SA’s new skipper will face a taxing task

SOME teams don’t need to be captained as much as left alone to get on with winning. Others are nothing without their captains. Still others are captained by committee.

Players look to the skipper to sweat the small, medium and large stuff; from being the first bloke to step over the rope to putting up with the press to being fined — banned, even — for a slow over-rate.

Captaincy looks sexy from the distance of the boundary, but it’s not much fun from the proximity of a match referee’s accusing finger or when some humourless reporter gives you a hard time about the sky being too blue.

The job (and it is a job) is much easier on the field than off. Even so, when the players get it right, they take the credit.

But when they get it wrong, you take the blame.

And those are just the broad strokes. How much more taxing is cricket for those unfortunates who are under the continual pressure of knowing they are responsible for setting the example for everybody else in their team?

Oh, and don’t forget to play properly while you’re busy with all that. No one is as despised as a captain who does not pull his weight in the side.

Until March 6 this year — the day after the third test against Australia at Newlands — Graeme Smith had woken up and gone to sleep to this reality for 3 959 straight days. That’s enough to drive most sane men mad. Perhaps Smith was nuts to start with. Or maybe he is cut from a cloth we have little hope of unravelling in our own minds.

Thing is, he needs to be replaced by the time SA play two tests in Sri Lanka in the second half of July. That’s 15½ weeks away, so time, for once, is not of the essence. But making the right decision is, and we should be grateful that SA have two viable candidates to choose from in AB de Villiers and Faf du Plessis.

But a pertinent question remains: what will Smith’s successor as SA’s test captain be getting himself into?

All of the above is only part of the answer. He will also have to deal with the real and imagined challenges of the game’s ongoing racial transformation — amazing how darkening the national team always raises the alarm that it is being weakened, never strengthened — and easily the most fickle public in world cricket. With them a press that has little taste for subtlety; and, of course, those creatures called administrators.

The new captain will take over a dressing room in which the coach still has to earn the respect that came standard with his predecessor. Russell Domingo is a solid man and a successful, experienced coach. But that’s not good enough for the people who want him to be Gary Kirsten. So much so that Domingo could do with the protection afforded by a captain whose appointment does not need to be explained.

As a team, South Africa have become adept at sealing their dressing room against the realities of their wider world. Most of the time that unifies them and they are stronger for it. Sometimes it isolates them and they lapse into bouts of quixotic self-regard.

Add that to the to-do list: keep it real, skipper.