Leading Edge: Absence of ego will help SA grow

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

IF you are not careful as you shamble about the more dodgy alleys of the internet, you could see a short film in which Faf du Plessis describes how he keeps the family jewels safe while he is at the crease.

“For those who don’t know, I’m one of the guys who gets hit in the nuts probably the most in the world,” Du Plessis explains. “For those who do know, it’s a very, very painful thing to go through. Hence, I’ve come up with this little situation here.”

With that he holds up to the camera a batsman’s box big enough to give Mark Boucher the idea to strap the thing over the horn of a live rhino to ward off poachers. Or to prompt Graeme Smith to throw it at those horrible judges who voted his wife off their pathetic little unreality television show.

The contraption is, in fact, three boxes of increasing sizes fitted one into another, Russian doll-style, and taped snugly together. Across the front of all that, in scrawly black marker pen, someone has written, “The Beast”.

Du Plessis, pokerfaced, continues his pitch for homemade protective gear: “The first 56000 times I got hit (wearing) two boxes it was painful. So three is perfect for me. It works.

“I’ve probably been hit in the nuts five times since I built ‘The Beast’ and I’m pain free. And I can definitely recommend it.”

But wait. There’s more.

The deadpan delivery is Du Plessis’ way of using supposed seriousness to ensure he is not taken at all seriously. If an ego-shaped vacuum throbs inside every professional sportsman, Du Plessis is an amateur. In the grand sense of the word, of course - batting at No. 3 in any format is not for the frivolous.

Du Plessis was in the same mode and mood when he sat down behind the microphones to talk to a roomful of reporters about his 78 in his debut innings, against Australia in Adelaide in November, 2012 - and regaled us with the tale of how his boot came off and he slipped and fell on his way down the stairs from the dressingroom to the field.

An innings later, Du Plessis was back. He seemed utterly serious. In fact, he was exhausted. This time he had a yeoman century to discuss, a labour of diligence and duty almost eight hours in the baking: Adelaide was an oven for those eight hours. Still, no ego was discernible.

Neither do SA’s other captains allow their personalities to loom over their teams. AB de Villiers is so concerned with saying and doing the right thing by his men that he contradicts himself in that cause. Hashim Amla, of course, is the epitome of egoless. Trying to get him to talk about himself is like getting Kevin Pietersen not to.

Which is a significant departure from the SA teams that grew up in the shadows of giants like Smith and Boucher; great men in their own context and hard bastards in any context - but both possessed of personalities big enough to shrivel lesser souls. Now, those souls have the chance to grow.

But let’s not deny the greats their due. SA became the No. 1 test team under Smith, and where would they have been without Boucher’s brass balls?

And he didn’t need ‘The Beast’.