Graeme Smith: A memoir of magnificent tales

Graeme Smith

It was a breakfast as bizarre as it could get. A mug of morning coffee had metamorphosed into a potion too hard to gulp in. Numbness ruled my body, emotion my head and I was deviously disconsolate, blinking in disbelief. The lump in my throat was excruciatingly enormous, exponentially exacerbating the agony on my plate. The skin on my face was as white as bone, out of confoundedness rather than complexion.

The dawn, with it had brought the dilapidation of an emperor and the dusk of an empire. The ring master had decided to shut shop and hang up his insignia, leaving his circus devoid of its most popular identity. That the beacon of South African cricket would vanish in a few hours reduced the ever jovial cricket connoisseur in me to a blithering toddler, stumbling in the dark.

Graeme Smith had called it a day. Curtains were being pulled down in a wink leaving fans worldwide bewildered beyond belief, flabbergasted by the fact that the theatre would continue, but without one of its greatest thespians.

Roll back the reels. A good ten years down the line. The Proteas had been bamboozled out of a world cup in their own backyard. The skipper, a senior statesman by the name of a certain Shaun Pollock had renounced his crown, putting the most coveted job up for grabs.

That a tall, left handed batsman, a bloke who was barely ten tests old would be given the top job would have been scoffed at as the hopeless hallucinations of a hyperbolic brain, even by the most bullish of bookmakers. But preposterousness won over pragmatism and the unimaginable was imagined by the men who mattered. The bosses saw the poise and panache in the boy who had turned twenty just two summers ago.

Graeme Craig Smith took over the reins, a manly desire to script a legacy of his own itched on his boyish face. With the scorn of the sceptics reverberating in the aftermath of a shambolic World Cup campaign, the job on hand was an extremely arduous one, but one Smith took to like fish to water, with a dash and dare seen in a few.

As an ideal sequel to the alliance forged by Gibbs with Gary Kirsten as South Africa’s go to opening duo, the Smith-Gibbs conglomeration was prolific in the sheer weight of runs it accumulated post Kirsten’s retirement. Smith brought with him the zeitgeist of classical batsmanship as well as the admonishing disdain of the pulverising opener which is in vogue. Playing a brand of cricket with brashness coupled with resoluteness which hundreds dream of, but only few produce, Smith made the numero uno spot in the Proteas line up his second home.

The stats do tell a tale, one that propels to further altitudes, the gallantry of this hero who cracks the whip right atop. In all of South Africa’s opening partnerships worth three hundred runs or more (four in all), there has been the larger than life presence of this man from Transvaal.

12^th March, 2006. Yes, it is that epic encounter which had an ensemble of the most power packed of theatrics I’m talking about. A day when the wile in the Wanderers strip wandered away for good rolling out the stage for a whirlwind plunder of runs. The African safari that succeeded the Aussie carnage was the greatest of manifestations of a duo which had usurped the boundaries of imagination in the realm of deadly excellence.

Smith and Gibbs carted the Aussies in pursuit of the peak which hadn’t been pursued before, let alone be conquered. Smith belted a ninety runs from fifty five deliveries, matching Gibbs’ monumental knock of 175, stroke for stroke. The knock should be rated as the Proteas skipper’s best ever in coloured clothing. Not for its numerical magnitude, but for the role it played in encrypting history at the bullring. If ever a ninety deserved to be equated to a whole hundred, this indeed was the day to think beyond mathematical boundaries.

Graeme Smith the player was no ordinary willow wielder by any means. By and far, among his generation’s elite. One doesn’t score back-to-back double centuries as ‘Biff” did in the English voyage of 2003, at drop of a hat. But what defined him, made him ‘the boy wonder’ was the hard-nosed captain, who brought to the coveted profession a brand of patented astuteness, hiding a ruthless soul in a youthful face.

Graeme Smith bids adieu

All of 22 years old, Smith became the pony to drive South African cricket forward, to steer the ship to safe waters from turmoil. His calm demeanour and the ‘young youthful lad’ image was a scabbard hiding the dagger underneath. That captaincy complimented his game instead of crucifying a budding career spoke volumes of the lad who exhibited maturity light years beyond his age, in the battle hardened test cricket cauldron.

Coupling productivity with style and imbibing substance with flaunt, Smith rode his way into the corridors of fame as the Proteas cricketing knight. The rookie became South African cricket’s greatest resplendent. His longevity at the top job remains his greatest credential as well as his biggest accolade. He has presided over the most magnificent of test victories and most adventurous of back door escapades. In a group where victory became a cult and success an omnipresent aura, he taught the team to endure loses, yet not become losers.

A long ten years at the pinnacle. In whites, Smith has led his nation out to the field over a one hundred times, tasting the nectar of success in almost every second game (104 Tests, 51 victories, 27 losses, 26 draws). Boy, isn’t that phenomenal? In a backdrop, where playing a hundred Test matches remains a monumental feat, leading a nation a hundred times stands out as an unsurpassed peak. Like Tendulkar’s hundred hundreds, Bradman’s “Bradmanesque” average, Smith’s hundred tests at the helm is bound to stand the test of time and remain a fort that will in all probability never be breached.

An image which flows into the mind and fills the heart is that of a ‘single handed’ warrior striding out to single handedly save a game for his side. Smith sporting a broken backhand, walking out at number eleven at the SCG in January 2009 remains and will remain an unblemished memory in the years to come.

Broken bones aside, unwavering commitment and unflinching spirit being his allies, Smith the warrior waged a vigil at the crease wielding a lone handed willow to the Aussie pace battalion’s barrage of 90mph bullets. He had almost taken the Proteas to safety, when a Johnson missile breached his single handed defence with home all of ten balls away. South Africa lost the battle, but Smith won the war and conquered hearts.

As Graeme Smith bids farewell, it was only concomitant for the South African juggernaut in Test cricket to end. The winning streak which stretches for a whopping 6 years, during which the Proteas didn’t lose a single test series, began back in 2008-09. I guess, with Smith it was the case of an early rise to the top culminating in an adieu many didn’t anticipate coming at the age of 33.

The body might still be durable for an encounter, but ‘Biff’ feels the mind has run its course. A young family at home with a sick daughter deserves him more. The sailor leaves the ship after a decade long voyage in the tempestuous seas. Amidst all the war cries of an exhilarating tussle between two mighty forces, the atmosphere is as gloomy as it can be, unable to sink in the verity that South African cricket is unlikely to venture into those adventures again, which had, not a diaspora of people, but cricket lovers worldwide cheering like madmen, at the edge of their seats for what seemed an eternity.