Ahead of the World Cup I was dubbed the Sunday Times’ 2010 correspondent. It was less an honour than one of those jobs nobody else wanted to do because they already had their plates full with other stuff. I would meet Danny Jordaan — the person largely responsible for bringing the event to our shores — for breakfast in Sandton occasionally.

I remember agreeing to meet in Eastgate, a shopping mall on the Eastern side of Johannesburg. 

Miraculously, Jordaan, who drove a massive BMW, managed to get lost. He seemed so stressed and so absent-minded that I wondered sometimes how he managed to wake up in the morning, or if he perhaps needed to get somebody else to do that for him.

Despite escapades on golf carts in the Caribbean and late-night phone calls, we became fond of each other. He was a left-arm medium-pace bowler, he once told me, which somehow fitted. He asked me to write his book, either to be a ghost-written autobiography or a biography. 

He sometimes looked green from over-work, which went well with the permanently dishevelled look. There was a period, let’s not forget, during which Fifa became uppity about South Africa’s perceived lack of building progress, and parachuted a whole lot of their Swiss A-team down to South Africa. 

I remember a name — Delia Fischer. If you needed anything, you went to Delia. She was so time sensitive she ticked all the chronological boxes. 

The World Cup was a jol, from Siphiwe Tshabalala’s equaliser against Mexico in the opening game to Diego Maradona press conferences, from Spain’s tiki-taka to Ghana’s better-than-expected run and that hand-ball. But eventually, the vuvuzelas stopped blaring and the fun ended. The dream began to fade. Worse still, the dream began to sour.

It transpired that pre-World Cup Bafana friendlies against Thailand, Colombia, Guatemala and Bulgaria had been fixed by a group of mainly Singaporean match-fixers with assumed names like Simon Mega-Diamond and Jason-Joe Lourdes. 

They infiltrated the South African Football Association’s (Safa) referees’ department, very few of whom thought there was anything amiss when the fixers — men they had never set eyes upon — offered procure referees which they hadn’t vetted. And at less than the going rate. 

Safa, of which Jordaan became president after his World Cup golf cart and mayoral duties were over, became byzantine and inefficient. Its executive was massive. Chief executives came and went. Here was a culture that appeared to be more in thrall to factionalism and patronage than it did to delivery.

In 2011, Chuck Blazer and Jack Warner, the companeros Jordaan had been schmoozing in Grenada, stopped scratching each other’s backs. Warner was exposed by Blazer in a money-for-votes scam and resigned from the Fifa executive, but not before he had secured his pension. 

In one of his more ingenious scams, he built a football centre of excellence on the outskirts of Port of Spain. He renamed the facility the João Havelange Centre of Excellence (COE) without the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football’s (Concacaf) knowledge, Havelange being the Brazilian bruiser and head of Fifa who was once accused in the Brazilian media of running guns into Bolivia. 

Using a front company owned by himself, his wife and his son called Renraw, which is Warner spelled backwards, he bought the land for the João Havelange Centre of Excellence from Lever Brothers West Indies.

They rented this land back to Concacaf, who thought they owned both the centre and the land upon which it was built. 

Sir Anthony Cathcart Simmonds, former attorney general of Barbados, wrote an Integrity Report about Warner and Blazer’s goings-on published in April 2013. “In the end, as a result of his fraudulent conduct, Warner divested Concacaf and Fifa of approximately $26 million, and Warner obtained title to the COE property, which rightfully belongs to Concacaf.”

 Warner didn’t get to where he got by retiring to the front lawn to do tai-chi and frolic with his grand-children. After Blazer had shopped him, he returned the favour. And so the FBI came after Blazer. The man who had once rented an apartment in Trump Towers in Manhattan only for his cats was pulled off his scooter and told to put his diary on hold. 

Blazer was nabbed on tax-evasion and money-laundering charges. It was found out that he loved to pay himself commissions. His world — and that of Warner’s — I remember writing at the time, was not of one checks and balances, but of cheques and balances.

Jordaan wasn’t just dimly aware that all of this was going on somewhere in the middle distance. He was surely also aware of the shenanigans in the so-called African Diaspora Program. The details need not concern us here, suffice it to say that Warner was again involved. 

In 2015, for example, the Financial Times followed African Diaspora Program money. It concluded that at roughly the same time that Fifa was paying Warner for the “Diaspora Legacy Program”, so $72  million found its way into a Tunisian business person and international football power-broker’s HSBC account in Switzerland. It is an amount, they said, that roughly corresponded to $70  million the South Africans admitted using to “assist[ing] African football federations”. 

Let’s not beat around the bush, this is tantamount to admitting you are paying bribes in return for votes. And it was not going on while Jordaan was peering into his briefcase, trying to remember what it was that he thought he was looking for.

The feeling that more could have been made out of the World Cup is widespread. There was so much energy, so much goodwill, generated by South Africa’s successful hosting in 2010, that the years since seem like an opportunity missed. Jordaan, surely, is part of this missed opportunity. With the goals at his mercy he, as in rugby, hoofed it over the bar.

He told me and many others in the mid-1990s that football in this country wanted its place in the sun. Given the legacy of apartheid, who would disagree? But what have we done with that place? 

Do the fields blush with flowers? Are we producing a small percentage of the world’s best players, the world’s best administrators, the world’s best referees? We all know the answers to these questions. Last week Bafana Bafana beat South Sudan in an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier. In some quarters this was hailed as a victory worth celebrating. 

The Safa saga seems like a long-running pantomime. There is always some kerfuffle about money, where it is, where it is not and where it has gone. Safa’s auditors, PwC, didn’t only resign once, they resigned twice — in 2019 and 2020. We have all read about the President’s Discretionary Fund. That’s not a phrase anyone but the president likes the look of.

And how about the Jennifer Ferguson rape allegations against Jordaan? Why would a musician like Ferguson, now living in faraway Sweden with children of her own, concoct rape allegations if she didn’t feel compelled to do so? What would there possibly be to gain?

The slightly jaundiced among us can’t have helped noticing that the current charges against Jordaan, of theft and fraud amounting to R1.3  million, are negligible ones. This suggests that there are those who want Jordaan to go and, after this conclusion was reached, they needed to find charges against him to support their desire to be rid of him. 

Jordaan, however, has nothing else. The cut-and-thrust is what he lives for. And here’s a cheeky thought: given the company he keeps — or, more accurately, the company he once kept among the power-brokers of the international game, the comedy duo that was Warner and Blazer — is it really surprising that he’s charged private security to Safa’s account? These are glimpses into a hidden world of dysfunction of which Jordaan is only a part.

One can’t help but notice Jordaan has a nasty habit of sticking around, hogging the ball like an old-fashioned playmaker. Whenever someone has shouted for him to come off, he’s gestured back that he can’t hear. He’s been staying on for close to 30 years now.

He’s in illustrious company. Havelange, Warner’s chum, was president of Fifa for 24 years; Sepp Blatter, Havelange’s successor, was president for 17. 

It tells you that men of their ilk, through amiability, patronage, the breezy arts of back-slapping and the dark arts of secret handshakes, tend to like the positions they’re in. That means they stick around. 

When they need to go to ground, they do so. A couple of months later, they’re up and running again, which enables them to stick around until at least the next drama. These are guys that play for the full 90. They always have.

Look out for The Luke Alfred Show, his weekly podcast on all matters sporting with an edge of mischief. It’s available on Spotify, Apple podcasts and YouTube. Feel free to become a paid subscriber through Patreon.

