting shot to his teammates was that he would be offline and that they wouldn’t be able to find him. Last week he posted another picture: him holding a garrick of at least a metre long; the biggest of the species he has yet caught. The eyes and the smile were soft. It didn’t take a sports psychologist to see the happiness was back.
Kirsten van Heerden, who was an international swimmer for 13 years and represented South Africa at the 2006 Commonwealth Games, is indeed a sports psychologist. She’s also a player development manager with SACA, and while she doesn’t work directly with De Kock she is plugged into the challenges all players face because of the pandemic. “Often you’ll hear players say that on tours they see, pretty much, their hotel room and the cricket field,” she said. “But it’s the choice that you can go out if you want to that has been taken away. Now you can’t. That loss of control can be very difficult for players.”
Van Heerden said players can’t police what evades the Netflix firewall and leaks into their consciousness unbidden: “They’ve been given a lot more time to think and over-think, which most athletes do anyway. You drop a catch or have a bad performance, and you go back to the hotel and you’re not allowed to leave your room. There’s all this time and there’s no distraction from your thoughts.”
Life is not what we thought it was before the pandemic put the brakes on the world. But what is life now that a single positive test for Covid-19 could change everything? That is not at all clear, which is disquieting for most of us. For those accustomed to tightly regimented systems, it can be terrifying. Especially when they are marking time in the bubble.
“It would be fine if it was six weeks; even nine weeks, which is about the maximum [people can endure safely],” Van Heerden said. “But when it’s six weeks and another six weeks followed by another six weeks, it can get overwhelming. Athletes are very goal-orientated. If they know they have 10 bubbles, they could do them. But is it 10 bubbles? Is it two? Is it 40? A lot of my job with players and athletes I work with is to say we don’t know. So we have to focus on the things we can control right now, and do the things that we know can help you in the bubble. And we don’t know if it’s going to be 10 bubbles. If you’re running the Comrades [a 90km ultra-marathon in South Africa] you can’t think of the 90th kilometre at the beginning, otherwise you’re going to be overwhelmed. It’s natural, but our job is to bring the focus back to just now, or just today, or just this week.
“Normally players wake up and their day is incredibly structured — they know what they need to do, where they’re heading and what goal they have. Now they wake up outside of that and it’s really hard for them. A lot of elite athletes get told what to do. They don’t have to think what to do. As a player, your bags magically disappear and then magically reappear outside your hotel room. I know the public will say that’s ridiculous, and that players could do that themselves. But this is the world they live in and it’s very real for them. That’s what they’ve grown up in and what they know, and to be thrown into a different world is difficult. They’re having to handle things themselves, and as strange as it may sound, for them it’s almost like having to learn a new skill.”
John Smit, who captained the Springboks to victory in rugby’s 2007 World Cup, told Van Heerden he didn’t know how to buy an airplane ticket until he planned his honeymoon. He married after playing 39 of his 111 Tests, and in eight countries other than his own. Anthony Delpech, a champion jockey who has ridden 116 Grade 1 winners in South Africa, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates, was a stranger to drawing cash from an ATM: “His agent or his wife would do that.” Not knowing how to perform what most of us would regard as an everyday task is one thing. Not knowing how to recognise the difference between a pout after a poor performance and a problem that could take years to resolve is distinctly another.
“People think, ‘How can you be mentally tough and have mental health issues?’,” Van Heerden said. “I was speaking to an athlete the other day who said you have to be incredibly tough to deal with mental health issues. You can be a mentally tough cricketer, but there are things that happen in life that have nothing to do with weakness or with having a weak mind and your coping mechanisms can be overwhelmed.”
It doesn’t help that professional sport, while inconsequential to reality, can unfairly target and punish those who get it wrong. “If you make a mistake, it’s so public,” Van Heerden said. “If you are battling there’s nowhere to hide. And the public can be brutal in their comments. No-one walks out there to try and make a duck or to try and bowl badly, but in the day and age of social media everyone has an opinion. We talk to the players about social media and a lot of them are really adept at staying off it or managing it, but with nothing to do late at night you end up scrolling through Twitter. That’s not the best idea. Players are human: they’re people first. They’re mentally tough, but mental health is something different.”
The pandemic has only added to that part of the players’ challenge: “There are a lot of changes [because of the virus], and yet they still have to perform. The public is unforgiving — you’re still getting paid to play, so they expect you to win. We’re all having to adjust, but it’s not nearly as public for us as it is for elite athletes.”
To help ease the load, an app requires South Africa’s players to answer, daily, questions that indicate their levels of wellbeing. The information is forwarded to a sports psychologist — not Van Heerden — and Stephen Cook, the former Test opening batter who since the beginning of last year has been SACA’s cricket operations and player engagement manager. No-one else sees or knows what the players reveal.
“The psychologist can ask me if I’ve touched base with a guy and whether he is doing OK,” Cook said. “Sometimes he has put in a lower rating because he’s feeling a bit down in confidence after he’s had a couple of first-ballers. It might not be that he’s struggling mentally; he’s just feeling naturally a bit down that day. So it’s not perfect, but it’s a reminder to the players that there is something available. There are people there for them if they need them. Sometimes guys who get into a pickle that way, they don’t see the wood for the trees. It’s a daily reminder that someone does care about you enough to check up on you.
“For some players it’s great. For others it will be a bit of a burden. They just want to get on with life. But that’s fine. I think we’ve taken the attitude that we’ll try and help everyone, and if it helps one or two guys who otherwise wouldn’t have spoken to someone, that’s fantastic. Then we’ve done something to help. It’s a piece of a puzzle rather than an ultimate one-stop shop answer.
“If I think back to mine and previous eras, you wouldn’t have opened up. It would have been seen as a sign of weakness. But now some of the best players in the world in a variety of sports are more than happy to say, ‘Listen, I’m struggling’, and feel totally safe with the perceived fallout.”
Did the app catch De Kock? We cannot know. But we do know that he handles the fish he reels in with amazing grace. And that once he has found them he allows them to be lost in their own freedom. Like he is now. Until next time.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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