Ken Borland

A successful choir obviously needs everyone singing together in complementary fashion and the Proteas’ success over the last summer has certainly been a team effort, but coach Mark Boucher has spoken of the importance of having the two captains, Dean Elgar and Temba Bavuma, singing from the same hymn sheet.

Since the unfortunate experiment with Quinton de Kock as captain, Elgar and Bavuma have taken over the red and white-ball sides respectively for the last 13 months and the split captaincy has worked well, although the consistency of the limited-overs side has perhaps left something to be desired.

“Dean and Temba came in as leaders in a tough time,” Boucher said. “They are completely different characters, but they have rubbed off on each other. They feed off each other and they speak to each other a lot.

“They have also both been in really good form with the bat and have been leading from the front.

“What’s been particularly good is that they are on the same page when it comes to where they want to take South African cricket,” Boucher said.

Elgar said the success of the Test team has helped to ease the burden of captaincy, which is never easy when there is so much going on off the field to deal with.

“Everything good comes with a challenge and I like challenges,” Elgar said. “That’s why I’m still playing Test cricket at nearly 35 years old and I feel my best cricket is still ahead of me.

“If I was younger, maybe I wouldn’t enjoy the captaincy as much. It has been extremely testing off the field, but I have an amazing core of players around me, they respect and understand me as a person.

“I think we’re in a very special place as a team and that leads to me being a lot happier with what I’m doing. Getting results and playing good, strong cricket, definitely eases the burden of captaincy,” Elgar said.

Elgar and Boucher are both hard-nosed leaders who would perhaps not be out of place training recruits in the marine corps. And they have both suggested the players who went to the IPL instead of playing in the Bangladesh series will not automatically get their Test places back.

“I don’t think it’s fair to just say they come back,” Elgar said. “The guys playing now have made a massive statement. We have a decent batting pool now.

“Someone like Ryan Rickelton has taken to Test cricket pretty well, he’s had a taste and now understands it. Even if the intensity was not quite what it will be playing England.

“But it’s out of my hands whether the IPL guys get selected again,” Elgar said.

“The IPL guys did vacate their spots and there is now good competition for those spots. It’s a nice position to be in,” Boucher said.

The satisfaction of completing a successful summer with a 2-0 series win over Bangladesh was writ large on Dean Elgar’s face on Monday, but the South African captain knows that soon he will have to get busy analysing their Test campaigns and getting a handle on where they can improve for the bigger challenges that lie ahead later this year.

It does not get more convincing than their 332-run win over Bangladesh on Monday, their biggest ever at St George’s Park, but stiffer opposition lies ahead with tours to England and Australia later this year.

“Not a lot of people would have given us a chance of winning five out of seven Tests this summer and it’s great to have those numbers on our side,” Elgar said after Keshav Maharaj’s 7/40 had bowled the Proteas to victory.

“It’s been an extremely successful summer with a lot to build on, but my job is also to dissect our performances and get the negatives out.”

Elgar’s first and foremost concern was the batting and their failure to get more hundreds.

“From a batting point of view, we need to notch up more hundreds. Us senior guys are getting into position and we need to reach those three figures because we know how much pressure that then puts on the opposition.

“We haven’t quite nailed down the batting, and that’s on my own plate as well, so that’s the one main negative. But we’re extremely aware of it, we’re working bloody hard to fix it, maybe even trying too hard,” Elgar said.

The 34-year-old Elgar has been a hit as captain, introducing a hard-nosed, unrelenting style of cricket to the Proteas Test team. It has been a modus operandi that has resonated with the players and is a good fit with traditional South African values like determination and ruthlessness.

“I’ve been trying to install a way of playing that the team can buy into and we’ve come on leaps and bounds. As a captain, I’m now more experienced and I’ve been able to put my own leadership stamp on the group.

“I’ve gained confidence as I’ve been in the job and hopefully we have a style of play nailed down now that we can all follow. I know the players buy into it.

“I think the team is in a very special place, which means I’m a lot happier with what I’m doing as captain. Getting results and playing good, strong cricket definitely eases the burden of captaincy.

“I’m very grateful for the cricket we’ve played this summer and it’s been great to be competitive at this level,” Elgar said.

Eduard Coetzee admits that, during his playing days, he moved to France for nine years because he did not believe, as a White player, that he had a future in South African rugby. Now, as CEO of the Sharks, he is spearheading one of the most ambitious and successful beacons of transformation and inclusive culture in the game.

The former Sharks and SA A prop left Durban in 2005 and played for Bayonnais and Biarritz, before returning to Durban in 2012 and working in the financial sector. He was appointed as the Sharks’ commercial and marketing manager in 2014, chief operations officer in 2015 and became CEO in July 2019.