He still is an amiable man, so amiable that if there is a stage of amiability beyond amiability, a sort-of supercharged or V8 amiability, Jordaan is your guy. This is why, when working at the Sunday Times in Johannesburg, my colleagues and I always referred to Jordaan not as “Captain Amiable” but as — wait for it — “the lugubrious walrus”.

In early 1996, Jordaan had reason to be proud. Kenya could not discharge her hosting responsibilities to the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations, so South Africa stepped into the breach in a stroke of fabulous luck. 

This was because, as hosts, South Africa qualified automatically for the competition using — get this — rugby grounds such as those in Bloem and Port Elizabeth as venues for the soon-to-be-hosted football. 

Jordaan was always careful about what he said during those years, a trend that has continued, but one of the few noteworthy statements he used to make at the time was that football in South Africa needed its own dedicated stadiums. Only when it had them could it be liberated from its historical and circumstantial association with rugby and, therefore, apartheid.

South Africa had played three matches in her qualifying group when news of her status as new Cup of Nations hosts emerged. The three matches included 1-0 wins over Madagascar and Mauritius, and an away draw against Zambia, otherwise known as the sovereign principality of King Kalusha Bwalya. 

Although handily placed, it was by no means a given that Bafana Bafana — as they were coming to be known — would qualify. Both Zambia and Gabon were ahead of them in qualifying when the news came through that Kenya were unable to put on the show.

So Jordaan had pretty good reason to be pleased that hot afternoon at the beginning of 1996. He would have even more reason to be so as the tournament progressed. South Africa beat Cameroon, one of the powerhouses of the African game at the time, 3-0 in her opening match, which filled Bafana and the nation with a hope veering dangerously close to hysteria.

The knockouts duly arrived. A narrow win over Algeria in a Saturday afternoon cloudburst couldn’t dampen South African expectations and, when Ghana were thumped 3-0 in the semi-final, it seemed as though we were being given permission to think the unthinkable.

South Africa’s passage at this stage of the tournament was helped by Nigeria’s absence.

Nelson Mandela had criticised the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian environmental activist, by the Sani Abacha regime. In a fit of pique, Abacha had withdrawn Nigeria, the then cup holders, from the competition. Bafana would have needed to play Nigeria to take their title away from them. 

Instead, Bafana Bafana played Tunisia in the final. In the second half, Doc Khumalo played a diagonal ball crisp as a chicken wing to put through substitute striker Mark Williams, who made it 2-0 to the hosts. The Cup was venturing as far south as the continent stretched.

These were heady days for South Africa, South African football and the lugubrious Jordaan. The rand was still strong — or comparatively so — and locals were fond of talking about a quaint notion of the “Rainbow Nation”. Germany, England, France, the Netherlands and Brazil — a personal Jordaan favourite — ventured to these shores, or us to theirs, to play friendlies. It was probably a close-run thing as to who had bigger pulling power in those days: Mandela or Babeto, Dunga and Romario. Either way, Brazil were persuaded to arrive for the Nelson Mandela Challenge, in April 1996. 

David Elleray, one of the world’s most respected referees, took the whistle. The match started 20 minutes late because South Africa’s vice-president, Thabo Mbeki, couldn’t get to Soccer City on time.

South Africa scored first with a Phil Masinga header. They were in it until, suddenly, they weren’t, running out losers by three goals to two. Eighteen months later, Bafana again lost to Brazil in a friendly by the odd goal. Nothing to be embarrassed about here. Brazil beat many a side by the odd goal in the late 1990s. 

Jordaan was in charge of an association that took itself seriously because it presided over a national side who took themselves seriously. These were not perfect times — South Africa’s disappointing showing in the 1998 World Cup in France showed that — but they were times in which South African football was, if not a power-house, then at least committed to not being left behind.

It was such status that inspired South Africa, with Jordaan heading the local delegation, to bid to host the 2006 World Cup. We don’t know exactly what transpired in the murky underworld of international football realpolitik on the eve of the vote in 2000, suffice it to say that New Zealand delegate Charles Dempsey, a golf-playing Hobbit of a fellow, was given a mandate from his association to vote for South Africa. 

With talk of notes under hotel-room doors and midnight shenanigans, Dempsey disregarded the mandate from Oceania, the block he represented, and abstained. His abstention meant that votes between Germany and South Africa to host the 2006 tournament tied. Sepp Blatter, another of the amiable man school, stepped in. And cast the final vote for Germany. 

Jordaan and his fellow bid team, Michael Katz, Koos Bekker and Irvin Khoza, dusted themselves off, and the bid team started racking up the frequent flier miles in pursuit of hosting the World Cup once again. 

A couple of years later, with South Africa’s 2010 bid in full swing, I remember deciding to wait for Jordaan at Grenada airport in the Caribbean as he campaigned for South Africa to host the 2010 World Cup. He was jetting in from Trinidad, where he’d had a couple of what I imagine were trying days with Jack Warner, the dodgy Caribbean power-broker and wheeler-dealer.

Jordaan knew I was in Granada for the Sunday Times. But he didn’t know that I’d be at the airport to say hello. As he fetched his bags and sauntered through passport control, I saw him in his customary dark, slightly shabby suit. 

He looked green. Whether it was from fatigue or fear of flying, or was simply the delayed after-effects of spending too much time with the cash-crazed Warner, I never got to find out. 

At the airport he amiably gave me the slip. But we did agree to meet at the palatial golf resort at which he was staring later. At the appointed time, under gently swaying palms, Jordaan breezed past in a golf cart, shouting directions to his next stop. I was beginning to feel I was being dragged into a Steve Martin movie against my will. Best keep amiable.

I followed on foot, while he hopped from hole to hole in a golf cart. I chased him to the seventh, clutching my notebook, and followed him to the eighth. He whizzed across the little bridge to the tenth.

The reason Jordaan and I were in Grenada was because the Confederation of North Central American and Caribbean Football Associations were having their annual meeting there. Voting for who would host the 2010 World Cup was only a month away and Jordaan wanted to do some last-minute schmoozing. 

Getting Mandela to press flesh and go walkabout with Warner in Trinidad was part of the initiative, but now Jordaan needed to tell the confederation delegates why they should encourage Warner and his mate, the big Chuck Blazer, to vote for South Africa.

It might have seemed like a straightforward matter. When Germany pipped South Africa at the post to host the 2006 World Cup, Blatter told the world that the next World Cup would be hosted in Africa. Morocco and Egypt had emerged as compelling bids, and Jordaan was taking no chances. 

Either way, here we were, Jordaan, myself and Blazer and his wife, sipping tea and making World Cup small talk so tiny it verged on the invisible. Whether they are scumbags or not, all journalists suffer from reputation bias, particularly in the eyes of those who have much to hide. I didn’t know it then, but Chuck had been supping at the football trough for years. He had much to hide.

Jordaan was increasingly difficult to get hold of once South Africa had been awarded 2010 hosting status in Zurich in 2004. He was always somewhere else. He used two passports, both of which were dangerously full. If he wasn’t going there, he was coming back. 

Because it was difficult to pin down, we resorted to tricking him. One of us on the sports desk would phone him and ask about something besides World Cup preparations. We would ask about the Champions’ League, or technological innovations in football, or the race for the English Premiership title. 

Jordaan would be overpowered by his enthusiasm for the game. He would be frank, thoughtful, engaging. Talking football in general put him into a good mood, whereupon we pounced, folding a World Cup question or two craftily into our list.

We could never have known that Jordaan’s dream, and his reputation, would soon begin to sour.

