If you’re still counting the number of qualities that helped Temba Bavuma rally his troops for a triumph as massive as the ICC World Test Championship, I will give you another – being close to the right people.
I believe he had a lot of discussions with our rugby captain Siya Kolisi, who the sporting world knows as a highly accomplished Springboks skipper. Under Kolisi, South Africa won back-to-back rugby World Cups in 2019 at Japan and 2023 at France.
Dealing with pressure
I’ve watched a fair bit of Bavuma and noticed how he came to terms with dealing with the pressures of being a black captain of South Africa. There is a possibility that Kolisi and Bavuma are represented by the same agency, but surely they have shared a lot of information, and somewhere down the line, those chats have proved fruitful. Bavuma has been transformed into an astute leader of men. There was no shortage of criticism for Bavuma, but never underestimate what an individual can do in his own quiet way. He developed the self-belief and passed it on to his team.
The self-belief had a good effect on him. He started to behave differently. His interviews were done with a lot more confidence. I was asked the other day how do I view Bavuma since I’ve been the first non-white cricketer to represent South Africa. Well, I’ll tell you what I said in my book, Man in the Middle, after I retired from cricket, in 1994. I said that I’m very confident of the fact that South Africa as a nation historically, even during the apartheid years, had talented sports people. It didn’t matter what ethnic group you represented. They were seriously talented. When it came to cricket specifically, there was going to be a challenge for the black African batter getting exposed to international cricket — how quickly can we produce them, how good can they become. That was always what I saw in my experience growing up in the apartheid years and then after unification.
Strength in diversity
I was confident that we were going to produce white South African and black South African quick bowlers like the West Indies because our guys are strong and come from a rugby mentality. And then, we produced batsmen. You saw the Indian flair with Hashim Amla, the natural flair of Herschelle Gibbs, JP Duminy, Ashwell Prince, and others. The picture I’ve just sketched tells you that in diversity, there is strength.
Former spinning all-rounder Omar Henry played for SA from 1992 to 1993 and was their chief selector.