No Smith. No Kallis. Now what?

SA Cricket Magazine

Telford Vice, Johannesburg

There is nothing strange about something going bump at 21 minutes past 10 on a common or garden Monday night. But this something did not go bump. Instead, it crashed. It boomed. It banged.

It was a release from Cricket SA confirming Graeme Smith’s retirement from the international game. How and why he hell had this happened, and happened on the night of the third day of the deciding Test against Australia at Newlands?

Let’s not go there, because as things stand we do not know why and there are too many cynics eager to lead us down paths of their choosing.

Rather, let’s go back to a dark day in March 2003, in the aftermath of South Africa being eliminated from the World Cup because Mark Boucher thought a tie was good enough to put his team in the next round and blocked a ball to end an over from Muttiah Muralitharan that had already yielded 13 runs. A tie was not good enough: he should have smacked the damn thing for runs.

Shaun Pollock, the captain, took the fall for a dressingroom full of people who couldn’t get their act together enough to make sure that the batsmen in the middle knew what was required of them. Resign, said the suits. Go to hell, said Pollock. So, they fired him.

At the press conference that followed, Pollock famously tripped over his words and revealed the name of his successor. He was a 22-year-old kid who had grown up in Joburg but moved to Cape Town as an 18-year-old. Left-hander. Big fella. Brave. Brash. Looks like a cartoon crab at the crease - his grip is all wrong, his stance is a leaning tower of hulk - but ye gads can he hit the ball a long way.

Haroon Lorgat was part of the panel of selectors who decided Smith was their man. What had led them to do so?

“It was a gamble,” Lorgat admitted. “We knew that Graeme had the kind of attitude that leaders are made of. He didn’t have the benefit of age or experience on his side. But certainly when you looked him in the eye, when you spoke with him it was apparent this was a chap who could make it.”

Almost 11 years on, those eyes smiled brightly as Smith sat on his backside on the Kingsmead pitch after the second Test against India in December. Alongside him, also smiling, sat Jacques Kallis - whose retirement on Christmas Day matched Smith’s for shock value.

Had Smith known, as he sat there, that less than three months later he would take the same decision as the man who had helped him, more than most, build South Africa into the best Test team?

“It was on my mind already then,” Smith said as pens and pencils scrawled across notebooks and cameras clicked and whirred one more time, with feeling, at his last press conference as South Africa’s captain,

“When Gary (Kirsten) left (after the Champions Trophy in England last June), that was when the process started for me, when the thought had entered my mind. It’s been a period of time of trying to understand that.”

South Africans will need their own period of time to understand what this means for the future of their Test team.

Smith. Kallis. Gone. That was catastrophe enough when it struck South Africa in a single innings. How much greater will the impact of the double whammy be given that Smith and Kallis between them own 283 test caps, 22 554 runs and 72 centuries?

And that’s just some of the numbers of the matter. The alarm of glancing up at the cordon and not seeing Smith at first slip and Kallis at second will be not unlike looking at the space where you know you parked your car ... And seeing an empty parking space. Someone call the cops!

Smith and Kallis were men who got things done. They did so without fuss and bother, and with a certain reassuring Safferness that told us they would always be there when we needed them. We needed them plenty - as batsmen, mostly, but also as bowlers, fielders, captains, and people who would not let us down.

Almost incidentally, they made their team the finest in all of cricket. That would have happened, you get the feeling, whichever team they played for. Thank the gods it was ours.

But, even including Smith and Kallis, that team have never been the West Indies of the 1970s and 80s, nor the Australians of the 90s; the greatest sides of the modern era. South Africa, who lost for the first time in 14 series to the Australians this season, are up there. But they are not in the same class.

The Windies imploded from magnificent in maroon to pathetic in pink after their generation of great players faded, and the Aussies have only just put themselves back where they like to think they belong.

What awaits South Africa? Kallis’ allround contribution is impossible to replace. Ryan McLaren will do a steady rather than spectacular job and Wayne Parnell will be more spectacular than steady. Could the longterm answer be Vernon Philander? Beyond the batting ability Philander showed against India and Australia this season - he scored half-centuries against both - the sheer guts he put out there to survive the hostile Aussies on the last afternoon at Newlands marks him out as someone cut from the same mental cloth as Smith and Kallis.

Filling the hole Smith leaves will be even more difficult. Few players have what it takes to open the batting, more successfully than not, in Test cricket for 12 years. Even fewer are born to lead.

“We all had a look around to see who was going to take over from Shaun, and the fingers pointed to Jacques or Mark (Boucher),” Herschelle Gibbs told Australian radio station SEN. “But Graeme was very keen on the job; he wanted it quite badly.

“From the get-go we saw a man who wanted to be a leader and wanted to lead from the front, and who always played the game with a lot of heart and a lot of grit. He was a natural captain.”

Smith shared more partnerships - 68 - with Gibbs than any other player. They shared century stands seven times. They averaged 50.36 as a pair and scored 3274 runs together.

“I enjoyed opening the batting with him,” Gibbs said. “I’ve had some of my best days on the cricket field on the other end of the pitch from him.”

More happily, South Africa’s next Test engagement is in Sri Lanka in July. So they have the time to think carefully about their future.

Sri Lanka is a good place for a honeymoon, and the players who fill Kallis’ and Smith’s boots will be in the midst of theirs. Poor performances will thus be forgiven.

Zimbabwe and West Indies are South Africa’s other Test opponents this year. Regardless of the personnel on all sides, the Proteas should beat both easily.

And, with a bit of luck, nothing will go bump in the night and no-one will retire.