Look out for The Luke Alfred Show, Luke’s weekly podcast on all matters sporting with an edge of mischief. They’re available on Spotify, Apple podcasts and YouTube. Feel free to become a paid subscriber via Patreon

Fears about the health of ageing parents; fears about how soon it would take to throttle the home-from-school kids. Fears about whether your next breath was going to be your last one.

There was a whole new vocabulary to get used to. It spread with viral speed, attacking everything. Think of “social distancing”, and “hand sanitiser”; think of recycled shopping bags and the mixed blessings — often hilarious — of Zoom meetings.

“Can you see me Arnold, I can’t see you!”

“Is this the link? Do I just click? And then I can see you!”

For me, personally, beaches played a small but important part in my Covid-19 story. When I was so fatigued that I was unable to walk across a small beach (the dogs bounded across with ease) I realised that something was up. 

Something was. I was “positive”, an irony I seldom tired — not true, actually — of telling my friends about, because my first vaccination was only days away when I first came down with the plague.

Before I couldn’t cross the beach without pausing for breath, I snuck out and crossed the beach without thinking. In the early stages of lockdown, when I had the beach to myself, I marvelled at everything. How pristine was the beach sand? How clean and litter-free. And, suddenly, how incredibly benign the weather was.

The important thing was that no-one else was crossing the beach. They were taking social distancing to extremes and battening down the hatches, getting Woolies to deliver non-perishables and toilet paper. 

They were breathlessly exchanging banana bread recipes and bartering for booze. They were coming up with ingenious strategies for queue-jumping so they could be first to be vaccinated.

There were no footprints on the beach when I crossed it for the first time, so I experienced a Robinson Crusoe moment. I was the first man. The only man. This was how it was in the beginning, an Edenic moment of calm, peace and plenty.

At this stage of the pandemic we used to pore over our phones, gazing at the animals returning to empty parks and cities with a longing we didn’t know we had. Goats walked like celebrities down the high street in a Welsh village. Fish returned to the canals of Venice, where the water was an indescribable blue, part green, part turquoise. 

With everyone locked indoors, the natural world returned to some kind of happy balance (or so it seemed). The weather stabilised because the carbon emissions and vapour tails and general industrial desecration was no longer happening. 

While the middle-classes were ordering things from Takealot like there was no tomorrow (a very real possibility at the time) even the most brazen of us were wondering if the lockdown didn’t provide us with some lessons for living. Call it a lifestyle change. 

Did it not perhaps provide a countervailing argument to our brazen consumption? A lesson about our reliance on fossil fuels. A lesson about the distant origins of our things.

Part of learning the new Covid-19 vocabulary was beginning to come to terms with the notion of supply chains. The lockdown saw the rise not only of suburban hysteria, but the rise of self-elected suburban authorities. They were usually self-important men with not a fibre of irony or self-deprecation in their being. 

They lectured on the local Whatsapp group, telling us that if such-and-such a gizmo needed to come from China but the factories weren’t producing and the ships weren’t shipping, we might need to do without. 

It gave rise to the important question (even as we were ordering still more things off the internet) of doing without. Could we not mend our shoes? What a novel idea! Or darn our socks? Could we re-coat our frying pans instead of buying new ones? Could we consume less and so throw less away? 

Rather than buying our way out, was there some other way out?

For a pregnant month or two, it seemed as though we could. It seemed as though we might return to some sort of holy equilibrium, where overseas travel was a treat and not a right. And where we could make do with something that was still in good nick but – astonishment, shock, horror – out of fashion? 

The lockdown provided us with a prism through which we could look at our crazy lives and simplify them. It was – and no-one really talks about this anymore – a strange and special time. Although it only happened two and three years ago, so all-consuming is our contemporary amnesia that it’s as though the period never happened at all.

Yesterday I walked across the beach I couldn’t walk across just before it was confirmed that I was Covid-positive back in 2021. There have been storms here in the Cape and weather warnings, the result of global warming that slowed down during the pandemic. 

The sea was a ghastly frothy brown-green you’re not going to take smartphone photos of so you can send to family in Australia. But it was also wild and exhilarating, so good to be on the beach.

The storm had flattened the small plants and succulents on the common, near to the beach. There were bluebottles and dead crabs at the high-water mark. There was also an assortment of litter.

There were energy drink cans, bottle tops, two litre plastic bottles that once contained vile green and orange cool-drinks. The most difficult litter to pick up off the beach are the flecks of broken polystyrene cups. 

They break into pieces, many of them dastardly and small. Getting your hands around them is awkward. As the young (male) joggers thundered up and down the beach, there I was, like the parody of a pensioner, picking up litter and muttering to myself.

As I muttered, I reflected that it didn’t take long for us to — ahem, lock — back into our pre-Covid ways. If anything, we’re travelling more, if only to make up for all the travel opportunities we lost during Covid. Cars seem to be getting bigger, appetites larger still. The credit card is indeed an infernal and frightening little object.

The moment where we might have changed our ways and habits of consumption are long gone. Sort of like a fading footprint on a virgin beach.

This is not surprising, but it is sad. 

In the latter stages of the pandemic, the social discussion moved away from our consumption habits, global warming and the future. It moved towards the vaccine, and its desirability and efficacy. 

We saw the birth of the anti-vaxxing lobby, and the critique of Big Pharma. Some of it was thoughtful, academically sound, and well-argued. But most of it was gobbledegook. The early stages of lockdown saw us worry about the last banana (for the banana bread), while the latter stages saw us worry about the last vaccine. 

The idea meanwhile, as the world’s weather systems spread out of control and the wildfires rage and the ice-caps melt, that we might be the last man – or woman – is long gone. Or is it?

And there he was, at The Harem strip club in Bedfordview, a Johannesburg suburb, having his ticker call time on a life he seemed to lose long before he dropped dead. 

Maybe it’s excessive to say he lost his life before he died. Maybe it’s more genteel to say he misplaced a life, in the way you might misplace your car keys or gym bag. 

Maybe we should be more respectful of an old Springbok. Except that Small was a man of the world and it’s surely not necessary to tug our forelocks too hard. 

He enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh and the trappings of rugby success, so I think it’s pretty okay to talk about him losing his life before he finally keeled over. 

The alternative is to be all faux tasteful about it, which seems disingenuous, and peddles the untruth that Small and his life got back together again, and everything was just dandy, which was hardly the case. 

He’d surely have a mordant chuckle at the environment in which he finally went tits up, although I think we can all agree that use of the words “mordant chuckle” was probably beyond him, so he might not have had a mordant chuckle at all. 

He might, though, have a good laugh at himself and given himself a high five at the way he decided to go. It was quite a big moment, in a blazingly trashy, You magazine kind of way, although, equally, it was quite a Small moment, in a blazingly trashy, You magazine kind of way. 

None of us are being disrespectful, I don’t think, in shaking our heads and laughing. If he was being honest, James might have had a good laugh at himself himself.

Small statistical point: did James score the night he died — if you’ll forgive the pun, a question which is, I’m sure you’ll recognise, purely rhetorical? Was the hanky-panky a first-phase kind of thing from a good line-out ball, or one involving patient build-up over many phases? 

Not being intimately acquainted with either The Harem (or strip clubs in general), I can’t say for sure, although I like to think that Small didn’t score his try in the corner, far away from prying eyes, but right under the posts, where the entire club could see him. 

Way to go, James.

As an extension of the above point about scoring, would the rugby statisticians categorise it as a domestic or an international try? 

I know enough about strip clubs to know that they’re sometimes full of women from Eastern European lands, so an international score is my preferred option. 

