LED BY FAF, PROTEAS’ NEW ERA HAS NO ‘I’ IN TEAM
For nine, long years spanning 14 series away from the comforts and familiarities of home, South Africa didn’t lose a single Test series. It was a record which inspired every cricketer to come into the team rather than intimidate them. It brought out the best in them, often fighting qualities they had no idea they possessed until confronted with adversity.
Eventually, of course, like an old family dog cherished by all the family and occasionally taken for granted but more often for loving walks, it had to be put down. A gentle, painless injection would have been preferable, but the Indian team used a heavy, blunt object 20 months ago and there was nothing South Africans could do about it.
Nine years. In an era when debate more often than not suggested ‘home ground advantage’ had gone too far, the South African’s confounded conventional wisdom by refusing to be beaten, often in the face of absurd odds and the most unlikely of scenarios.
The list of ridiculous match saves is too long to mention here – but batting out the final day in Colombo on a raging turner was a good one, and doing so in Adelaide from a starting position of 76-4 was even better.
The 14-series record is second only to the 18 which the great West Indies team of the 1980s managed. Somehow it seems slightly more commendable for South Africa to have put their record together without a shred of the air of invincibility the West Indies enjoyed.
Faf du Plessis made his debut in the Adelaide Test match and scored an unbeaten hundred, while AB de Villiers played my favourite Test innings – 33 from 220 balls in over five hours, without a boundary. He blocked half volleys and left long-hops, all bowled deliberately by the end. Imagine that. It was an illustration that there were no limits to what the team would do to avoid defeat.
When defeat finally came, Hashim Amla had (reluctantly) accepted the Test captaincy but he resigned soon afterwards in favour of de Villiers who, in turn, was forced to step aside through injury – temporarily he thought. His replacement, du Plessis, made respectful but strong reference to the record and, by implication, those players who had earned it.
“Some great teams and great players created that piece of history, but it is in the past now. It is time for this team to make its own history,” he said.
Only three players were part of it from start to finish – defeat in Sri Lanka in 2006 to defeat in India in 2015-16. Hashim Amla, de Villiers and Dale Steyn. The ‘big three’ were all youngsters at the start of their careers but they had the knowledge of what it took and what it meant to win in England and Australia twice each and remain unbeaten in India, the UAE, New Zealand and Sri Lanka.
Others, like Morne Morkel and JP Duminy, arrived early in the piece although one now remains following Duminy’s ‘release’ to return to Cape Town before this Test.
At least the men who arrived nearer the end than the beginning, like Dean Elgar, Quinton de Kock and Kagiso Rabada, no longer felt like they were guarding another family’s heirlooms, or looking after its dog for that matter.
Amla said after defeat that it was “a consolation” to have lost the record in conditions more extreme than he had ever encountered before and perhaps that can be used as a starting point for a new age. Duminy said the squad “prided
JP Duminy said the South African squad ‘prided themselves on being resilient tourists’. That has been carried forward in chunks
themselves on being resilient tourists.” That, too, has been carried forward in chunks.
Most of South Africa’s greatest postisolation cricketers were part of the great unbeaten run. Shaun Pollock, Makhaya Ntini and Herschelle Gibbs at the beginning, Jacques Kallis and Graeme Smith almost throughout and, of course, Amla, Steyn and de Villiers.
Much pondering has been done about what made the most difference between the performance of the Proteas at Lord’s and Trent Bridge. Naturally, Englishmen were more concerned with what went wrong with England.
It is usually wrong to over-apportion credit or blame to the captain – he is, after all, just one of eleven players on the field. But in the case of du Plessis, and in this instance only, it is probably fair to say he was the biggest single difference. Only just ahead of the fact that his fielders caught the ball rather than dropped it in the outfield.
Then there was the selection of a fourth seamer, Chris Morris, who performed at vital times with bat and ball. After that we move to the unmeasurables, like the no-ball count dropping from 13 at Lord’s to none in Nottingham.Who knows how much difference that may have made?
But the least quantifiable of all is the long-lasting effect ‘the record’ has had on South Africa’s Test cricketers, even those who barely knew it in real life. Now that it has gone, it is possible to say with some certainty that its legacy remains and contributes to the bloody-minded determination to never, ever to accept defeat.
Morris referred obliquely and in wittily exaggerated terms to du Plessis, “batting for three days to save a Test match”, as part of the effect his leadership has. But there are so many examples – like the extreme selflessness of de Villiers.
The message is the same in all successful teams, of course, but somehow it comes across and is transferred between generations more clearly and effectively in the Proteas Test team than in most others. The team comes before all individuals.