Evolving Elgar: more like Du Plessis, less like Warner

“Maybe a year ago it wasn’t as okay as it is now.” - Dean Elgar on what we don’t see about his captaincy.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

FAF du Plessis looked, as usual, as if he had stepped out of the pages of a magazine. In fact he had emerged from Kingsmead’s dressing room to see what all the fuss was about clad in nothing but a towel. Had Dean Elgar been South Africa’s captain, he might have rushed out stark raving naked brandishing a bat in one hand, swinging a stump in the other and not bothering to ask questions.

Du Plessis’ calm presence in that doorway remains an enduring image from the first of too many unseemly episodes on Australia’s tour of South Africa in March 2018, the last time the teams met in a Test series.

David Warner, aided and abetted by fielding close to the bat, had spent much of the second session of the fourth day of that match, the first of the rubber, verbally abusing Quinton de Kock, who was batting. Warner kept spewing nastiness when the players left the field for tea, and as they were making their way up the stairs De Kock retaliated by making a disgraceful comment involving Warner’s wife. The already ugly Aussie exploded with loud, foul-mouthed rage and had to be physically retrained, which emptied the dressing rooms. We know this because the scene was captured, in all its ingloriousness, on the security cameras.

Elgar, who was in that South Africa XI, would not become captain until March 2021. And a good thing, too, probably. Du Plessis is measured, diplomatic, and mindful of cause and effect. The Elgar of March 2018 was a shoot first, refuse to apologise later kind of guy. Happily, South Africa will be led in the Test series that starts at the Gabba on December 17 by a figure who has developed into someone more like Du Plessis even as he has become less like Warner.

“Ten years ago I might not have had the skills to deal with it,” Elgar told reporters in Johannesburg on Thursday about shouldering the burdens of leadership. “Being 35, I’ve taught myself how to do things and when to focus on things. As a player I’m here to score runs; I’m here to win innings for our team. But I’ve also got a greater responsibility. That’s off-the-field stuff that people don’t see. It’s actually been okay. Maybe a year ago it wasn’t as okay as it is now.

“Some things you don’t have to waste your energy on. Putting energy into the important things is important. I don’t sweat the small things because I think you waste a lot of energy when you do that. When it comes to my players I use a lot of energy. Every player has their own pressures and being captain you have a few extra responsibilities.”

Another indication of the progress Elgar has made at a human level is the care he showed when he spoke of his vice-captain, Temba Bavuma, who will have to put behind him captaining South Africa to their most infamous loss yet in their T20 World Cup match against the Netherlands in Adelaide last month: “What we’ve discussed between us is personal. I respect what he’s been through, but I can’t speak for what he has been through because I wouldn’t know how to deal with it personally. So, for now, I’m respecting the space he is in.”

Elgar goes to Australia having scored a century and a half-century in four innings in South Africa’s domestic first-class competition. Bavuma, a nuggety Test batter, hasn’t played since the Adelaide awfulness on November 6.

“I think the time off has done him good,” Elgar said. “He wanted to have a break from the game and you’ve got to respect that as well. He’s got a lot of pressure on his plate. But we’ve got to go to work again soon and he’s got to be in the right space for the team. That’s going to be the message I put forward to him. I’m pretty sure he’ll respond well. It’s up to me to get him into the right space so we give him the best opportunity to go out and play his brand of Test cricket.”

Elgar’s evolution is far from the only major change in South African and Australian cricket in the past three and more years. Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft ended the 2018 series in disgrace for their central roles in the Sandpapergate ball-tampering scandal, but have all returned to the fold. Warner’s reputation has been laundered to the extent that his life ban from leadership positions in Australia’s teams is being openly and widely contested by people who didn’t raise a peep of protest when it was imposed.

De Kock, Du Plessis’ successor as captain, led in four Tests, eight ODIs and 11 T20Is before he was sacked — only nine of those games were won — and replaced by Elgar and Bavuma, in the white-ball formats, in March 2021. De Kock retired from Tests that December. Du Plessis played his last Test in Rawalpindi in February 2021 but was expected to re-appear for the T20 World Cup. He didn’t.

Ottis Gibson, South Africa’s coach in 2018, was fired after his team’s dismal 2019 ODI World Cup and replaced, in an interim capacity, by Enoch Nkwe and, permanently that December, by Mark Boucher — who resigned after the T20 World Cup with a year left on his contract. Another interim coach, Malibongwe Maketa, who served as Gibson’s assistant, will take South Africa to Australia. Elgar would seem to have had something to that happening: “‘Mali’ is one of the coaches I asked our director [of cricket] to try and get in to be interim. I got that right. He understands his role, which is going to be a supportive role. He understands me as a cricketer, as a person and as a leader.” Nkwe, who served as Boucher’s assistant coach from December 2019 to August 2021, when he resigned citing, in part, difficulties working with Boucher, is now CSA’s director of cricket.

Tim Paine found himself lumped with the Australia Test captaincy before the end of the 2018 rubber, only to be undone by a sexting scandal in November 2021. He has been succeeded by Pat Cummins. Darren Lehmann quit as Australia’s coach in the wake of Sandpapergate and was followed into that position by Justin Langer, who resigned in February this year and is now taking cheap shots at Cummins.

The whirl of these twin revolutions is enough to make anyone’s head spin. But Elgar’s is on firmly enough to keep a steady eye on the challenges of playing a series in Australia. Particularly when the visitors are South Africa. Or is it that not everything about Elgar has changed?

“The nature of individuals in their squad is pretty brash and bold, in-your-face kind of characters,” he said. “I think that plays into our hands. I think we enjoy confrontation as a group and we manage it pretty well. We’ve got calm heads around that. If they want to be in-your-face, it’s fine. I definitely don’t shy away from that and I will be encouraging the players not to shy away because I think that’s when South Africans bring out their best character.”

South Africa won the 2018 series but have since prevailed in only five, while losing seven, of their 13 rubbers in the format. Australia had played 11 Test series before their current home engagement against West Indies, winning five and losing four.

But not since 2008 have South Africa been in Australia to play the Boxing Day and New Year Tests. “Growing up as a kid, you always wake up for these Boxing Day Test matches Down Under and you don’t mind losing a few hours sleep,” Elgar said. “Now we’ve got 16 players who are going to experience it first-hand. It’s a childhood dream. I don’t think it gets bigger than this.

“But you can’t let events overwhelm your thinking. That’s going to be the message I am going to be driving. We are still there to do a job. You need to respect where you are and take in the moments in your own personal way, but we are playing a Test match for South Africa and we need to back our processes as long and as hard as we can to give us a favourable result.”

South Africa’s victory in 2008 was their first series win in Australia after five defeats and three draws since 1910. They have since won two consecutive rubbers there. Australia finished on top in the first five series they played in South Africa, starting in 1902. The South Africans won the next two, the last of them the final series the team from the then apartheid state contested until 1992 because of isolation. It took another eight rubbers between the sides in South Africa, two of them drawn, before the home side won the 2018 epic.

Australia versus South Africa, or South Africa versus Australia, invariably bristles with a mutual contempt born of a certain familiarity of national characters. That cannot change, however much the game changes in these countries.

So come on in. The water will be as hot this time as it has been every other time. Don’t forget your towel.

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