Question is — does a try against Bulgaria qualify as an international try? Tricky one that, given Bulgaria’s below-average record in the international game, and one sure to have the stats guys scampering like, well, punters in a strip club who have temporarily mislaid their boxers. 

Small’s rugby life was filled with such vitality, such meaning, is it any wonder that he misplaced his second life? Maybe life after rugby somehow lacked intensity and meaning? 

Let’s not forget that Small was part of the first Springbok team in 11 years to play international rugby when the Boks took on the All Blacks at Ellis Park in 1992. 

He didn’t score a try in the World Cup in 1995 but he sorely tested Jonah Lomu’s patience by holding on to him like a punchy Jack Russell terrier whenever he could. 

We forget that Small won the Currie Cup with three different provinces: Transvaal, Western Province and Natal. 

After you’ve come face to face with a runaway train like Lomu, the rest of your life is just a pale shadow of your barnstorming first half.

After discovering that you and your life have gone their separate ways, who wouldn’t spend half a lifetime trying to get back together again? I know I would. I’d want my life back. 

I’d sure as hell want my life and I to get along, so we could be together again like old times. Old times are, of course, the best of times and the cliché holds for Small, I think, far more than it does for most.

Small tried as best he could to get back together with his life, he really did. Only his life was rugby, and the mateship and intensity and adrenaline surge of rugby. After the rugby had gone, he tried everything. Modelling. Restaurants. Booze. Sex. Drugs. Sometimes he’d try all five on the same day. 

At one stage Small was a partner in an advertising agency. He even rode a Harley-Davidson motorbike, sometimes with his shirt off. I’ve always thought a Harley was a camp accessory for such a macho guy but Small was clearly prepared to try anything to get his old life back. 

Try as he might, though, nothing else mattered. Or nothing else mattered as much. He and his life went their separate ways, into — we might say — new lives, which made reconciliation difficult, if not practically impossible. 

The strip-joint part of Small’s death wasn’t the only thing that tickled my fancy. While in the club that winter’s night, the official version of events says that he had a heart attack, although it is germane to the record to point out that when he arrived at the hospital he was butt naked. 

To “have a heart attack” has always been one of those phrases that confuses me because it can give the impression that the heart is being attacked by forces outside of it. 

Thing is, the heart attacks itself. There’s something weirdly appropriate with Small’s heart attacking itself because, more than any other organ in his body, Small was all heart. He was the least cold-blooded kind of guy that I ever knew of because he was so scandalously, so completely, heartfelt. To say he was his heart is in no way being hyperbolic. 

True, Small’s body had taken a beating over the years, but I’ll venture that his heart had to deal with the really serious wear and tear. His heart was always being broken. His heart was always on the line. His heart was always under siege. 

Although perhaps it is better (and more accurate) to say Small’s heart was always on his sleeve. He’s one of the few guys whose heart functions best outside of his body. He wore it there all the time. 

You didn’t have to try very hard — you could actually see it. It was there in the way he sang the national anthem, in the way he played his rugby. There’s a clip after the World Cup final in 1995 of Small, alone, with the William Webb Ellis Cup held aloft, shiny and gold in his right hand, while he stabs his index finger of his left hand at the sky. 

Small is saying something to God. Whether anyone is listening or not has bothered minds far better than mine for an eternity but let’s just say that Small was making a point. 

He was pointing up there and telling whoever is up there that the Springboks, after having been out of international sport for so long, aren’t to be trifled with. They’re back. And Small is back with them.   

After his heart attack, Small was brought to the Bedford Gardens Hospital, a hospital I knew well, because after she had a stroke in 2014, my late mother, Cecily, went there for a gallbladder infection. 

She recovered from the infection but she never recovered from the stroke, never spoke another sentence and quietly meandered away to her death in silence. 

On the day of her discharge from Bedford Gardens, I went to fetch her, so she could convalesce in our home because her house had just been sold. 

About 10 days later, the two of us were walking in our garden, she holding my arm. It was winter and the trees were bare. 

She indicated that she wanted to sit down and I helped her. She sat down on the stone wall of a raised bed in which a fine, old walnut tree grew. The tree was surrounded by irises, so thickly clustered that she could bend backwards into them so they made a kind of pillow. It was the last time I saw her with even a semblance of happiness in her eyes.  

Our house was about 2km from the Bedford Gardens Hospital. We lived in the suburb of Kensington, adjacent to Bedfordview. The fact that Small died close to where I lived isn’t in any way important, not objectively so, but we humans make connections. We make stories in our heads and this story is a story about how close Small felt to me and a generation of kids who grew up in Johannesburg in the 1980s and 1990s.  

Small was born on 10 February, 1969 so, had he been alive today, he would have celebrated his 55th birthday a couple of weeks ago. His birthday — had he been alive — was the occasion I used to write this appreciation, pay my respects and have a little bit of fun at his expense at the same time. 

I’ve always wanted to write meaningfully about Small because he was representative of a time, as he was representative of a type of man. He seemed to exemplify a distinctive place and time and age. 

Part of that was a kind of animal defiance, a defiance that served him well as a rugby player, but probably a quality that was less useful in the post-rugby life that he set about losing with such pathos.

I must be careful here. I never interviewed Small. I heard and read about him from colleagues. But none of this meant that I didn’t in some small way feel a kinship with him. 

First, Small was very Johannesburg, as I am and will always be, although I live in the city no longer. 

He spoke like a Joburger, for one thing, and he acted like a slightly boorish Joburg gym bro, for another. It’s almost possible to pinpoint his accent exactly — part Greenside, part Northcliff, part Parkview. 

It was a harsh accent, without inflection or softness. And it told you not only what was there — what you could actually hear about the man — but told you something of what was behind the man, too.

As a Joburger growing up in the dying days of apartheid, Small would have felt insecure as part of an outcast white minority. I’m not sure whether that insecurity would have been rampant or mild but here’s the thing. He was English-speaking in a predominantly Afrikaans game. 

His name was James, James for god’s sake, not Jannie or Jan. He went to an urban, co-ed school not famed for its rugby. He played first for Transvaal, neither a powerhouse of the north or south, a province that could blow hot as easily as it could blow cold. 

There was always that feeling with Small — real or imagined — that because of where he came from he had to fight just that little bit harder to get to where he needed to go. 

This social backlighting, if you will, conspired to mean that he over-compensated. He was always meaner, that bit harder, that bit more foul. The chip he carried on his shoulder was there for all to see along, of course, with the heart he wore so successfully on his sleeve. 

He was the first Springbok upon readmission to get red-carded, by English referee Ed Morrison, for dissent in the second Test against Australia in 1993. It was sometimes difficult for him to walk the thin line between arousal and thuggery. His mouth was sometimes more foul than his play.  

Interesting this, because his non-rugby life is characterised by an almost complete lack of mouth. Small was inarticulate to a fault. He could hardly get a word out. I sometimes felt that all that heart — all that feeling — would simply overwhelm him. 

There was so much feeling in the man. He was like a feeling time bomb. A hurricane of feeling. All that rage and love and anger and hurt. Small had so much of it. No wonder his heart burst.

Small seemed hurt in the way boxers seem hurt. He seemed primordially hurt, as though he was a dumb beast, who’d been dragging his hurt around with him since the beginning of time. 

The hurt was exaggerated by where he played, which was sometimes at full-back but mainly on the wing. 

Being a wing is a lonely position, part goalkeeper, part opening batsman. You sometimes don’t even see the ball. Your only reason you have contact with your team is because you’re wearing the same colour jersey. Being out on the wing — being so out on a limb — compounds your loneliness, which compounds your capacity for hurt.

