Elgar’s false stroke shouldn’t demand his dismissal

For a while there, Dean Elgar was doing well. He offered a typically and refreshingly unvarnished view of South Africa’s performance last season. He spoke of the importance of robust but thoughtful communication between players and coaches. He gave a sensible critique of the dangers of social media. He made plain the significance of possibly being appointed Test captain.

None of which was surprising. Too many cricketers sound the same while they talk a lot without saying much. Elgar’s is an original voice, and he is always worth listening to – as he was on the audio file released by Cricket South Africa on Monday.

But, after saying all of the above, he described what his life was like under lockdown. And stumbled into this: “I’ve got to cut the grass once a week, which is something I have done in the past. I’m fortunate to have a garden boy, but he’s not working now because of the rules that have been in place.”

If you’re a South African of a certain age, you will cringe at that. If you’re white, “garden boy” is probably what your parents called the gardener – who was an adult just like them but was somehow unworthy of being recognised as such. If you’re black, you’ll know why: because gardeners were and are invariably black, and to refer to a grown man of any age as a boy was another piece in the poisonous puzzle of racial oppression that informed South African society under apartheid.

Elgar is 32. He was seven when apartheid ended. He should know better. He should also know that he has provided ammunition for people who want to propagate the idea that whites in cricket are trying to re-engineer racism to fit the modern game. First Thabang Moroe was suspended as Cricket South Africa’s chief executive and replaced, albeit in an acting capacity, by Jacques Faul. Then Graeme Smith was named, initially temporarily, since permanently, as director of cricket ahead of at least one candidate of colour, former selector Hussein Manack. Then Mark Boucher was appointed coach and Enoch Nkwe, previously the interim team director, was relegated to assistant coach. Then Faf du Plessis’ message to his compatriots in the wake of Temba Bavuma being dropped from the Test team was “we don’t see colour”.

Nevermind that action had to be taken against the dangerously reckless Moroe, that Faul is an exponentially better administrator than most, that Smith has long since acquired many of the qualities and skills requisite to his position, that Boucher earned the respect of his players decades ago and has kept it, that Nkwe graciously accepted his new role and remains a major figure in the dressing room and in the nets, that Du Plessis perhaps is guilty of no more than the naivete of the privileged, and that Bavuma carried and continues to carry himself with dignity and has since won back his place. The louder truth is that, in each of those cases, blacks were sidelined and whites elevated.

And now this; Elgar using the language of a white South African from the bad old days. If you wanted to throw a lit match on the kindling of race and class inequality and division that is still so obvious in South Africa, and that has only been made starker by the contrasting realities of the mostly white haves and the largely black have-nots during the coronavirus lockdown, Elgar’s comment would serve the purpose. Whether he is or isn’t racist is not the issue. The point is what he said will be used to build the argument that cricket has been captured by whites at the expense of blacks.

How, people on one side of the ever ongoing race debate will ask, could Elgar be appointed Test captain if he thinks of Bavuma and Kagiso Rabada as boys because they are black? And what are Bavuma and Rabada to make of a captain who doesn’t consider them men, again because they are black? That Elgar thinks any such thing is far from established. But the opportunity to ask those questions has been created by Elgar himself.

Will people now pay as much heed as they might have done to his pithy summation of a 2019-20 campaign in which South Africa lost six of seven Tests in India and at home against England: “It’s almost like we had two different outlooks. We had the Indian trip, on which we had an interim coach [Nkwe]. That was quite difficult in the sense of, as a new and interim coach, he can’t always set things up in a short period of time. And playing in India is always going to be hard work and a massive challenge. We threw so many punches in the first Test, which I think took the wind out of our sails going into the next two Tests. India are going to be ruthless in that position. They’re going to keep their foot on your throat when they smell a bit of blood. For the England series we had a head coach appointed [Boucher], which was a god thing in the sense of adding stability. We started well and then struggled to solidify or do the basics correctly. England did, and utilised their experience in their favour.”

What fresh inferences will some draw about Elgar’s preferences for dealing with his fellow players: “You’ve got to know your personnel or your teammates that you can have hard chats with. Sometimes you’ve just got to sit around the same table and express what you’re feeling. Sometimes people don’t like hearing the blunt truth. That’s something that’s maybe lacking around the world at the moment. It’s always difficult to have hard chats, but you need to trust where it’s coming from. You need to have trust in the player or the coach. It’s about the how and who you’re speaking to. You’ve got to be a little bit sensitive towards some guys and bring your point across in a different manner. You can still have hard chats without the shouting and swearing. You can just say the right things and maybe it will hit home.”

Parts of the internet are cesspools of angry attention-seeking, so there can only be understanding for Elgar’s aversion to staring at screens filled with people trying to vent at him: “I don’t have a lot of social media, so I don’t see a lot of negativity. That’s something that players do these days because of the accessibility. I’ve taken that away because I don’t like being negative. I’m a very positive person. I’m not going to have people say things they want to say things and influence my thinking. As an individual you have that control – whether you want social media or not. I’ve chosen not to have it, and I’ve done that to focus on my performance, the team and the bigger picture. I’m trying to negate the negativity that comes with being an international sportsman.” But you have to hope he takes notice of the response when he gets it wrong. As he patently has in this case.

And which he will do at times if he is named South Africa’s next leader, a job he seems to have a firm grasp of, has done in two matches and clearly wants to do again: “It’s not an easy journey being a Test captain, but I think leadership comes extremely naturally to me. I’ve done the captaincy thing in the past. I’ve done it from school level to provincial level and in a few franchise teams. I’ve really enjoyed it. If I was asked to be captain I would think long and hard about it. It would mean a lot to me. But it’s not a job interview and you don’t hand in a CV. You’ve got to respect the people who are making the decisions. It’s their choice.”

There is a lot to like about Elgar. He is feisty, loyal, tough, skilled, talented, gloriously grumpy, furiously funny, happily human. Doubtless there are aspects about him that are difficult to like. As there are about all of us: we are nothing if not fallible. That doesn’t make us reprehensible. It makes us complex, which is to be celebrated. In old and new ways, Elgar sets a fine example of what it means to be a man. Boys look to him for nothing less, not to do his gardening.