Dean Elgar is not your punching bag

Dean Elgar, 35, can’t be doing with Twitter, while he managed seven pics on the Gram before quitting that too. I haven’t checked TikTok because I wouldn’t know how to, but there’s more chance of him picking up an IPL gig than there is of getting him on that one. He is old. His kind, we hear, are in peril. He is the captain of South Africa’s Test team, and thus the antithetical counterweight to virtually everyone else who has some say on the future. Lugging on his back a porous collective of low-slung hopefuls and time-strapped desirables, he inhabits the spirit of some ancient conscript, striding across the barren karoos of a red-ball life, exposing his scars to the southern sun while the kids twat about for money and fame. He may not have asked for this, but it’s found him nonetheless.

He is also, perhaps paradoxically, as important a figure as the world game has right now. A triumphant South African Test team – one that contends, say, the World Test Championship final next summer – will not just energise the Test game in Elgar’s own country but expose the folly that it needs to shrink to survive. We’re living in existential times, where every rearguard victory, series turnaround and punch upwards offers further kernels of proof against the idea that cricket’s troika of financial superpowers can sideline the others and still hope to have a game come the end of it.

Gruff, gnarly, good on the cut, Elgar is an unlikely saviour. Still, he has survived through the last decade, seeing South Africa’s talent streams flow outwards from its fertile regions to be bottled by others, and understands what’s at stake. Thrust into the job by an ailing near-bankrupt administration, told to simultaneously plug the leak and enrich the soil, he’s somehow fashioned from the debris of a near-broken system a run of seven wins from nine Tests.

Those two matches they lost, by the way, were series-openers, against New Zealand (by an innings and 276 runs) and then a slavering India side intent on completing the grand slam of away victories (Australia, England and then this one). The latter comeback was provoked by the jarring retirement of Quinton de Kock, whose mutiny forced Elgar to reach back into his past – to those roughhouse initiations as an English speaker playing club cricket in largely Akrikaans Bloemfontein leagues, “where it was basically a question of fit in or f**k off” – to crack some heads, read some riot acts, shake his champion KG Rabada out of his funk and engineer a 2-1 victory, a result which hinged on his own comically stoic and borderline masochistic 96* in the second Test at Cape Town.

If this is a cricketer who only knows the one way, it is not a position born of dull pragmatism so much as the unyielding evidence of his eyes. Elgar is geared for survival. It’s there in his under-the-nose back-foot smother-block, and his world view. The contrast with his fourth innings at Newlands to that of, say, Jonny Bairstow against India at Edgbaston – or even Alex Lees, with his now-iconic run down the track to the third ball of England’s chase – offers up an intriguingly spiky counterpoint, around which the next four weeks will be framed.

Under Elgar’s captaincy they are top of the Test Championship table with a good chance of contesting the final next summer. Get there, and it will speak again of the extraordinary depths of pride and resilience that the South African badge engenders. After all this is a team whose only star batter is the man himself, a craggy southpaw with a Test average of 39 whose charisma, such as it is, reveals itself only as an expression of disgust at the very idea of it.

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Here lie the roots of Elgar’s distaste for those he has to face for the next month. He hates the showiness of it all. “The new England style is quite interesting,” he told Wisden Cricket Monthly last month, in statements which have dominated the build-up to this series. “But I don’t see that there’s longevity in brave cricket because I see things evening out over time in Test cricket. There was often parity between England and New Zealand [in the recent Test series] and had New Zealand taken their opportunities and their catches then things could have been very different. England would have come away with egg on their faces.”

His charges have since joined him, not least Anrich Nortje, who recently spoke to the i newspaper. “Don’t think about it, don’t care – sorry,” he said, in response to a question about ‘Bazball’. “We’re focused on Test cricket… I don’t know what you are talking about, you’re talking a totally different language.”

The subtext is pretty obvious. Elgar and his boys see arrogance in England’s ‘new style’, hubris in their strut, and unthinking compliance in their media, all of which offends their understanding of how to survive in this toughest of all games.

This funny old rivalry, which for three decades has compelled two innately conservative cricketing cultures to produce some humdingers, has suddenly changed complexion. But while England are enjoying experimenting with alternative ways of living, for South Africa the game is more elemental than that. It’s not, for them, about choosing how to live and work and play. It’s about fighting for the ground to work at all.