Small was so hurt that he was always looking to be hurt again. I don’t remember ever seeing him miss an up-and-under. He was always steadfastly brave. He never flinched and seldom missed a tackle. 

It was always curious to me to ask (in a slightly academic way, admittedly) whether he played rugby because he was hurt or whether he played rugby to get hurt just a little bit more.

Even when Small smiled, he looked hurt. When he grimaced, he looked hurt; when he scowled — quite a regular occurrence in the Small emotional repertoire — he looked devastatingly hurt. 

The hurt is what did it for the gals. Not the soft-porn photoshoots or the shirts-off thing on Harleys. The girls just loved the whiff of damage. For all his chiselled good looks, Small often conveyed the idea — unconsciously, I think — that he was really just a little boy playing the most grown-up of manly games.

I only saw Small smile unabashedly once. It was when he shook Nelson Mandela’s hand and, for a sweet instant, he left the hurt behind. He’s smiling at Madiba glowingly, without holding anything back or being on the defensive. He could occasionally be like that, Small. It was rare. And, because of that, it was beautiful.

I remember once trawling through YouTube on a slow Tuesday afternoon, looking for something but nothing in particular, which is a sure way to find yourself down the merry YouTube rabbit hole. 

This allowed me to forget what I was looking for until, by finding some of the very things for which I wasn’t looking, I remembered what I had clambered into the murky underworld of the internet for in the first place. 

I find that finding what you’re not looking for is an incredibly useful aide-memoire in your quest for what you’re searching for, don’t you? It is convoluted, sure. But it isn’t always fun to take the straight line to get from A to B, sometimes you need to take the underground line, or the route that takes in D, E and F.

Anyway, it was one of those dumb-shit afternoons in which time moves like syrup and even the air bubbles with ennui, when I stumbled upon a match between the Springboks and the French Barbarians or France “B” in about 1992 or 1993. At the end of the game, Small took off his Springbok jersey and walked across to Serge Blanco, the great French full-back, and asked Blanco if he wanted to swap his blue for Small’s green. 

No one ever refuses the offer of a swapped jersey, have you noticed? It’s the one ritual in sport that remains unsullied by everything else. 

There can be trash-talk and bombast and pantomime, the regular Punch and Judy show, but jersey-swapping remains as basic a ritual of respect as touching a fist or shaking a hand or tossing a coin.

And so, yes, Blanco swapped his blue France “B” jersey with Small’s green one and the two exchanged words. I’m sure Small wasn’t loquacious but, hey, who needed words? The gesture spoke volumes. It was loud and clear.

I’ve looked and looked for the clip ever since, without ever being able to find it, which makes me think that I might have imagined it. 

Come to think of it, Small’s entire career feels a little imagined nowadays. This isn’t only because Small was so silent, because there are so few words around Small, but because although he died less than five years ago, he seemed to die a very long time ago indeed. 

The Springboks have won the World Cup twice since he died. Every win puts distance between himself — and his rugby achievements — and the present. Some of his former Bok teammates, such as Joost van der Westhuizen and Ruben Kruger, have died, too, which serves to further drag the 1995 World Cup victory back into the mists of another century. 

It was a time when the livery on the tailfin of a 747 was still orange and there was an endless kerfuffle about emblems and anthems. The first horrible spasm of load-shedding, a phrase nobody had yet had the misfortune of hearing, was a full 12 years away. “Cadre deployment” was but a phrase in a textbook. 

If asked, most people would have answered that Covid-19 was something from the realms of cutting-edge dystopian fiction.

A new generation knows nothing about Small, except as a guy on the highlights packages who often slammed the ball down with one hand after he’d crossed the opposition try-line. 

To them, he’s just someone who played rugby, not the exemplar of a particular time and place rooted specifically in the Joburg of the late 1980s and early 1990s. 

He didn’t spend the time afterwards enjoying what he had earned but spent his time looking for ways not to waste his time. It was part of his tragedy, quite a compelling tragedy as it turns out, although you have to be attuned to the tragedy in such things to see tragedy there at all.

For all of the bad-boy schtick, Small played his game in the last age of rugby innocence. He witnessed the turn to professionalism, and embraced it, but for much of his career he was an amateur. He was also an innocent in a far more fundamental way. Small could never be accused of cynicism. He was too whole-hearted for that.

The South Africa in which he played was innocent, too. Mandela kept us innocent. Hope kept us innocent. And we kept ourselves innocent, for why should we be otherwise?

It’s strange to think about Small and innocence in the same sentence because, superficially at least, the two seem incompatible. But there was a lack of guile with Small. And it went hand in hand with a kind of purity, a purity that could, on occasion, be ugly. 

That such damaged purity should end up dead, naked in a strip club, is odd, strange, grotesque. It is also comforting, because you sense it was the kind of way that Small and his big heart would have wanted to go. 

Way to go, James.

Bafana Bafana’s Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) quarter-final against Cape Verde in the Ivorian capital of Yamoussoukro on Saturday was surely a case in point.

With the score deadlocked at nil-all, and the witching hour approaching, Ronwen Williams, the Bafana Bafana goal-keeper, contrived to jolt us sleepyheads back home wide awake.

Darting off his line to narrow the angle with the Cape Verde’s Gilson Tavares bearing down on him for a certain goal, Williams pulled off a miraculous reflex save. Put through by a cheeky diagonal pass that caught Bafana’s central defenders napping, Gilson and his heavily-strapped right knee, fired off a snapshot with the Bafana goal yawning.

Had Gilson’s shot headed in, Bafana would have been heading home, but Williams stuck out a gloved paw that deflected the shot just enough for the ball to glance onto the crossbar.

Those who weren’t asleep were now wide awake, and those who were asleep had woken.

There followed the remains of the second-half, and an agonising two halves of extra-time. With the scores still stuck fast, the dreaded penalty shoot-out hove into view.

Bafana’s Mihlali Mayambela came close to scoring in extra-time, as did Evidence Makgopa the Orlando Pirates striker in the same passage of play, but neither could cast a successful spell on the Cape Verde goal. The Cape Verde goal-keeper, Vozinha, fetching in all pink, remained unimpressed with Bafana’s crisp interplay, as did his hard-working defenders and central midfielders. The men in blue shirts stood as firm as the archipelago of small islands in the Atlantic.

Full of players who sound Brazilian – João Paulo, Jamiro Monteiro, Jovan Cabral – but who often play professionally in Portugal, Cape Verde were probably the better side.

They created more half and quarter chances and generally looked more industrious. Getting beyond Bafana’s wide defenders on several occasions was one thing, however, getting past Williams in goal was quite another.

Of the two teams, they were also the more petulant, and the more poorly-behaved. As penalties looked like an inevitability, they simulated; they threw temper tantrums on the side-lines and they bickered amongst themselves. By the time penalties arrived, their happy place was receding like a ship over the horizon.

By contrast, Bafana were uncomplaining. They’re a stoic side, calmly and deliberately coached by Hugo Broos, a Belgian who worked wonders with Cameroon in helping them to win the 2017 Afcon. Such resilience served Bafana well in the penalty shoot-out, but Williams served them better.

Guessing correctly three times in a row, the midnight mind-reader dived and saved three times to his right. Later he dived to his left and saved again. It was so brilliant it was almost diabolical but no-one in the (by now) wide-awake nation was complaining.

As the white-haired Broos, a fellow who is figuratively nearing midnight himself at 71, said after the shootout: “Six hours ago I was 71 – now I am 75. It was a very stressful game.”

