One of the best sports books I have read is John Carlin’s Playing The Enemy, an account of South Africa hosting and winning the Rugby World Cup of 1995. Rugby was the game of the White supremacist Afrikaners, the architects of the apartheid system, yet it had an unlikely fan in Nelson Mandela. Carlin sensitively recreates how Mandela, a man jailed for decades by Afrikaner politicians, came to embrace the sport, discussing its technicalities with its fans. After his release, Mandela became
president of South Africa and, in that capacity, became the unofficial mascot of a White-dominated rugby team, developing a special friendship with the Afrikaner captain, Francois Pienaar.
Carlin’s book (later made into a film called Invictus, with Morgan Freeman playing Mandela) beautifully blended sport with its social and political context, by showing how previously antagonistic racial groups were brought together by the camaraderie between a visionary Black politician and open-minded White sportsmen. I remembered the book (less so the film) earlier this year, when the South African team won the World Test Championship at the most hallowed of all cricket grounds, Lord’s. That win lacked the historical charge of the 1995 rugby victory, which came so soon after the end of apartheid in South Africa, and took place under the watch of the most charismatic world leader of his age. Nonetheless, for non-jingoistic cricket lovers everywhere it had the same sort of fairy-tale-like echoes. For South Africa had been treated poorly by the self-appointed ‘Big Three’ of world cricket, Australia, India, and England, who consider them so unworthy of respect as to never give them more than a two- or three-Test series. That their WTC victory came at the expense of the holders, Australia, gave me a special thrill. Most joyous of all was to see South Africa so brilliantly led by their Black captain, Temba Bavuma, who — in addition to all he did to make of eleven individuals of different racial backgrounds a real team — also batted so well in the crucial fourth innings of the match.
I watched almost all of the WTC final on television, because it was Test cricket, and because South Africa is a country in whose complicated history I have a long-standing interest. After Aiden Markram and Temba Bavuma had completed their successful run chase, I had dinner, and went to sleep with a sense of pleasure and fulfilment. The next morning, when I scanned the news on my phone, that sense had been grossly violated, aesthetically as well as politically. For I now found that, to allegedly ‘commemorate’ the WTC final, the International Cricket Council had put out a video in which the main roles were played not by Bavuma and his men, but by Jay Shah, the chairman of the ICC. One viewer calculated that fully 11 out of the 23 shots in the 45-second video had Shah as the star. This was shockingly vulgar, mostly because (by all accounts) Jay Shah does not know how to hold a cricket bat (or how to bowl on a pitch of 22 yards either), but also because the principal reason that Jay Shah is chairman of the ICC is that the Board of Control for Cricket in India effectively runs world cricket, the Bharatiya Janata Party effectively runs the BCCI (and hence the ICC), and the second most powerful man in the BJP (and hence in India) is Jay Shah’s father.
Bavuma, Markram, Rabada, Maharaj and the other members of the South African team thus had their moment of triumph defiled by a brash, boorish, self-promoting son of an Indian politician. Jay Shah was widely mocked for his act. However, his behaviour was of a piece with a long-standing condescension that Indian cricket administrators have shown towards South African cricketers. Back in 2012-13, when India was due to play a three-Test series in South Africa, that series was abbreviated (from three matches to two) because a series against the West Indies was hastily arranged only so that Sachin Tendulkar would play his 200th Test match in Mumbai. It was a similar condescension that made the BCCI offer South Africa a mere two-Test series at home towards the end of 2025. Admittedly, this was decided before their WTC win; nonetheless, that it was so scheduled shows that the BCCI thinks South African cricketers far less worthy of its attention than those from England or Australia, who are routinely offered five-Test series. This deference towards White, English-speaking nations sits oddly with a regime that claims to be opposed to British colonialism in general and to Thomas Macaulay in particular.
Offered a measly two Tests, Temba Bavuma’s men nonetheless swallowed their pride, and came, saw, and conquered. On a pitch in Calcutta designed to help Indian spinners, the South Africans bowled and batted much better in conditions more foreign to them than to the hosts. The captain in particular was at the top of his game; in his assured bowling changes, in his match-defining knock in the third innings, in his match-winning catch in the fourth innings. The visitors carried their form into the second Test in Guwahati, where, led by an inspired all-round performance by Marco Jansen, they comprehensively outplayed the home side.
If 1995 was South Africa’s year in international rugby, 2025 is assuredly South Africa’s year in international cricket. Five-day cricket is by some distance the most arduous form of the game, and to win the World Test Championship must therefore count as a far greater sporting achievement than winning the T20 or one-day World Cups. Having won that trophy, the South African players then came to India, the country which has more cricketers and cricket fans than all the other nations of the world put together, and where teams like Australia and England have found it notoriously hard to compete. Yet, mocking history and circumstance, the South Africans dominated the home side throughout the two Tests, even while lacking their best player, the fast bowler Kagiso Rabada.
This unexpected defeat has sent Indian cricket fans into a tizzy. They ask why our side lost so badly in tracks they knew much better than their opponents. They wonder why Sarfaraz Khan, with his remarkable record on home pitches, was not picked in the Indian squad. They speculate as to whether the coach, Gautam Gambhir, will be sacked. The more self-aware fans will ask whether our obsession with the Indian Premier League has led to our becoming less competitive in Test cricket. Hopefully these fans shall also ask an even tougher question — in the light of how our team has been thrashed, surely it is past time that the BCCI accords the cricketers of South Africa more respect?
In my view, the best way to atone for our past arrogance would be to schedule, as soon as it is convenient, a four- or even five-Test series played by India in South Africa. That would really test our mettle, and allow us to judge how good our much-feted cricketers really are. (Notably, though India has won Test series in Australia, England, New Zealand, Pakistan and the West Indies, it still hasn’t done so in South Africa.)
The achievements of the South African rugby players in 1995, so soon after the end of the apartheid and the country’s first democratic election, were memorialised in both a book and a film. Now, thirty years later, there is little euphoria about South Africa as a nation, and of course Nelson Mandela is long dead. It is thus overwhelmingly unlikely that a feature film with Temba Bavuma in the lead role will be made about the Test matches played by South Africa in 2025. But perhaps a South African (or even an Indian) writer of the younger generation could at least devote a book to it. He might there make something of the fact that in one key respect the cricketers of 2025 score over the rugby players of 1995. This is that they are far more multi-racial in their composition, and have been led (superbly) by a Black captain.
Meanwhile, as an ageing and non-jingoistic cricket fan myself, I offer, as my tribute to Bavuma’s men, this All-Time XI of the best South African cricketers of the post-apartheid era: 1. Graeme Smith 2. Herschelle Gibbs 3. Hashim Amla (vice-captain) 4. Jacques Kallis 5. Temba Bavuma (captain) 6. A.B. de Villiers (wicket-keeper) 7. Shaun Pollock 8. Dale Steyn 9. Keshav Maharaj 10. Kagiso Rabada 11. Allan Donald 12th man: Jonty Rhodes.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in
