Crazy diamond
Steyn has lent cricket his humanity
● “Terrible guitar player” isn’t how most people would introduce themselves. But Dale Steyn isn’t most people, and his own opinion of his proficiency with a six-string is the first thing more than three-million Twitter followers see when they log onto his account.
Is that humble bragging? Or a clue that SA’s leading Test wicket-taker is about more than cricket?
That most people would plump for the latter shows the admiration Steyn has gathered while earning respect around the cricket world.
Record or no record, wickets or no wickets, Steyn will leave his mark as someone who lent the game his humanity — and, even more rarely, will leave the game with his humanity intact.
Here are a few reasons why:
Celebrate it like you stole it
There’s already blood in the eyes, and then they explode. A throat opens to expel satiating rage.
Veins bulge like snakes under the skin. An arm assaults the air.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it even human? In the moment, all or none of the above could apply. But we do know this: Dale Steyn has taken another wicket.
Not that every success is afforded equal treatment. Those achieved at the expense of major Test batsmen, particularly in pressure situations, get the Full Monty.
But there are almost forgotten celebrations, for other, lesser strikes, which are then remembered and performed perfunctorily and a touch by rote.
Tailenders usually get a barely raised hand, like a bored royal being wheeled past a dutifully cheering crowd.
Many of Steyn’s white-ball wickets seem hardly to register with him.
If the roar from the stands is loud enough — and so to ignore it would insult the spectators — he brings out a sturdy but stodgy fist pump.
In an age fuelled by fakeness, he struggles to wear his heart anywhere except on his sleeve.
Haircut 100
Steyn arrived on the Test scene 14 years ago, beaming the almost chubby face of youth at the world.
That has matured into a lean and lined visage, evidence of decades of eternal summer. And above and around all that have bobbed and weaved all sort of hairstyles.
We’ve seen the schoolboy borselkop, the schoolboy floppy, complete with unmanageable fringe, the Walter White beard and moustache, the severe sidepath as previously seen on the stages of British repertory theatres in the 1930s, a Mohican pregnant with violence and borrowed from Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, and the mercifully shortlived Alice band period.
And we’ve forgiven him all of them.
Maybe not the Alice band …
Socially unsocialised
At a press conference at the WACA in 2012, when Steyn was asked where all the wickets had gone — he had taken 5/258 in Brisbane and Adelaide — he replied, icy cold: “Perhaps I’m just not good enough.”
Years later he took issue with me on Twitter: “You used to be a reporter. Now you’re just a hater. F*** off. Blocked.”
And blocked I remain. But we have since had several downright entertaining discussions — from this end of the conversation, anyway — and illuminating interviews.
All good. Far rather anger in your face than out of earshot.
Besides, how many of us old enough to vote know how to unblock someone should we want to?
And we’re only getting older. One of these years, when Steyn has time to devote to his guitar, he might want to learn to play a song that seems, in parts, to have been written for him: “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
“Shine on you crazy diamond.”
In an age fuelled by fakeness, he struggles to wear his heart anywhere except on his sleeve