It’s been a giddy Afcon because, after years of being coy about being Bafana fans, we are stuck in the closet no longer. It’s good to be back. You remember the good and the bad but there’s only memory muddle in the middle. In the fallow years, for example, we’ve forgotten all those little tics and idiosyncrasies.

Think of Percy Tau’s penalty miss in the opening half of their first group match against Mali. And think of their little flurries of piano and shoeshine, and their “no-please-after-you” mildness in front of goal.

We’ve forgotten, too, their heart and their indefatigability. They never moan. And they always keep coming. Their quietly-worn self-belief can wear you down.

In a sense it didn’t matter that they lost on penalties 4-2 to Nigeria on Wednesday night, because Bafana and Broos’ midnight hour came in their 2-0 quarter-final victory over Morocco. Ranked 13^th in the world, one of only two African teams in the Federation of International Football Associations (Fifa) top twenty (the other are Senegal), Morocco are the right stuff, borne out by their run to the semi-finals at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.        

Drawn in Group F with Belgium, Croatia and Canada, they topped the group to fire themselves into their second round. After a nil-all draw with Croatia, they beat highly-regarded Belgium 2-0 thanks to goals by defender Roman Saïss and Toulouse winger Zakaria Aboukhlal. In the round of 16 Morocco beat Spain on penalties before accounting for Portugal 1-0 in the quarter-final.

The win over Portugal brought them face-to-face to France, a tie full of history, culture and, even, enmity. Morocco were not disgraced to lose 2-0 before losing by the odd goal to Croatia in the third-placed place-off.

For Bafana to beat a side of such quickness and pedigree is a singular achievement. As Broos has said, he hopes it means that talent scouts from around the world start to take South African domestic football just a little bit more seriously.

If you’re a scout and happen to be reading this, you could do worse than enquire about Tebogo Mokoena, who can bend it like David Beckham, or Khuliso Mudau, his Mamelodi Sundowns team-mate.  

Mudau is a livewire right-back, hardly the sexiest position on a football field, and one to attract neither plaudits nor headlines. His gifts, however, are considerable. Simply no-one goes round him and to watch him carefully shows just how difficult it is to be an artful defender whose main aim in life is to pick the pocket of the man running at you.

He could have catapulted Bafana into the final late in the game against Nigeria, jumping into the box like a crazy frog. Finally the shock of being so far up-field became too much for him, and he sort-of fell over, unable to fire off a shot that might have propelled Bafana into their first final since the glory years of 1996.

Alas, it wasn’t to be, as Williams wasn’t able to repeat his Cape Verde heroics against Nigeria in the penalty shoot-out on Wednesday night. Despite the disappointment of losing the semi-final, get this: When the knock-out tie against Morocco at Afcon happened, Bafana were ranked 66^th in the world, between North Macedonia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They won’t be ranked 66^th after this storming performance in the competition, of that we can be sure.

The semi-final against Nigeria was really just a little appetiser, because the two teams have been drawn in the same qualifying group for the 2026 World Cup. It’s an expanded tournament, with 48 teams, and although Benin and Rwanda also look tricky in Bafana’s group, the Super Eagles are the real threat.

Given Wednesday night’s agonising draw, two penalties, extra-time and then penalties again, don’t bet on an easy ride in either home or away match against Nigeria in the World Cup qualifiers. Take your blood pressure medication. Plonk yourself down in your favourite chair and bring on the popcorn. You’re going to be in for a dizzy ride because Bafana are back.

This is because South Africa’s first- and second-choice players are occupied with the jamboree that is the second edition of the SA20. 

As a result, they aren’t available to play Test cricket for their country, once seen as the zenith of every cricketer’s career. 

The SA20 takes pride of place on the calendar because it pays the bills by generating broadcast rights revenue across the world. 

South Africa has a smaller pool of stellar players than England, India and Australia, so said players need to stay at home to wear coloured clothing, hit sixes and earn astonishingly large amounts of money. 

It helps, too, to be chipper about the endless blaring of Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, sign a few autographs and pose for selfies. 

Not only does the double-booking give the impression that Cricket South Africa (CSA) can’t read their own Google Calendar but running two formats of the game concurrently gives the impression of diffusion. 

Where is cricket’s commercial core? Does this coincide with its emotional values? What are the game’s priorities? Nobody seems to know. 

Such diffusion is well expressed in recent events featuring sponsors Betway, an online betting platform. As an event sponsor of the Proteas, Betway’s latest contract with CSA was meant to end on 8 January, the final day of the second Test against India at Newlands.

As it turned out, the Test was over well before that, rolling to an early conclusion after a punch-drunk one-and-a-half days. 

The reason? Between them, the Western Province Cricket Association and CSA conspired to prepare a graveyard, rather than a pitch. 

All of this meant lost sponsorship opportunities for Betway. 

They might, of course, renew as an event sponsor but it’s also an open secret in cricket circles that they’re none too pleased with CSA, so probably won’t. 

Betway’s dissatisfaction takes many forms. 

They’re unhappy, for a start, with how CSA has handled things in relation to under-19 captain David Teeger. CSA’s first pass at the kerfuffle, remember, was to call in senior counsel Wim Trengove to adjudicate remarks Teeger made at the Jewish Achievers Awards’ Ceremony on 22 October. When Trengove said Teeger’s statements weren’t detrimental to the game, the matter appeared to have been put to rest. 

Except that on the eve of South Africa’s hosting of the under-19 World Cup a week ago, CSA stripped Teeger of the captaincy, saying it was “in his own best interests and those of the team”. 

Teeger remains part of the team, however, which raises the question of whether CSA seriously expects a thinking public to believe the risk of protest and even violence at the team’s matches is reduced because he’s not the guy who tosses the coin?

While Betway is disenchanted with CSA, it is starry-eyed about the SA20, and continues to be the sponsor of this year’s tournament. 

All well and good, except there’s a problem. CSA is the guardian of the game in this country and the SA20, which has a governing council independent of it, is nominally under its control. 

CSA attracts very few sponsors, and one of the few, Betway, has just failed to renew as an event sponsor for its Test team. 

At the same time, Betway is pleased to be involved with the SA20, which is punted like nobody’s business on co-owner SuperSport, and has a glitz and glamour with which the more sedate and fluvial forms of the game can’t compete. 

So, what do we have? CSA, after two attempts (the T20 Global League and the Mzansi Super League) going back seven years, finally has a T20 tournament that sticks. 

From the point of view of Betway, what’s germane here is that the SA20 is as far away from CSA as it’s possible to get, while still being nominally under CSA’s control. 

In creating the SA20, CSA has  fallen into the unintended consequence of creating opposition for itself. It’s called cannibalisation. And it brings us back to the idea that neither the fans, nor the market, nor anyone else associated with cricket in this country, really know what the hell’s going on.

CSA is painfully aware of this, at least in part, because only last year it bleated that it needed to be given more credit for its role in the SA20 by SuperSport and the SA20 organisers. 

Suddenly you found the cheesy spectacle of overweight middle-aged men in tight-fitting clothes appearing on behalf of CSA at all the SA20 post-match awards and interviews. 

It was rather like taking your children to Joburg Zoo on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, only to see a troupe of clowns wander into the lion’s den. 

Over in New Zealand, the Proteas’ whites won’t be quite as slim-fitting, and the team will have room to move out of the sometimes fetid confines of the local sporting fishbowl.

In a way, the Shukri Conrad-coached team are in a win-win. They’re not first-choice, so no one expects them to do very well; such negative expectations mean the pressure is off and, who knows? They might just surprise us with a win.

