Tears of a Captain

It matters. For now.

    Of all the silly, nasty things which have been said – and will continue to be said – about South Africa’s humiliating 13-run loss to the Netherlands and premature exit from the T20 World Cup, the most ill-informed and banal is that the players don’t, or didn’t care.

    Temba Bavuma added his tears to a long list of predecessors in Adelaide on Sunday – the only exception was a media officer who took pity on him and kept his post-match press briefing to a merciful three minutes. Not that a tearful Bavuma was looking for protection. Like every single Proteas captain before him, he faced the music. As mournful as it was.

    The only captain who didn’t cry following a World Cup exit was the first – Kepler Wessels. But then, he once batted for seven hours against the West Indies with a broken hand. He was the hardest man in cricket. Emotions, at least of the cricketing variety, were perishables to be encased in a lead box and buried under many tons of concrete. Peter Kirsten, however, another tough character, was shamelessly awash following the “22 off 1 ball” semi-final exit to England in Sydney.

    I can’t recall anybody shedding tears following the Brian Lara masterclass which eliminated South Africa at the quarter-final stage of the 1996 World Cup in Karachi but three years later Hansie Cronje appeared 30 minutes after the semi-final tie with Australia at Edgbaston in Birmingham red-eyed and clearly in shock.

    Four years after that it was Shaun Pollock who couldn’t hold back the tears after the DLS tie with Sri Lanka at Kingsmead which eliminated his team at the group stage and then Graeme Smith had a double dose of misery with the semi-final capitulation to Australia in St.Lucia in 2007 and the bullying defeat inflicted by New Zealand in the Dhaka quarter-final of 2011. The first he could stomach. A thrashing can be digested. But not the second. He, too, was shell-shocked and resigned from ODI cricket as a result.

    All of those traumas were surpassed by AB de Villiers’ experience before, during and after the semi-final defeat to New Zealand in Auckland in 2015. I was not alone in believing, at the time as we sat in front of him just after midnight, that those scars would never fully heal. They still haven’t, and probably won’t.

    Unlike any of his predecessors, Bavuma has had to contend not just with a wretched run of form but a great deal of cynicism and direct abuse. Avoiding social media ‘comment’ is harder than avoiding Covid-19 at its peak. He tried – but failed. It hurt.

    “I think mentally, yes. Does it hurt you as a player? You know, you try and manage your mental space as much as you can. You try to control what… what gets to you. But unfortunately, social media and people these days, you know, whatever has been said, always, always gets to you. I've always tried to keep a level head, through all the good and the bad times. We are going to take a lot of flak as a group, probably rightly so,” he said following the Dutch debacle.

    It was never an excuse. Nothing was: “We have nothing to blame. Everything was in our hands as a team. We had the confidence, we had the belief, and I would say we had the form behind us. But you know, when it mattered we just couldn't do the business,” Bavuma said, voice cracking.

    Mark Boucher spoke about the “lack of energy” in the performance. He said he couldn’t “put my finger” on the reason but did suggest that the 10:30am start may been problematic in a tournament that had, otherwise, only involved 2:00pm and 7:00pm starts. It was neither a complaint nor an excuse, but it is a fact that all workers might be discombobulated by a change of hours having become accustomed to a different rhythm. Accountants beginning work at 6:00am might make slow starts. Builders, town-planners and bankers the same.

    Amongst the many truths spoken by an emotional Bavuma after the game was this: “I think I've carried myself with dignity through the good and the bad times. And I think if I were to leave (the captaincy) now, I would leave with my pride intact.”

    Even amidst the emotional carnage, Bavuma was able to keep himself together and speak sense. Here’s another thought: “I do think there's, there's elements of learning that we can take from it, especially the younger guys – Stubbsy or Marco Jansen, you know, not to have to make the same mistakes that the older guys have made within the team. Yeh, unfortunately, the (choker) tag we will…we gonna carry that monkey on our back until we win a tournament.”

    Boucher’s press conference was considerably longer than his captain’s. Nobody was about to set him free early. Like Wessels many years earlier, Boucher doesn’t do emotion. At least, when he does, it is without emotion. “Gutted,” he said when asked how he was feeling, in the same way he might have said ‘thirsty’. But those few who know him well, understood. He was truly gutted.

    Boucher was questioned, and spoke, for almost 15 minutes. It was right at the very end, his penultimate sentence, which may give the greatest cause for concern.  

    “We'll just we have to try and keep all the players interested in playing for South Africa. I think that's… that's a big question that needs to be answered. And then hopefully, hopefully, they can put some good combinations together and create good coaching stuff around these guys.”

    Sadly, the comment cannot be put down to ‘emotion’ because Boucher doesn’t do that stuff. The conversation is happening not just in the Proteas change-room, but in international change-rooms around the world.