Leading Edge: Farewell Amla and Steyn - we may never see their like again

Had Dale Steyn and Hashim Amla cut their teeth in the gathering nonsense that is South African cricket now, they might never have bothered to keep at it.

The Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

FIRST, last Monday, Dale Steyn. Then, on Thursday, Hashim Amla. Who else might have retired between you picking up the paper and reaching this page?

Steyn takes with him the snap, crackle and pop of the fast bowler’s fast bowler, who also managed to stay as real as he was when he arrived all those years, many hairstyles and many more wickets ago.

Amla was, is and always will be the epitome of calm and class, and all good human things. The least important aspect of his contribution to the game was the runs he scored, and they were important enough.

Players of the stature of Steyn and Amla cross the line between us and them. We don’t know them but we think we do. So when they no longer want to be part of our world, or that part of our world we want them to stay in, we feel something like betrayed.

If you’re in shock, that’s to be expected — and it should feel familiar.

There was alarm on a grey day in Taunton in July 2012, when heads bobbed up at the sound of Imran Tahir cleanbowling Gemaal Hussain to see a stunned Mark Boucher on all fours on the last outfield he would grace as a player.

And on a sweaty Christmas Day in Durban in 2013, when Jacques Kallis gave away the gift of playing test cricket.

And deep in the dark hours after stumps on the third day of third test against Australia at Newlands in March 2014, when Graeme Smith went ungently into that not so good night.

And in May last year, on an otherwise ordinary Wednesday, when AB de Villiers decided he had been there, done that and got all the international caps he wanted.

So, feel it. The shock is here. Again. But this time there’s also something else; an ominousness, a feeling that the end of the game as we have come to know it in South Africa is near. And not in a good way.

Plenty about cricket needs to change. It is too white and too wedded to affluence, and its major venues are too far removed, geographically, culturally and economically, from where most South Africans live. But, if cricket hopes to retain its credibility, it cannot change in the way it did last week.

How do Cricket South Africa (CSA) expect to avoid suspicion over their motivations for their radically retrogressive restructure, which with its shortsighted concentration of power in chief executive Thabang Moroe’s hands harks back to times when nothing moved without Charles Fortune’s, Hassan Howa’s or Ali Bacher’s say-so?

Shouldn’t an organisation that is, in clinically measurable financial terms, failing miserably concentrate on stopping the bleeding by, say, killing off the haemorrhaging horror that is the Mzansi Super League?

How do they justify setting up a highly promising coach like Enoch Nkwe up for a significant setback by sending him on a hiding to nothing in India when they have more experienced, widely respected and equally black coaches like Geoff Toyana and Malibongwe Maketa to call on, assuming they want the job?

Why aren’t they telling us what they are doing to try and stop Faf du Plessis, Dean Elgar and Vernon Philander from following Steyn and Amla out of this circus and back to reality?

Do CSA not see that they are handing the reactionaries, of which there are always too many, ammunition by behaving like this? Or do they no longer give a damn?

So let us give thanks that Steyn and Amla, who are both 36, came to cricket when they did; when it was still a profession with a future in South Africa.

Had they cut their teeth in the gathering nonsense that is South African cricket now, they might never have bothered to keep at it. If you had the talent and the commitment to crack it at the highest level, why would you trust people who seem to have only their own interests at heart with your livelihood?

Steyn was the best fast bowler in the world for much of his career, a player who grew a foot taller merely by standing on his mark. Amla was the finest batter anyone could send to the crease in any format, against any opponents, and in any conditions.

They didn’t become those players by accident, and they didn’t do so on their own. People had to believe in them, and they had to believe in people.

Who believes in CSA now? How? Why?