Human or heroes? Players can't be both

“If we’re having an interaction there needs to be some respect.” - Tabraiz Shamsi

Telford Vice / Cape Town

HOBART’S air was cold with the wetness that had diminished the previous night’s match to a dozen overs. That didn’t stop an unmistakably Eastern Cape Afrikaans accent from cracking through the grim, gritty gloom hanging over a pavement alongside Criterion Street in the heart of Australia’s prettiest city.

“… and they just went round and round the ground, pulling the rope with the tractor.” The Rs were raw and ragged. Round and ground were as nasal as they could be, making those words sound as if a firm Y had been shoved between the R and the O.

The conversation took a short, sharp step forward in the tone of someone who also didn’t grow up around there: “Oh really?” To a non-Australian English speaker’s ear that sounded like, “Aw rally?” Unlike Taswegians, who tend to speak in a slow, soft drawl, words tumble faster from Victorians — though not as fast as from Sydneysiders — and their vowels stay in the bottom of their mouths. When Victorians say celery you might hear salary.

The two men were walking and talking in the company of another, who nodded and smiled in confirmation. The three disappeared into a bustling café on Criterion Street; blokes out for a natter and a bite.

The first speaker was Anrich Nortjé, a son of Kariega deep in the dust of the Eastern Cape. The second was Peter Siddle, who grew up in Gippsland, a rural region of Victoria. They were with Rilee Rossouw, a comparative city slicker from Bloemfontein, a flat, sleepy sprawl bang in the middle of South Africa that is home to not much more than half a million people. There are enough dots of commonality in those disparate bits of geography to connect the three players, at least for a couple of hours. Country people are country people, regardless of which country they’re in or from.

And then there’s the cricket connection. Rossouw and Siddle were opponents in 2018 and ’19, when they played for Hampshire and Siddle. They became friends in June and July, when Rossouw turned out in 10 T20s with Siddle for Somerset. So the happy accident of Siddle’s return to Hobart from Adelaide, where he had featured in a one-day game for Tasmania against South Australia, coinciding with the South Africa squad’s arrival for their T20 World Cup match against Zimbabwe allowed for the making of a plan to catch up before the South Africans departed for Sydney the next day.

What did they talk about? “It was just guys catching up; Rilee and him are quite good mates,” Nortjé said in Sydney two days later. He seemed guarded about, perhaps confused by, a question that ostensibly had little to do with cricket. So the tack was changed. Did he and Siddle discuss fast bowling? “Here and there but not so much. They were catching up and I was just joining them — I was hungry! But Peter’s a great guy. I really enjoyed the chat with him.”

A different but also similar scene unfolded at the MCG on Sunday, when first Adil Rashid and then Moeen Ali hustled to the middle to talk to Saqlain Mushtaq, who had been inspecting the pitch while the England and Pakistan teams warmed up on the outfield for the T20 World Cup final. Rashid has played 229 matches for England since August 2009 and Moeen 256 since February 2014. They appeared in 168 together. Saqlain arrived in their international careers in May 2016, when he was appointed to the first of his several stints as England’s spin consultant. In an hour or so Saqlain would be Pakistan’s head coach and Moeen and Rashid would be on the field for England. But in those few precious minutes they were three friends reunited. What did they talk about? Like Nortjé, Siddle and Rossouw, probably not cricket.

Pablo Picasso is supposed to have said: “When art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” Oscar Wilde held a similar view: “When bankers get together for dinner they discuss art. When artists get together for dinner they discuss money.”

Difficult as it may be to believe, cricket is not always uppermost for cricketers. Even when they are around other cricketers or within close proximity of, before or after, even something as important as a World Cup match. Because players were, are and always will be people before they were, are and will be anything else. Cricket no more defines them than outer space defines astronauts. Cricket is what they do. It’s not who they are.

That cricket can make players is not in dispute. A less considered but just as relevant truth is that it can also break them. To list some of those who likely would not have had the gumption to succeed in the world beyond the game would not be difficult but it would be cruel. Many have been so malformed by cricket that they aren’t fit for any other walk of life. They have never grown up because the game has indulged them to the point of stunting their personal growth. Once they retire their awakenings in the real world, where they struggle to find a foothold in coaching or commentating, are rude, painful and pitiful to behold.

They discover they are not, after all, heroes. Instead they are what we all are: nothing more nor less than human. They are people from somewhere, maybe now elsewhere, perhaps on their way to living somewhere else; people with pasts, presents, futures, backgrounds and accents. But now that cricket has embraced a nittier, grittier concept of data and how it should drive decisions on and off the field, there is a danger that cricketers will be considered less human and more an element of an equation spelling success or failure.

Suryakumar Yadav, for instance, moved from Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai at the age of 10 — when he was as besotted by badminton as cricket — after his father landed a job at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. He now lives in the city’s Chembur district with his family and dogs named Oreo and Pablo. But most of what we are reading and hearing about him is tied to the bald fact that he had a strike rate of 189.68 at the T20 World Cup. He is far more than a number.

To see what cricket can do to players — as opposed to do for them — consider Temba Bavuma, a clear-eyed, deep-thinking figure of integrity who these days struggles to look up at press conferences. He seems a husk of the person who showed the leadership and skill to guide his team through the calamity of Quinton de Kock refusing to play rather than take a knee at last year’s T20 World Cup.

Bavuma’s failure to be bought at the SA20 player auction in September was myth colliding with reality: he is South Africa’s most tenacious Test batter but he is not a serious T20 asset. Worse, as South Africa’s white-ball captain he was held up to twist in a withering wind at the T20 World Cup, where he scored 70 runs in five innings at a strike rate of 112.90. Seventy-nine of the 198 players who took guard in the tournament scored faster.

Bavuma’s appointment as captain in March last year — which made him undroppable — is a fair subject for debate, as is his decision to accept that position in what he must have known is his weakest format. But what cannot be tolerated is the blatant abuse he is subjected to routinely, much of it plainly racist, in public forums. Neither is it fair that he is looked down on and disparaged by his peers in the Xhosa community, for whom professional success is closely tied to personal worth. Small wonder Bavuma seems to have shrunk into a shell from which he would do well to emerge. His experience should make cricketers ask, if they haven’t already, how much of themselves they can safely expose to the world.

“You share what you feel you would like to share,” Tabraiz Shamsi said on the same day as Nortjé was hesitant to go into detail about his conversation with Siddle. “For myself, my family stuff is quite private but other stuff I’m happy to share. At the end of the day we are human.

“In the past, with no social media, people were a lot further away from cricketers. So the public did not realise that we go through the same things a general person would go through. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it as long as there’s no disrespect. That’s the one thing I feel strongly about regarding this — if we’re having an interaction, there needs to be some respect.”

Too often there isn’t. Too often players are walking statistics whose only perceived value is in their performances. When they do well they are feted as heroes. When they don’t they are criticised in shameful ways, often personally. Small wonder they are sometimes reluctant to talk about matters not directly connected to events on the field. That doesn’t make them privileged prima donnas or unappreciative of the fans. It makes them what they are: human.

First published by Cricbuzz.