Temba Bavuma is the current captain of the South Africa test cricket team. If the wider world is interested, there are, I think, profound lessons to be learnt from, and currency to be made from, his story.
South Africa have just won the final of the World Test Championship. This was the third running of the WTC in its two-year cycle, a tournament introduced fairly recently to formalise the competitive structure of test cricket which, though not without significant flaws, is already well-established, prestigious and sought after.
This is the first major ICC trophy South Africa have ever won. They have, over the 33 years since their return after apartheid, developed the reputation as cricket's greatest chokers, losing countless crunch games when victory was in their hands. They have had many fine players, and arguably better teams than this one, but this is their first big win (this aversion to success is in direct contrast to the rugby union team, which has a remarkable four World Cup wins from only eight tournaments entered).
South African cricket, post-apartheid, is a complicated story, with plenty of good and bad to it.
As well as scholarships and schemes for young black cricketers, it was decided early on that their should be a formalised "quota system". I think the exact nature of it has varied, but certainly, for the last few years, that has meant, across a cricket season, there need to be six non-white players in the team, two of whom should be Black African.
Separate to Black African players, in this categorisation, are "Cape coloured", one of the most diverse intermixed ethnic groups in the world. Ashwell Prince was, briefly, the first non-white South African captain, but Temba Bavuma is considered the first black African captain.
He was also the first black specialist batter in the team when he made his test debut in 2014. That is pretty striking as it had been more than 20 years. There had been excellent non-white batters like Herschelle Gibbs, Ashwell Prince and the great Hashim Amla, there had been one great black bowler, Makhaya Ntini, some other decent all-rounders but in all that time, there had not been one black batter who had made it to the team, let alone thrived.
So there was a lot of pressure on the diminutive Bavuma from the start. I remember the first time I encountered him, watching England's 2015-16 tour of South Africa. He failed in the first test. In the second, famously, early on in his innings, Ben Stokes, fresh from a career-high double hundred with the bat, sledged him with the brutal "You are absolute shit. What are you doing here?"
Now, people have said worse on a cricket pitch, and no ill intention implied on Stokes' part, but such a sledge carries double the weight because of SA's quota system, because of what a cause of tension and dissent it has been, quite often from white players who do not feel they are being treated "fairly". Many of them, most famously Kevin Pietersen, have plied their cricket elsewhere. South Africa became quite the cricket factory for other nations, particularly England (to be fair to many of the players involved, England is a much better place to be a professional cricketer financially than South Africa, so if you have a British parent and are not certain you'll make it to the South Africa team, it's a natural move....)
Anyway, Bavuma made a century in that innings, and I immediately became a fan. His next few years in test cricket were ok, not great. He made a fair few 50s and showed he could exist at test level but didn't push on with more 100s. This was, in general, a bad time in tests for South Africa. with the great team of Smith, Kallis, Amila, de Villiers, Steyn, Boucher, Philander, Morkel coming to an end, and very few new players of quality coming through. Their best player, Quinton de Kock, refused to take a knee when it was demanded, and would retire from tests for white ball riches. The country prioritised white ball cricket in general.
Bavuma held his place in the team but was not doing enough to put the muttering about quotas to bed, even though no one else was doing any better. He replaced de Kock as captain of South Africa's white ball side in 2021 and became captain of the test team in 2022. He was South Africa's first black captain.
The upturn in fortunes, both for the player and the team, was instant and remarkable. Bavuma has averaged 50+ with the bat since then, looked like a proper world-class batter, and he has not yet lost a test as captain. In this suddenly good-again South Africa team, there are several very good players, the best of them being fast bowler Kagiso Rabida. Indeed, with Bavuma, Rabada, fellow fast bowler Lungi Ngidi and spinner Keshav Masharaf (SA's best spinner since apartheid), the core of the side is non-white.
In a world where the idea of diversity, equality and inclusion is being rolled back, supposedly in the name of fairness, it is worth looking at what happened as the culmination of a long-running albeit controversial system of positive discrimination, where a little bit of quota helped a young black player keep his place in the team, what actually happened, for him and for the team, when he was given the lead, how South Africa finally has a team that properly represents their nation and has also achieved something the teams of the past could not achieve.
Fairness, eh ...
No comments:
Post a Comment