Coetzee’s business savvy – he has a doctorate in Inclusive Business Model Innovation – and vision certainly played a part in one of the biggest investments ever in South African sport when the MVM consortium became private equity partners of the Sharks.

But the Sharks don’t just have plenty of financial capital; there is also the sense that they have tremendous moral capital in the bank because of the nation-building project that is going so well at Kings Park.

“When we discussed transformation back in the day, all the heads – Black and White – used to drop in the team room,” Coetzee recalls. “It was seen as a punitive thing.

“Whites would feel they had no future in the game and agents played a big hand in that. I was in France for nine years because I believed I had no future here.

“But transformation, in terms of gender, race and mindsets, is a business priority. A lot has changed and ‘I See Colour’ is the cornerstone of our culture. I’m White, you’re Black and that’s cool. We can’t act as if colour doesn’t exist.

“It’s not about apologising for who I am but about being sympathetic to other people. And I had an upbringing that paralleled Steve Hofmeyr’s – Affies, Tuks, the Bulls,” Coetzee points out.

The 42-year-old knows, of course, that on-field success is what the Sharks will ultimately be measured on, however, and even there, ambitions are high.

“We have ambitions of being global competitors. We want to win the Heineken Champions Cup. Previously we were just trying to survive as South African franchises, we would build players up and then lose them.

“But we weren’t an unsuccessful franchise, we were happy enough. But MVM have brought an attitude of we want to try to be the best. They are thinking big.

“We want to invest in people and uplift the community. It’s not about turfing out our history but amplifying it and the global reach of what they believe is an undervalued team,” Coetzee says.

One of the notable gifts of the married father of three sons is the ability to see the potential in others.

“There are guys here who really come from nothing and when you discuss their previous life with them, you realise what that actually means.

“And then you throw them into a situation with lots of money and pressure and no support. That’s where our life coaching and educational development programmes come in.

“I’m still studying and I tell the players that if I have time to do it, then so do you. We have created a structure that gives them enough time to study, with the help of tutors.

“If they do want to go into business, we help them with seed capital through our business development office and our investors draw people of influence into the Sharks environment,” Coetzee points out.

Next time you’re in Durban, pop into the coffee shop at Kings Park, which is run by players, or the local chicken shop which the Sharks have invested in and which has 10 franchises in KZN and five others in Gauteng and the Western Cape.

It is all part of the Sharks’ policy of treating their players unbelievably well … and thereby getting the best out of them on the field and hopefully keeping them in Durban.

For Duanne Olivier, Monday’s first day of the second Test against India felt like “a new debut” and he gave credit to his fellow pacemen for their efforts in helping to turn a slow start into ultimately a successful opening day for the Proteas as they bowled the tourists out for just 202.

Olivier missed the first Test as he built himself back to peak conditioning following a bout of Covid, but on Monday he was back sharing the new ball with Kagiso Rabada, playing Test cricket for the first time since February 2019, when he took a Kolpak contract in England.

But things did not go well in the first hour for either Olivier, whose first four erratic overs went for 18 runs, or South Africa, as India reached 36/0.

But the drinks break helped the Proteas focus their effort and thereafter they squeezed India and claimed 10 wickets in 49 overs. Olivier and Rabada took three wickets each and young Marco Jansen claimed the other four; Lungi Ngidi bowled as well as any of them but ended with 0/26 in 11 overs.

“It felt like a new debut for me and I was very nervous,” Olivier admitted. “But we just wanted to try and have good energies and put pressure on the batsmen. Lungi and Marco did a superb job to create that pressure.

“And then the whole unit did it. It was a good day for the bowling unit as a whole. We would have taken 202 all out any day. The message from the coach was to stick to the basics and our processes and then reap the rewards.

“Lungi bowled exceptionally well but did not get the rewards, it was just one of those days for him. I am still trying to bowl fuller at good pace, but a couple of balls were too floaty. I will try to do better in the second innings,” Olivier said.

The Proteas batsmen then reached 35/1 at stumps and Olivier is optimistic they can cash in on the second day.

“If we want to be hyper-critical then we probably gave India 20-30 too many runs. The pitch is a bit different to how it is in domestic cricket, there’s not as much grass. It is harder and it will speed up.

“It was very hot today and it will start deteriorating in the second innings and then it might spin. We are 1-0 down, that is the reality, and of course we want to win the series.

“But as a team we can’t look too far ahead, otherwise our focus is not where it needs to be and you can get distracted. Tomorrow is a new day and we will break our processes down into smaller bits,” Olivier said.