Will the real Faf du Plessis stand up?
Brilliant hero of Adelaide test must re-emerge against Pakistan
FAF du Plessis’s eyes lurked like a mugger’s, deep in the dark alleys of their sockets. His cheekbones had sunk without trace into a face the colour of the ash of last night’s braai fire. His mouth was pale, thin and uncertain.
With his chin tucked into his sternum, Du Plessis stared straight ahead and tried to make sense of the day he had just lived through, and which was still banging around his aching head. Outside, the embers of an epic match glowed in the setting sun.
Inside, staring back at Du Plessis, a roomful of reporters,
I’ve got no doubt he has the talent and the ability to get through this
several of them veterans of their craft, were trying to suppress their wonder: how had everything gone so right for Du Plessis?
It was November 26 2012. The previous day, there were 28 overs left when he came to the crease with SA listing on 45/4. By stumps, he had faced 74 balls for his 19 not out.
The next day, Du Plessis took charge for 392 deliveries, two thirds of the total balls bowled, to score an undefeated 110 and save the Adelaide test.
He was exhausted and dehydrated as he tried to keep it all together for that press confer- ence before seeking recovery in the needle of a drip. But even then a glimmer of triumph gleamed from the backs of those tired eyes. And well it might have: in almost eight hours of batting, Du Plessis had gone from test debutant to cricket hero. Even the fair dinkum Aussies knew it and were happy to say so.
Eight tests, 20 one-day internationals and seven T20s later, that status has slipped its once solid moorings. Du Plessis has gone eight test innings without a half-century and has passed that mini-milestone just once in his last 13 ODIs. The picture is brighter in the shortest format, in which he has scores of 63 and 85 in those seven games.
Worse yet, he was tried and convicted of ball-tampering during the second test against Pakistan in Dubai last month.
For his next trick, Du Plessis will have to rise above all that to captain SA in T20s in Dubai on Wednesday and Friday.
Is the Faf du Plessis we’re getting the same Faf du Plessis we saw on that shining day in Adelaide?
“I’ve got no doubt he has the talent and the ability to get through this,” Jimmy Cook said. “The danger was that he started off so well. People expected him to be a superstar. Now opponents have seen him play.”
Du Plessis seemed to have emerged from the gloom in the third ODI in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday, when he drove with rare confidence for his 55.
Two days later at the same ground, he flung his bat at a delivery from Mohammed Irfan and was caught in the covers for 10. The stroke suffered from too many competing ideas and not enough clear thinking.
Would the more formal, less experimental environment of test or even first-class cricket not be a more suitable place for Du Plessis to play himself back into form, compared with the frenetic fizz of a tight one-day series?
“When a guy is out of form, one-day cricket can be good for him,” Cook said. “It’s not like first-class cricket where you can hang back and try to build an innings — you actually have to
He’s moving around the crease too much; he’s almost arrogant
go out and play. He’s going to have to play his natural way.”
What has Du Plessis been doing wrong?
“He’s moving around the crease too much; he’s almost arrogant in the way he does it,” Peter Kirsten said. “I’d like to see him respect the delivery more. He’s trying to improvise too much too soon.
“He’s getting out playing across the line too often. He needs to play between mid-off and mid-on.”
As he did on Wednesday, in fact. “I’ll probably get my nine hours of sleep tonight for the first time on this trip,” he said then.
When his eyes are able to close properly again, Du Plessis needs to remember the player he was when he looked and felt like death on a hot afternoon in Adelaide.