The test cricket season seemed to have arrived a little too early this year. A random late October morning, preceded by Test matches at Kingsmead and Gqeberha, saw the Proteas at Newlands for what became the deciding match of the Test series against Australia.

Both Kingsmead and Gqeberha delivered stop-start Test matches, thanks to rain or bad light stopping play. Crowds at Kingsmead were so poor that it should seriously be reconsidered as a Test match venue, if anyone at Cricket.

South Africa is paying proper attention. Newlands on Day 1 drew a crowd of over 11 000.

As the shadows grew long late on Friday afternoon, no one could fault Bavuma’s view that, "I don’t think there’s a better crowd or venue that you can play test cricket at than here at Newlands".

The joys of Test match cricket are in its ebbs and flows (who might have predicted a 176-run victory for the Proteas on Day 5, for instance?), its intelligence, its eccentricities and its near silence: the odd clap, the odd comment, the rustle of wind and soft chatter around the ground. The rumble between overs. Nothing is quite like test match cricket; nothing beats it. It is the ultimate test of concentration, skill, resilience and nerve. It’s a game, beautifully languid at times, with each session telling its own story.

Yet, as if to remind us that we are living in a world where silence is counter-cultural and holding a thought either in silence or to oneself is near sacrilege, blaring music between overs during a Test match has now become the norm at Newlands.

The purists balk, and yet it is the short-form T20 game that is drawing the crowds with its hype, colour and noise. Loud music pervades any T20 match, a truncated form of the game that ensures cricket’s coffers do not run empty. (Its plus side is, of course, its family-friendly aspect and the way it introduces a new and younger audience to the basics of a complicated game.) Ironically, this short form of the game is therefore necessary for cricket’s survival as a whole. As with everything driven by a bottom line, something has got to give.

Sadly, the attention (deficit) economy and the bottom line are killing off Test match cricket, as Barney Ronay, writing brilliantly in the Guardian (UK), recently described: ‘The hard game, the actual game that still produces the short-form TV offshoot, is being sacrificed mercilessly. And the thing that is replacing it is not just demonstrably inferior, but self-dooming in its basic inanity … where the bottom line is the only line, where everything must be reduced to stupidity and profitable chaff.’

And so, if ever there was a sporting response to inanity, it was this Test match series.

And if ever Test match cricket deserved an audience, it was for our captain Temba Bavuma’s match-winning innings of 179 in Gqeberha, and then at Newlands, where the Proteas, playing under the strapline ‘Unbreakable’, kept us all absorbed until late on Day 5.

Never give up. Never say die.

This gritty little team has now also produced the world’s best Test match bowler and Test all-rounder (according to the latest ICC men’s rankings) in Marco Jansen, or ‘Planke’. Has a nickname ever been more apt? In his post-match interview, he said drily, ‘…(I’m) just ‘a laaitie from Klerksdorp’ whose father said, ‘moenie laat jou kop te groot raak nie.’ One could not help really rooting for Jansen, who was once mocked by a sporting journalist during his first match at Lord’s for his ‘working-class roots’. Prejudice and classism rear their heads everywhere.

As the team did a lap of honour for the Newlands faithful on Saturday afternoon, one could not help but think back to 5 January 2016, when Temba Bavuma, then aged 25, scored a brave and exciting 102 not out off only 148 balls. As Bavuma raised his bat to the applause of his teammates, the South Africans in the crowd knew precisely what that emotionally laden moment really meant. Our past is never lost on us, never far away, and we all knew why former Proteas fast bowler Makhaya Ntini had his fists in the air in elation.

Bavuma became the first black African to score a century for South Africa. He is the first black African player to captain a Test match team, and he has done so with grace in the face of shameful racist taunts.

In 2016, it was former England captain and South African Kevin Pietersen who said of Bavuma, “I don’t know who that kid is who bats six, (Bavuma), I don’t know why he’s batting in that line-up…”

Bavuma, from Langa township, honed his skills there and later in Gauteng under the mentorship of Geoffrey Toyana. He went on to play for the Lions and became vice-captain in the 2013–2014 season. By 2016, he had been struggling to cement his place in the Proteas side, but that century showed us Bavuma’s deep well of grit and determination, and what he would go on to do when our backs were against the wall.

As is often the case in South Africa, sport provided us with a reminder that talent, if nurtured, is universal and not the preserve of a particular race.

While watching the sheer joy of this sweet Test series victory, one could not help but also think of the self-inflicted wounds of cricket’s administration.

Cricket South Africa (CSA) has had its fair share of what ails most of South Africa’s institutions: dysfunction, corruption, maladministration and self-interest. When the then minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, Nathi Mthethwa, intervened in cricket at the end of October 2020 and appointed an interim board, he did so as a last resort. His intervention represented the final opportunity for CSA to fix governance issues or risk complete decline.

Eventually, the Interim Board managed to put a new governance model in place. Improving the administration remains a work in progress, and the new governance model — like democracy — is imperfect. The Board, as currently constituted, is short of deep cricketing knowledge and faces serious financial challenges.

The Members’ Council, mostly in thrall to its own narrow interests, cannot always be counted on to do what is in the best interests of the game.

We are still paying the price for past wrongs. Rebuilding trust between administrators, the board and players remains a challenge for the long haul. Bavuma himself has been clear-eyed in his assessment of the administration of the game and has been an astute champion of his players’ needs.

It is therefore easy to see how we lost our place at the top table of the ICC, how we took our eye off the ball — in this environment, there was little space for the development of the game, especially at club level. But it is not the role of CSA alone to develop a future pipeline of young players, particularly black players.

Schools have a role to play, but they can only do so if properly resourced by the government. That requires money and partnerships. It also requires a focus on the importance of a holistic education, thus building a healthy society in which talent is recognised and nurtured.

So, successive ministries of Sport, Arts and Culture cannot escape accountability for failing to see the importance of equipping schools for sport.

(The incumbent minister, a dangerously clownish and unserious man, lacks the insight to do anything but sloganeer, unfortunately. Sport really does deserve better, as do the arts). One could add that listening to ball-by-ball commentary on the radio is not only a part of the ritual of test match cricket but another way of taking cricket to a broader audience across our country. But in another sign of dysfunction, there was no radio commentary provided by the SABC for this test match series. Given that the majority of South Africans gather news via this medium, it is a travesty for the public broadcaster to fail so abysmally in fulfilling its mandate.

This series has highlighted many more positives, however, and also what South Africans can do when we work as a team with proper leadership. In coach Shukri Conrad and Bavuma cricket we have just that.

When Conrad was appointed, there were those who questioned his cricketing pedigree. Many are unaware that Conrad’s father was a legendary cricketer in his own right and that Conrad has been steeped in cricket since before he was born.

His father, Dickie Conrad, was one of the finest players of that great generation of cricketers. So, for Conrad to hold the mace aloft at Lord’s in 2025 and to defeat Australia in test match series on home soil in 2026, were full circle moments.

In so many ways, the partnership that Bavuma and Conrad are building together pays homage to the players who could never represent their country, and it provides a firm foundation for taking the game to millions more in our diverse country. This will take clear-eyed strategic administration of the game, proper government support and a commitment to excellence.

Because somewhere in a township or a suburb, a child has watched Bavuma raise his bat, lanky Jansen celebrate wildly, KG Rabada breathing fire in the first two overs on Day 5, the Mulder and Rickleton centuries and imagined themselves doing the same.

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