Graeme Smith - the gentle giant who guards South African cricket

Graeme Smith celebrates his double hundred against Pakistan

Being the number one team in Tests is not easy and holding on to that position is definitely not a walk in the park. However, after mauling Pakistan in the 2nd Test at Dubai, South Africa seems to be at ease wearing the crown of being the kings of Test cricket.

The last time South Africa lost an away Test series was way back in 2006 against Sri Lanka and since then, the Proteas have travelled twice to India, twice to the UAE to face Pakistan, twice down under, twice to the English shores and once to New Zealand, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Caribbean each. And they haven’t lost a single series.

In fact, they are on a roll of 13 consecutive undefeated Test series.

Since their re-admission into Test cricket in 1992, South Africa has always been a strong side. They have always had the depth and the quality, but the way this team has been steamrolling opponents on foreign soil, the number one tag looks safe with them for some to come.

And that’s only fair because the Proteas are perhaps the only team that has all its bases covered. They have a solid batting unit that can score runs all over the globe and a bowling attack that can create havoc on any kind of surface.

Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers and Faf du Plessis are equally competent at handling pace and spin while their fast bowling unit comprising of Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel and Vernon Philander can blow oppositions away on the flattest of tracks. The only chink in their armour was that in the spin department, but the rise of Imran Tahir and the steady performances of Robin Peterson have veiled that as well.

However, the biggest factor in South Africa’s domination on the Test circuit has been the strong and pragmatic leadership of Graeme Smith.

Just like a great book, the world of cricket is filled with different characters. If the Chris Gayles and the Shane Warnes add colour to the game, the ones like Sachin Tendulkar and Wasim Akram imbue it with brilliance. But there is another set of cricketers who slip under the radar and stay out of the limelight, yet add enormous strength to the game of cricket.

It’s easy to be poetic about batsmen who capture your imagination by caressing the ball with their velvet-tipped willows and draw a flurry of adjectives with every stroke they play, but it’s hard to describe a batsman who sticks to the crude way of bludgeoning the ball.

It’s great to write about the perfect stance of Rahul Dravid, but how do you define someone who crouches in his stance, with his feet on either side of the crease and well apart from each other?

How do you describe a left-hander who lacks the inherent grace of a southpaw and the silken Sangakkara-ish touch yet goes on to score four double hundred and boasts a career average of almost 50 in Test matches?

You describe him as Graeme Smith – a dogged fighter who makes the most of his limited talent to earn his place in cricket’s history. He belongs to a genre of cricketers whose game revolves more around brutal effectiveness than beautiful execution.

For us Indians, Smith is widely known as Zaheer Khan’s “bunny”. He has had enormous problems in negotiating the Indian left-armer and has often fallen flat in the face of the latter’s mastery.

But Graeme Smith is much more than that. He is the first captain to lead a team in one hundred Tests and is the only captain to score 8,000 plus runs while leading an international cricket team.

He has gone past 9,000 runs in Test cricket, has 27 tons to his name, and no South Africa batsman has hit more scores of 200-plus than Smith. He also holds the distinction of scoring the most number of away Test runs as a captain.

Staggering, isn’t it?

Whenever we talk about South Africa, the fiery pace of Allan Donald or the brilliance of Jonty Rhodes has always dominated the discussion. Even now, the experts and the fans hardly look beyond Hashim Amla, Dale Steyn and AB de Villiers. But Smith in his own right has become a giant in South African cricket.

There are quite a few reasons for that as well. His batting is anything but eye pleasing – an oft-heard portrayal of Smith’s batting is that it’s slow and unattractive. His stance is awkward, his movements clumsy and the over-abundance of protective gear that he dons makes him look more like Robocop rather than a batsmen.

All true. Smith doesn’t have the finesse, neither is he blessed with the gift of timing; and when you have the fluent Hashim Amla or the adventurous AB de Villiers batting at the other end, Smith’s slog sweeps and hard jabs through the midwicket certainly aren’t the most picturesque sights.

Even his captaincy lacks flair. He’s definitely not as “cool” as MS Dhoni and neither does he have the tactical acumen of a Michael Clarke. More often than not, one finds him reacting to a situation while at times, he looks bereft of ideas (remember England’s fightback at Lord’s in 2012?).