In point of fact, they’re not too shabby a side, and there’s a wisdom to some of Conrad’s choices. 

Take David Bedingham, who made his debut against India at Centurion on Boxing Day and looked the part, as well as Zubayr Hamza, once Bedingham’s middle-order colleague at Western Province. 

After falling foul of a drugs ban, Hamza moved from Western Province to the Lions in the off-season, with immediate positive results. 

He’s had a good first-class season for his new province, and he’s played Test cricket in New Zealand before, representing the Proteas the last time they were there during a Covid-disrupted series this time two years ago. 

If ever there’s a time to convert promise into a regular place in the side, now is it.

Another member of the side is 37-year-old Boland leg-spinner Shaun von Berg, who is in the side with his Boland teammate, Clyde Fortuin, a wicket-keeper. 

Von Berg, who was a Tshwane boy before taking a detour via Bloem and ending up in Paarl, can’t talk more highly of the effervescent Fortuin. 

“We’re roomies at Boland,” he says, “Clyde’s got a good cricket brain, so I don’t need to signal him or anything — he knows exactly what I’m doing, sometimes before I do it.”

While our Test cricketers are doing their thing in the Land of the Long White Cloud, the Teeger matter just won’t go away in The Land That Can Never Reach Consensus. A week ago, the South African under-19s — with Teeger in the side but not as captain — opened their campaign against the West Indies in Potch, where South Africa batted first. 

Teeger scored a slow 44 in 98 balls as SA posted 285 for nine. Before the game was over, however, he had regained the captaincy because the player who inherited it from him, Juan James, was injured. 

South Africa won a close match by 31 runs, with left-arm pace bowler and young hopeful Kwena Maphaka taking five for 38. 

And Teeger, the captain who was not captain, was captain for an hour and a half before the captaincy reverted back to James. 

There have been a couple of the latter in local cricket in the past few weeks and, because both are backlit by good stories, they’re worth a second look.

Before the just-completed two Test series against India, Dean Elgar announced his retirement from the team he once captained. He had been playing for the Proteas, uninterrupted, since scoring a pair (two ducks) on debut against Australia in Perth in 2012. 

As often happens, Elgar’s announcement was liberating. He promptly went out and scored 185 in the Boxing Day Test against India at Centurion, an innings full of most un-Elgar-like flourish, with some beefy cover-driving and muscular pulling. He could have been 18 again.

Elgar, a compact left-hander, is usually cussed at the crease but here he was all sweet and easy. He could have been batting in the back of a convertible wearing a cheesy Hawaiian shirt, so laid-back and devil-may-care did he look. 

Surely there was a whiskey sour (with paper umbrella) somewhere close to hand? Neil Diamond was playing on the twin convertible speakers. He had to be. The occasion demanded it.    

Elgar might have been in his penultimate Test at Centurion but, at 36, he probably had a few more years of Test cricket left in him. 

Why, then, was he on his bike? He was on his bike because Shukri Conrad, the new coach of the Proteas’ Test side, took the captaincy away from him, a decision with which Elgar was mightily miffed.

In an exquisite irony, Temba Bavuma, the player who took over from Elgar as skipper, injured himself before the Centurion Test, so Elgar temporarily regained the captaincy he’d just lost. 

He captained the side again in the abbreviated second Test at Newlands, where (again) Bavuma was unable to fulfil his captaincy duties because of injury. 

Aside from the issue of Bavuma’s disruptive long-standing injury woes (he also missed two matches in the World Cup in Mumbai, India, in October) is the wisdom of Conrad pissing off Elgar by phasing him out. 

He’s the most experienced and most reliable of the current crop of South African Test batters by a country mile. He isn’t an AB de Villiers or a Hashim Amla, true, but let’s not condemn a litchi for not being a mango. 

Only two Test openers with more than 50 Tests to their names since readmission have better numbers — Gary Kirsten and Graeme Smith. 

Revealingly, Elgar’s numbers compare favourably with a very different opener — in style and comportment — of the past 30 years and that’s the perennial loskop Herschelle Gibbs. Both scored 14 Test centuries, Elgar in four Tests fewer than Gibbs’ 90, although Gibbs has a slightly better average. 

Although similar, the stats shouldn’t blind us to a single profound difference between the two. Gibbs was the lovably quick-on-the-draw cowboy in a posse of astonishingly gifted gunfighters, while Elgar is a hard-pressed deacon in a congregation of talented but wet-behind-the-ears choirboys. It’s chalk and cheese. Maybe it’s cheese and chalk. You decide.

Four days after Elgar’s final Test, former teammate Heinrich Klaasen announced his Test retirement. Despite some stellar performances in the World Cup in October, Klaasen remains South African cricket’s best-kept secret. 

That’s partly because he’s undemonstrative and partly because he’s played only four Tests. After having been brought into the side by Mark Boucher, Conrad didn’t appear to know what to do with him. 

Klaasen played in both home Tests against the West Indies in February and March but, by the time India arrived late last year, he was jettisoned in favour of Kyle Verreynne. 

Many felt Verreynne had been unfairly treated in being dropped by Boucher but that would have been of little concern to Klaasen, who admitted to having had a couple of “sleepless nights” as he wrestled with the decision.    

The irony here is that while most of us remember Klaasen for his white-ball antics (who can forget his scintillating 100 against England in the World Cup in October?), he admitted in his farewell that Test cricket is his favourite form of the game. 

You might not have thought it, but there it is. Pumping sixes to the grass banks at his home ground at Centurion evidently counts for less than a plucky 40 or 50 played with poise and savoir faire against a gun attack in a Test.

Elgar and Klaasen’s retirements from Test cricket come on the back of Quinton de Kock’s after the India World Cup. 

Were South African cricket bursting with riches, with players of the stature of, say, Ben Stokes and Pat Cummins, three such retirements would be difficult to bear. 

But, talent-wise, the game is at its lowest ebb in 20 years, so premature retirements of this kind are disruptive. And because they’re expressive of something deeper — in all three case, hurt — they also tell us what the players really think of the suits and the coaches.

Conrad appears to have been gung-ho in giving the captaincy to Bavuma but he also deserves some sympathy because he works for a pretty peculiar boss. His employers, Cricket South Africa (CSA), double-booked next month, scheduling an away two-Test tour to New Zealand at the same time as the second edition of the SA20. 

The Proteas’ best players, such as Kagiso Rabada and Aiden Markram, will be playing for their franchises in the SA20, so Conrad has been forced to pick a third-string team for the Kiwi Tests featuring seven uncapped players, including a 37-year-old leg-spinner from the Boland. 

The skipper, Neil Brand, a talented 23-year-old from the Titans who no one but his parents has heard of, somehow failed to strike the appropriate note when he told an Afrikaans weekend newspaper on Sunday: “We don’t pick ourselves.” 

All of this gives CSA a bad name, leading to accusations that the left hand doesn’t appear to know what the right is doing, a fateful state of affairs in cricket. 

It doesn’t end there. The Newlands Test against India that was Elgar’s last, was over in a day and a half, with 23 wickets lost on day one. 

CSA is nominally in charge of Newlands nowadays, having parachuted veteran administrator Corrie van Zyl into its offices to help clear up the mess that requires it to lend the Western Province Cricket Association R26 million over the next couple of months. 

That mess appears to have extended to the wicket, which was virtually unplayable. Cricket wickets are like gardens. They require tending; they need water and fertiliser. They need love. And bosses who know what they’re doing. 

