Amla brings a straight bat to the Proteas captaincy
HASHIM Amla, once a reluctant leader, now considers himself mature enough to be captain of South Africa’s cricket team. The same could be said of the team itself. When he leads against Sri Lanka next month, the team might not be much different from the last time it played a test match. Graeme Smith, who led the team in 108 tests and won 53 of those, will be the obvious absentee, Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher having retired earlier.
The players who take the field in Galle will all be familiar faces. But it will a different side in other ways.
There is no question that Amla has big boots to fill. His immediate predecessor was a colossus of the game — a veritable run machine and the most successful test captain in the history of cricket.
Amla won’t surpass that record. He is, after all, 31 years old and unlikely to lead South Africa in as many tests as Smith did. Amla is also the antithesis of Smith in other ways. In batting terms, Amla is an elegant strokeplayer, Smith an awkward, but effective, bludgeoner of the ball. It is in the realm of leadership, however, where the biggest difference between the old captain and the new one lies.
When he accepted the captaincy this week, Amla remarked that he was a man on his own. He is also his own man, as he revealed by eschewing the beer logo on his shirt. He did it with such dignity that the beer barons bent over backwards to accommodate his temperance and devout Muslim beliefs.
The fifth Proteas test skipper since readmission to world cricket, Amla has a personality and demeanour that could not be more different to those of the men who preceded him. Whereas the other four projected a tough-guy image, especially the one nicknamed “Biff”, who was mostly brute force, Amla will be serene.
That doesn’t mean he will be less tough, just less ruffled. When he became the first South African batsman to make a triple-century — against England at the Oval two years ago — he appeared to have done so without even raising a sweat.
Like those who came before him, Amla also possesses an astute cricket brain. We saw a hint of that during his short-lived captaincy at the Dolphins, and he has been around the test scene long enough — 76 matches — to have picked up a thing or two about captaining at the highest level. Best of all, he gives the impression of being secure, at last, in the job. When Smith became captain, at 22 the youngest South Africa has ever had, he needed allies in the side and relied on old hands like Kallis and the de facto skipper, Boucher. This led to allegations of cliques in the dressing room. There will be no such danger with Amla in charge. It’s also a sign of how the team, like its captain, has matured.