IPL: A race within a tournament within a search for Smith’s replacement

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TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

Faf du Plessis has successfully captained most of the teams he has played in from the time he was first able to strap on a pair of pads. AB de Villiers has almost always been a member of those teams. He has also unquestionably been the best player.

Du Plessis’ bracing sense of reality and steady calm has shone out above his considerable quality as a player in his role as captain of South Africa’s T20 team. De Villiers, the most precocious talent South Africa have yet given cricket, bar none, leads his country’s one-day team by bulletproof example.

One of Du Plessis or De Villiers, save for a moment of the kind of madness cricket administrators seem duty-bound to stumble into, will be South Africa’s next Test captain.

Which will it be? What will separate them? How will the selectors make this decision?

The Indian Premier League (IPL) does not often have much to do with Test cricket. But, this time, it does. Whether Du Plessis or De Villiers cracks the nod when the decision is made in the next few weeks could depend on how each of them fares as they do their damnedest for the Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore respectively.

De Villiers has the edge by dint of being more established in South Africa’s Test team than Du Plessis. But the score should be evened if Du Plessis scores a pile of runs in the IPL - regardless of whether De Villiers does also. If Du Plessis has a lean time, the debate will be over and De Villiers will be the new Test captain.

Cricket people spend a lot of time and mental effort trying to convince themselves and others that how players perform in one format does not influence events in another. But none of their logic can overcome the truth that human nature is more powerful than any argument.

Like the rest of us, selectors know that what happens in a far-flung T20 circus - even the biggest one of the lot - between teams that do not matter or even exist except for a few weeks of the year should have no bearing on what might happen in a Test series in July, when South Africa tour Sri Lanka, or for the next decade or more.

But it does matter, because a quality cricketer playing well is an irresistible force regardless of the format. The player knows that every time he makes solid contact with the ball. We know it every time that contact sends the ball past the fielders.

De Villiers is a case in point. He was originally appointed captain of South Africa’s one-day and T20 teams not because he had grown into an inspirational leader - Du Plessis had hogged the captaincy spotlight, remember - but because Graeme Smith had relinquished those reins and De Villiers was the best player, by some distance, that South Africa had.

Why not Du Plessis instead? Because he had played just 11 ODIs and no Tests when De Villiers was elevated in June, 2011. That the T20 leadership has since gone to Du Plessis is closely tied to the concern that De Villiers’ game would suffer should he have held onto the job. Performance on the field is what matters, not pontification on man management.

As much as we tell ourselves that T20 and Test cricket are from different planets, we know that means nothing when we are dealing with players of the calibre of Du Plessis and De Villiers.

Try saying the formats are too different to be compared to someone who walks to the crease in a Test having spent the last several weeks smashing the game’s best bowlers to all parts in T20s. Try telling someone who has struggled through a Test series that everything will be OK in the T20s.

A well-played stroke transcends such artificiality. A clutch of them successfully played by one man in the space of an hour or so makes any argument to the contrary look stupid.

For South Africans, then, this IPL is a race within a tournament within a search for the right man to succeed the greatest captain South Africa have ever had, and one of the best the game has yet seen.

Smith is a giant whose shadow will loom over the game in this country for years yet. De Villiers is on course to the same stature. For now, Du Plessis’ place in the pantheon is less certain.

After the IPL, all the parts of that picture will be clearer.