Smith’s SA20 army marches on

“Still got it, Graeme.” - a passerby

Telford Vice / Wanderers

A familiar figure stood square and solid on the tarmac and stooped through the open front passenger window of a car in a queue waiting to get into the Wanderers on Saturday. He had a phone in his left hand and an earphone plugged into his right ear, and he seemed to be using both — and talking to the driver in the car — simultaneously.

He said his goodbyes to the driver and started walking away, still talking into his devices. A boy of maybe six years old appeared, holding a team shirt, a pen, a smile, and a hope. The man guided the child into a pool of shade — it was 30 degrees Celsius — and duly signed the shirt. Then the boy’s father took a photograph of the kid and his hero.

“Still got it, Graeme,” a passerby wisecracked, which garnered an upward glance and a smile.

Almost 11 years after he last played for South Africa, Graeme Smith does indeed still have it. People who weren’t born when his international career ended not only know who he is but want to share a moment in his greatness. And another thing: the boy was as brown as Smith is white. In South Africa, that is rare.

Smith is exceedingly easy to like, but some of his compatriots — infected by a poisonous and happily previous incarnation of CSA’s most powerful figures, who cynically and dishonestly weaponised race politics — are determined not to do so.

These malcontents are increasingly sad and increasingly irrelevant. They abhor excellence, whether it is black, brown or white. That becomes more true the higher they rise in their roles. Because their job is to have their jobs, not to do them.

So they wouldn’t have been out there in the heat, in long sleeves and jeans, more than three hours before the start of the third SA20 final, between Mumbai Indians Cape Town and Sunrisers Eastern Cape, mucking in with their supposed subordinates and doing their jobs, and more.

Smith is all about an honest work ethic and an utter lack of pretentiousness. David Gower made batting left-handed look like ballet in pads. Smith made it look like tree-felling. But which of them would you rather have batting for your life? Not that Swan Lake fella, fine bloke that he is.

The former tree feller has been the SA20’s commissioner since the league’s inception, and he has earned a lot of praise for making the tournament the best thing to happen to the game in South Africa since unity and readmission. The proof is in the stands, which have been more full than for much of the rest of the cricket played in the country.

Smith deserves his flowers, but he has not done it all alone, of course. Stephen Cook is the league’s head of cricket operations. Lynn Naude is the chief operating officer. Both are omnipresent. You would swear they’ve been at every game, the double-headers included. They are ominously on top of everything. They wield their outrageous competence like a sword sheathed in modesty.

An army has been mobilised beyond those three generals. The ranks include Vinnie Barnes, once South Africa’s men’s bowling coach, now the lead of the Schools SA20 project. Mike Gajjar, CSA’s erstwhile manager of cricket operations and among the sanest administrators South Africa has yet produced, is now keeping the SA20 machine’s wheels oiled.

And so on and so forth, to the extent that pressboxes are so strewn with people in tournament gear they seem to outnumber reporters. If that’s the price of success, it’s small.

The SA20 works, from top to bottom. That’s why the boss is out there on hot afternoons, doing his job and turning hope into happiness.

Cricbuzz