If teams are moulded in the image of their captains, Graeme Smith’s South Africans should be sharp, cheerful and forthright. Perhaps a little too forthright, some have suggested. Smith hasn’t been in the job for very long, nor on the international circuit for much longer, but a couple of times now he’s said things that have made people sit up and take notice.
About a year ago Smith offered a fascinating insight into Australian sledging during a magazine interview. It wasn’t so much the detail of what the Australians had said to him during his early moments in international cricket, but the fact that he was willing to talk about it.
It’s long been common cause that Australian teams push verbal intimidation to the very limit, but few have been willing to talk about it, citing the unwritten and somewhat anachronistic rule that ”what goes on on the field should stay on the field”.
The Australians were predictably miffed at Smith. Everyone else was rather pleased. The payback, however, probably still lies in the future. The next time Smith plays against Australia he will catch an earful when he goes in to bat. He’ll be a
couple of years older though, and, in this instance, forewarned is likely to be very much forearmed.
More recently Smith ruffled feathers with his less-than-flattering observations about Lance Klusener at a business breakfast function.
A number of people who applauded Smith for spilling the beans on the Australians have tut-tutted their disapproval that he should have criticised a South African player, even if he merely voiced a view that was already fairly widely held anyway. Smith may have been taken aback by the reaction his remarks provoked — and he may have learned a thing or two about going on and off the record, particularly as the comments were a response to a question — but it may still be some time before he acquires the verbal fog employed by so many sportsmen. In other words, at this stage of his career, he’s still unlikely to employ ”skipper-speak” — the diplomatese used by many international captains that involves the use of lashings of jargon, to say the least. Smith is still very much at the stage where he tends to say what’s on his mind.
Although Smith intends to speak to Klusener to clear up the fuss, his justification for speaking out in the first place is that he regards the current South African side as very much his team. Not so much in the sense that it belongs to him, but rather that his job is to protect it when it comes under attack. Remarks attributed to Klusener after his omission from the squad to tour England seemed to Smith to constitute an attack on those selected. So he responded.
Whatever else has been said about Smith’s youth and inexperience, one thing stands out about him — he’s up for the job.
He is not daunted by the size of the task ahead of the South Africans and while he’s happy to acknowledge that he’s still learning about international cricket, he’s happy to listen and take advice from anyone if they have something worthwhile to say. He’s not afraid, either, to face up to the tricky questions. Would he, for
instance, be prepared to drop himself if his form didn’t warrant inclusion? The answer is an unequivocal ”yes”.
You could argue, of course, that he would say that and that it might be a different matter if and when the issue arises, but given that the South African squad looks top-heavy with upper-order batsmen, it’s a loaded question and he doesn’t so much as blink at it.
It goes without saying that Smith will need all the help he can get in England, particularly on those days when the bowlers can’t find their lengths and lines and the fielders can’t hold or stop anything.
”I’ve had one of those already,” he says, pointing to his debut as captain against India in Bangladesh last month, when South Africa got just about everything wrong and were blown off the field.
A priority will be to get the senior players behind him. The new board of directors of Cricket South Africa may have done Smith a favour be reappointing Mark Boucher as his vice-captain.
Boucher is an influential member of the team, and getting him onside should prevent a clique of older and more experienced players developing and then dividing the team.
Shaun Pollock, too, has a major role to play in England. He may have been shabbily treated at the end of the World Cup campaign, and there was considerable speculation as to whether he might pack international cricket in as a result. But he is in the touring party and South Africa will be all the more capable for his
presence.
It may have been a little awkward for Pollock in Bangladesh as he got used to being just another part of the team instead of its leading figure.
The Bangladesh tour will have helped both Smith and Pollock redefine their roles, and it is difficult to believe that Pollock’s enthusiasm and intuitive understanding of the game will be kept under wraps in the dressing room for too long.
And yet the key figure in the South African squad might well prove to be Eric Simons’s assistant, Corrie van Zyl. Unlike Smith and Simons, Van Zyl is well-versed in English playing conditions.
He is a veteran of the late Hansie Cronje’s 1998 tour and the 1999 World Cup and it will be Van Zyl’s job to get the lines and, more importantly in England, the lengths of the South African bowlers right.
As ever, England seem to be a team on the verge of developing into something more than the sum of its parts.
They have experienced top-order batsmen and one or two promising new-ball bowlers, notably James Anderson, who took five wickets on his Test debut at Lord’s two weeks ago. But they also have an injury list of their own, and it is not clear at this stage how big a role their two senior bowlers, Andy Caddick and Darren Gough, will each play this summer.
Smith is 22 years old. He is a big man with a big chin. He has some problems with his technique, and his lack of experience keeps some people awake at night. But you’d have to be a curmudgeon not to hope that Smith gets more right than he gets wrong in England.