Over the Christmas holidays, while everyone else was trying to find a patch of beach sand that didn’t already have a German tourist on it, the South African men’s cricket team quietly pulled off the kind of miracle that wouldn’t be out of place in an Oscar-bait movie trailer.
Imagine slow-motion shots of exhausted cricketers experiencing the extremes of triumph and despair, agony and delight – with an impossibly gravelly voice saying things like:
“Against insurmountable odds …”
“No-one thought it could be done …”
“Watch the impossible … become reality …”
This, as the music gloriously swells over titles that say: “From the country that brought you the Rugby World Cup 2019 and the Rugby World Cup 2023, comes a thrilling new chapter ...”
The details aren’t really that interesting for anyone save the most tragic of armchair cricket fanatics, but the nub of it is that we qualified for the final of the World Test Championship and the important thing is that it’s a Big Deal. A lot of this is because the team did some incredible things to get there, with truly massive odds stacked against them. But by now, it feels like South Africans are getting quietly familiar, and maybe even comfortable, with this kind of sporting narrative.
All of us, except maybe the captain of the team that actually did it, Temba Bavuma.
Beyond the shadow of Kolisi
Bavuma has spent most of his tenure as the Proteas captain living in the 6’1” shadow of his significantly more famous and adored rugby counterpart, Siya Kolisi. Something that is very difficult to just gloss over when you take in how almost comically different these two men are in every way.
For starters, Bavuma is a really small guy, and Kolisi is, well, the opposite of that. Bavuma is softly spoken, serious and contemplative, while Kolisi literally sings his heart from his sleeve, draws eyes wherever he goes and is always seemingly unafraid to (mostly) joyfully express himself to the world at large. And he has reason to. He’s won back-to-back Rugby World Cups and he’s adored by just about every corner of the nation. Bavuma could probably slip into a Mugg and Bean for one of its stupidly enormous muffins without drawing even a second look. The reason is most likely down to the unfortunate reality that most of Bavuma’s time as the national cricket captain, and before that when he was just a player, was dogged by persistent scepticism surrounding his ability.
Once a promising young player, the feeling was that he’d plateaued at a level that was mediocre at best and that he wasn’t good enough to hold his place in the team, let alone be captain. He didn’t score enough runs; he wasn’t tactically sophisticated enough – the borderline malicious whispering was relentless. But despite all this, Bavuma has ended this current season among the top 10 batters in the world while also having successfully led his team to the pinnacle of the current Test Cricket cycle.
It’s a remarkable trajectory and speaks volumes about the man’s character. It also doesn’t take too much imagination to feel a deep level of metaphoric resonance between Bavuma’s arc and the country as a whole: once promising, but with unrealised potential; mostly written off by the world at large. Punching above its weight with a stout resoluteness that is largely baffling to anyone who isn’t us.
While watching Bavuma being interviewed in the immediate aftermath of having guided his team to this extraordinary achievement, I couldn’t quite believe how seemingly … apprehensive he was about it all. He’d gone out earlier in the day in strange and controversial fashion, while his team desperately needed steadying, and the game had ultimately been won by the kind of courageous last-gasp heroics that come along once in a generation.
Bavuma was asked how he had felt watching his team claw themselves over the line, and he said something truly astonishing: that he hadn’t really seen much of the chase because he’d instead been “sulking in the toilets”. It was such a candid moment, so vulnerable in its truth and frailty, that the 34-year-old instantly made himself the most relatable and fearless South African public figure I’ve watched in recent memory. To be so human in a moment like that was breathtaking and immediately brought me back to thinking about how different he is from his fellow sporting captain, who spends substantially more time in the spotlight.
Yin and yang
Siya Kolisi almost never speaks of himself. He very deliberately positions himself merely as a conduit for the team and as a vessel for the nation’s most feverish and hysterical positivity. He speaks of the country, and the Boks, and the coach, almost always deflecting away any of the personal. The victories aren’t his, they belong to South Africa or to Coach Rassie or to the other members of his team. In doing this he becomes a cypher, a cheerleader for our collective self-belief, dragging us all onto the stage with him to give us a taste of that sense of achievement.
Bavuma, however, often speaks in highly personal terms. But in such a vulnerable, laid-bare kind of way, that it becomes deeply cathartic to watch someone be so open and unvarnished about their own personal struggles and turmoils, even while they’re experiencing the heights of success.
It’s an invitation to recognise that for all our Kolisi-ish collective spirit, sometimes it really is just you standing alone with nothing but your own desires and frailties at war with themselves. And that feels just as important a quality to be shown and admire. Self-reliance, frustration, insecurity – but always only just held in check by threads of determination that have been layered into us by years of setback, false dawns and the slow, incremental creeping forward of progress. I recognise this deeply as a South African. Bavuma’s gift is allowing us all to “sulk in the toilets” for a bit, but then get back out there and try again. To trust in ourselves and to believe that somehow tomorrow will be better.
It’s kind of incredible to have two such utterly different people in these highly public roles, capturing the yin and yang of what could be crudely described as “the national character”. These two captains, black South African men playing sports traditionally regarded as being “white”, taking us to the heights of the game on the world stage and showing us totally different sides to who we are and what success can look like.
Springbok captain Siya Kolisi. Picture: Dan Mullan/Getty Images. Proteas captain Temba Bavuma. Picture: Grant Pitcher/Gallo Images.
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