In June South Africa became champions of the Test-playing cricket world by beating Australia by five wickets at Lord’s. Lord’s is cricket’s imperial palace. The spiritual home of the game. You couldn’t win a bigger trophy at a bigger place. These are big memories, so large they’ll last a lifetime.
What people tend not to know about Lord’s is that it houses the finest collection of cricket art in the world. An oil portrait of Viv Richards hangs on the walls. It captures masterfully Richards’s swagger and cool hauteur. There’s an equally impressive portrait of Brian Lara. And one of “Pigeon”, the Aussie fast bowler we know as Glenn McGrath.
After the Proteas’ victory, who might now be commemorated in oil and hung against the wall at Lord’s? Would it be Aiden Markram, scorer of 136 to win the game after his first innings duck? Or will Lord’s perhaps commission a painting of Kagiso Rabada, who had figures of nine for 110 in that match?
Maybe that’s too obvious, stellar as Markram’s and Rabada’s performances were.
Maybe the portrait should be of Temba Bavuma? The Proteas’ skipper scored only 36 and 66 in the final; neither of those live long in the memory. But those 102 accumulated runs don’t tell the full story. Bavuma’s second innings 66 was played for the most part on one leg. He injured a hamstring on the third afternoon. He was, so to speak, legless in the second dig.
Proteas batting coach Ashwell Prince thought he should come off. Bavuma said he wouldn’t, and answered Prince in far more fruity language than that.
Bavuma is a bit like Springbok flyhalf Manie Libbok — he divides people. His detractors point out that it was seven years between his first and his second Test centuries. They say he’s not demonstrative as a skipper. They say his T20 abilities are negligible. They’d be right.
But here’s the thing. Bavuma has suffered more abuse at the hands of so-called patriots than we can imagine. He’s become better with age. In his quiet, dignified way, he’s as powerful as Ox Nché. He’s even learnt to live with his coach, Shukri Conrad quips. “He leads from the back,” says Conrad.
Maybe South Africa’s performance can’t be captured in art. How does one, for instance, capture the quality of their catching in the final? How does one capture the fact that here’s a side who were bowled out for 138 on the second morning? That’s not the stuff of champions. To get back up after being so flat on the canvas is remarkable.
It’s equally remarkable that the Springboks are double champions of the rugby world. Their World Cup wins of 2019 and 2023 are now widely celebrated, but we forget. South African rugby was once like a drunk man staggering down a dark road at midnight. The sport didn’t have the faintest idea of where it was going. It was only a matter of time before it got hit by a speeding car.
Strange results, including defeats by Japan and Italy in 2015 and 2016, happened regularly. Allister Coetzee wasn’t allowed to pick overseas-based players. It was embarrassing wearing a green jersey in public, let alone in the broader world.
Thanks to Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber, the wisdom and money of SA Rugby and a golden generation of players, all that has changed.
But consider this. It’s a miracle, in South Africa’s fraught political and economic environment, where wealth differentials are so high, that this country has produced two concurrent world champions.
Looked at in another way, South Africa ranks 106th on the UN’s human development index. We’re sandwiched between Tunisia (105) and Uzbekistan (107). That’s not a good look.
Maybe South Africa’s performance can’t be captured in art. How does one, for instance, capture the quality of their catching in the final?l
Let’s unpack the miracle. South Africa is at the bottom of a continent the rest of the world views for the most part with pity. Very few sporting competitors in cricket and rugby (Zimbabwe?) exist on the continent itself. This means that South Africa regularly plays against teams from thousands of kilometres away. Though a sporting country, we cannot improve our sport through regional competition.
The strength, influence and ability of sporting teams tend to be enhanced by geographical proximity. Look at European football. Or North American basketball. That isn’t a feature here, where playing away inevitably means playing far, far away.
The broadcast rights landscape locally, where money is usually made in sport, is stagnant, thanks to an uncompetitive environment dominated by SuperSport, which is tardy and complacent. Not a day of coverage goes by without a misspelling or a gaffe or a moment of idiocy.
We cannot remotely envisage, in this broadcast rights environment, what happened two weeks ago in the US, where Disney, through ESPN, forked out $2bn for a 10% stake in the National Football League (NFL). Those amounts just aren’t possible in South Africa.
In addition, the standard of your average sporting board member in this country is poor. The politicians who concern themselves with sport are photo-op junkies and serial opportunists.
Did anyone see the unedifying spectacle of sports minister Gayton McKenzie hogging the limelight at SuperSport’s televised welcome for the Proteas after Lord’s? The players were bored and embarrassed. Rabada looked angry.
Two South African cricket provinces (Border and Northern Cape) are under administration. Western Province isn’t far from bankruptcy. Boland and Cricket South Africa (CSA) have wholly different views on Boland’s handling of a domestic T10 tournament the union ran last September.
Until six months ago, Boland had a convicted felon, Johan Clarke, as its acting president. As a prison warder in New Zealand 14 years ago, Clarke supplied drugs to prisoners, allowing them to continue being dealers while inside. He served eight months of a 21-month sentence.
When Boland listed the presidential candidates for its 2025 AGM in a couple of weeks’ time, Clarke’s name was on it. This is how business gets done in cricket’s provinces.
This wouldn’t, on the face of it, appear to be the kind of environment from which world champions are made.
By the same token, too much can be made of admin mediocrity and the tyranny of distance. Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwe-born England cricket coach, said one of his roles was to “cocoon” his side. In 2005, with Fletcher at the helm, Freddie Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen wrested back the Ashes from Australia. Fletcher’s instinct was right. Keep the players away from the suits.
The point here is that it is also difficult to tease out the causality between administrative mediocrity and sporting success — or otherwise. Do our cricketers prosper because of the administrators, or in spite of them? Most of us incline to the latter opinion.
For all this, it’s wrong (and inaccurate) to get into reflexive administrator-bashing for the hell of it. There have been some commercial coups at SA Rugby after the 2023 World Cup win in France. Think of new sponsors Pick n Pay — the coming together of two household brands, a Price Palooza for both parties.
The commercial highs of signing new sponsors FNB and Coca-Cola also need to be balanced with some less salutary achievements in the rugga ecosystem. The Bulls, this season’s United Rugby Championship’s beaten finalists, for example, will lose tens of millions of rand in the financial year.
On the cricket front, commercial achievements are similarly mixed. CSA has been savvy with signing sponsors Suzuki and Dafabet, but only three of the 15 CSA unions will make money this financial year.
The Titans are one of the three. “We’ll make double-digit profits,” says CEO Jacques Faul.
“We have maybe 30 of what we call ‘turnstile days’ at Centurion in a good season,” he says, “which isn’t very much, so we’ve focused on stimulating growth and events from Mondays to Thursdays at our stadium. We have more than 15 new sponsors in the small to medium range, we’ve made operational savings and we’ve insourced alcohol sales. We’ve had to work hard.”
Faul adds: “It’s difficult to make a profit in sport. You could say that if you break even you’re doing well.”
Our rugby players and cricketers have done more than break even, despite the ordinariness of the broader environment in which they operate. The rugby players, in particular, have used some of the iniquities of local life to spur them on. That both they and the Proteas are world champions is wild.
The last country to have done so in the two sports was Australia, in 1999. Think of who was in those two teams if you’re looking for comparisons with South Africa’s present generation. Stephen Larkham, John Eales, Joe Roff and Tim Horan played for the Wallabies. The baggy greens contained Shane Warne, the Waugh brothers Mark and Steve, and McGrath.
Some of these players have been commemorated in art. Shouldn’t we find some way to commemorate our world champions in art as well?
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