Du Plessis is key to SA’s wall and all

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Christchurch

QUICK. Click your way to Christchurch to check if AB de Villiers played, as promised, in SA’s World Cup warm-up match against New Zealand that was scheduled to start at midnight on Tuesday.

He missed Monday’s game against Sri Lanka with a hip problem, and SA team management described his absence by using that weasel word: “precautionary”. They also said he would be in action on Wednesday.

But De Villiers has had too many injuries and is too vital to SA’s Word Cup campaign for that inadequate re-assurance to be accepted without question - especially as he was not seen at Tuesday’s optional training session.

If he did not play against the Kiwis, panic. If he did, calm down and remember that cricket involves teams of 11 players. In every XI, for every De Villiers or Hashim Amla or Quinton de Kock or Dale Steyn there are 10 other players who are not as emphatic as that lot.

Without those unemphatic figures, cricket sides would be bricks without mortar. Faf du Plessis is one such player, a man who bats after Amla or De Kock in the order and ahead of De Villiers, a player who does not grab headlines as much as he seeps into them indelibly.

Without Du Plessis and his sturdy ilk, SA are a pile of strewn bricks. With him, they are a wall.

It is in players like Du Plessis that teams trust to look left and right while the stars hurtle full steam ahead. So he was quick to quell kneejerk notions of the match between SA and India in Melbourne on February 22 deciding the pecking order in Pool B.

“That looks like what will happen, but we know in World Cups there are always upsets and we expect that, in one of the games, one of the minnows will play a good game,” Du Plessis said.

The minnows SA will have to deal with are Ireland and the United Arab Emirates, and it is tempting to add Zimbabwe to that list. As for the rest ...

“West Indies we know can be dangerous on their day and Pakistan are the same,” Du Plessis said.

But the clash with India looms as SA’s crunch encounter in the round-robin stage despite the fact that it will be only the second match of the tournament for both teams.

“We are looking forward to that game,” Du Plessis. “I know it’s going to be a full house and we always enjoy the challenge of playing a team like India.”

Du Plessis has first-hand experience of that challenge, and of meeting it. The last time SA played India at the World Cup, in Nagpur in March, 2011, Sachin Tendulkar scored 111 and Dale Steyn took 5/50.

But it was left to Du Plessis, who scored 25 not out, and Robin Peterson, who made an unbeaten 18, to complete SA’s three-wicket win, which was achieved under pressure with two balls to spare.

That tells us the wall stands tall because of the mortar, not the bricks.