It seems that the Newlands wicket didn’t receive very much of any of these things. 

All, though, is not lost. This is South Africa, and we are old hands at snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. The 50-over side did remarkably well in last year’s World Cup in India — far better than many thought they would. 

We’ve just been awarded the hosting rights to the under 19 World Cup later this month and South Africa will host the senior men’s World Cup in 2027. 

So all is not lost for cricket. As in all things in the beloved country, though, it might need to get worse before it gets appreciably better.

Coetzee’s job goes to Rassie Erasmus, who up and leaves his job at Munster in Ireland with precipitous haste. One of Erasmus’ more astute decisions is to dispense with Coetzee’s chosen flyhalf Elton Jantjies. 

He plumps, instead, for Handré Pollard. The former Paarl Gimnasium schoolboy is cooler than a pink drink on a hot day.

Pollard, who has inspired comparisons with the great Naas Botha, plays in the 2019 World Cup final against England in Yokohama. When Coetzee was coach, playing in the final looked as remote as Reykjavik, but Erasmus is as big a revelation as Pollard himself. The 2019 final is won and Erasmus’ successor, Jacques Nienaber, essentially takes the same side — now older, more battered and wiser — to this year’s World Cup in France. 

Pollard isn’t part of the initial group because of a calf injury, but Malcolm Marx, a hooker, gets badly injured and Pollard sneaks in through the back door. So begins one of the great debates in South African sport: should Manie Libbok, who has played with a kind of heady insouciance in the early matches (think of his “no-look” kick to Kurt-Lee Arendse against Scotland) be persisted with? Or should Pollard waltz into the starting line-up given that Libbok’s place-kicking is erratic. 

In the end, the Bok management does the right thing. Given that Libbok is the incumbent, it persists with him and puts Pollard on the bench as back-up. The decision seems sensible enough but in the white-hot heat of battle it begins to be seriously stress-tested. 

South Africa are nowhere against England in the 2023 semi-final. They’re dreadful under the high-ball and can’t even catch the damn thing. Up in the stands Nienaber is paralysed. Erasmus seems bereft of ideas. Back home watching in South Africa you can actually feel the dream slip away.

Enter Felix Jones, the cerebral Irishman Erasmus has brought with him from Munster. A man alone on a frozen bench, Jones acts. He demands that Libbok, who is not at his best, be replaced by Pollard. It is the 31st minute of what is fast becoming a nightmare; four minutes later Pollard succeeds with his first penalty. The Boks go into the dressing-room at half-time 12-6 down.

In the 43rd minute Cobus Reinach is replaced by Faf de Klerk at scrumhalf. Faf and Handré go together like Fikile Mbalula and hyperbole, bunny chow and atchar, shisa nyama and ginger beer. With Faf and Handré together, the Boks have a chance, although the chance recedes again when Owen Farrell, who is playing immaculately at flyhalf for England, pots a massive drop-kick in the 53rd minute to give England a 15-6 lead.

The second half drags on but sequences of play are also over before you realise they’ve happened. It’s too painful to look but you must, otherwise you can’t see what’s happening. What to do? Look? Or look with your hands over your eyes? An entire nation can’t watch what is about to become the most incredible passage of play since Lukhanyo Am’s “blind” pass to Makazole Mapimpi in the 2019 World Cup final.

With Jones acting, Nienaber regains some of his poise. He brings on a raft of second-half changes, although the score is still locked at 15-6 to England. One of them is Deon Fourie, a utility forward who, late in his career, is experiencing an Indian summer. 

With 13 minutes to go and even Pollard beginning to get jittery with angst, the Springboks win a penalty; Pollard kicks it deep for a South African throw into the line-out; Bongi Mbonambi finds RG Snyman and the Bok forwards maul it up; Fourie busts off the back of the maul like a hyperactive meerkat with the ball tucked under his arm. He’s scragged metres from the England line. The ball is recycled on the Bok side and Snyman corkscrews over, bouncing Jonny May off his chest like a rag doll in the process.

Pollard leaves the best for last. With two minutes to go in the match and the Springboks trailing 13-15, the referee awards the men in green and gold a penalty after a dominant Bok scrum. We are told that the kick is 49 metres from the posts but Pollard, so self-assured, thumps the kick with such confidence that he could be kicking from right in front. Prize-winning novels will be written about the kick in future years.

The Boks repeat the trick in the final against New Zealand, with Pollard again playing a starring role. The World Cup victory brings some much-needed respite to a country in the throes of daily load-shedding. Folk talk about nothing else for weeks; they relive the World Cup in the heady present tense. Everywhere you look you can see the light in people’s eyes.

A couple of weeks later and the Proteas play in the 50-over World Cup in India, beating England, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka on their way to second place after the round-robin phase of the tournament. 

Quinton de Kock — known as “Quinnie” to his legion of fans — has announced beforehand that these are his last 50-over matches for his country. He scores four centuries in the tournament but goes cheaply to a tumbling catch by Australian skipper, Pat Cummins, in the semi-final. Sport, you think to yourself at the time, is not simply cruel, it is diabolical.

David Miller plays a lone hand in scoring a defiant 100 against the Aussies in the semi-final, but South Africa are 40 or 50 runs short of a commanding total. They bowl with skill and courage; they catch well. It isn’t enough. They have batted poorly after their skipper has won the toss and chosen to bat. It might be a mistake. Nobody knows, although they pretend they do.

In the final, Australia beat favourites India in their backyard. It is like stealing into the presidential palace in the dead of night, drinking the wine, fornicating with the servants and, for good measure, stealing the cutlery. All of cricket-loving India is aghast.

In the winter, back in New Zealand, where our story started, Banyana Banyana have gone to their second World Cup under Desiree Ellis. 

Ellis has come a long way. As a player for the national women’s team she was told to wear cast-off shirts from the men’s team. She once played in an international against Zimbabwe in which the entire team changed in a parking lot.

Now it’s different. Although it’s cold in New Zealand, Banyana blow hot. In atrocious conditions they lose by a goal to Sweden in their opening game before holding Argentina 2-all in their second. They leave the best for last. Against Italy, Thembi Kgatlana scores in injury time to win the game 3-2 for Banyana and catapult them into the second round.

At the beginning of the tournament the players are embroiled in a spat with the South African Football Association and at one point it looks as if they might not board the World Cup plane. A last-minute solution is reached and although Banyana are beaten 2-0 by the Netherlands in the second round, the result is a fillip for women’s football. 

If only, mutter many, such a result was in the compass of the perennially under-achieving men.

The South Africans lost the semi-final fair and square. They lost it because they didn’t score enough runs after winning the toss and batting; and they lost it because their pace and swing bowlers — Gerald Coetzee, Kagiso Rabada and Marco Jansen — were savaged early when Australia chased their below par 212.

For all this, it was a match of drama, passion and brilliance, that drama often given depth by some imperfect, edgy cricket. Catches were dropped and strange decisions taken as the action went through more cartwheels than a fairground big dipper.

Chief among them must be Temba Bavuma’s decision to bat first after winning the toss. There was sense in the Proteas’ skipper’s thinking, certainly. South Africa are more comfortable setting rather than chasing and when Australia batted under lights, the Eden Garden’s pitch offered more spin than your average government spokesperson.

Against this must be weighed the fact that it was raining in Kolkata before the game, and the players arrived to find the field covered. There was hessian over the pitch, too, and although the ground-staff did everything in their power to keep the pitch and outfield dry, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc rubbed their hands in delight when they saw how conducive morning conditions were to bowling fast.

South Africa bombed to 24 for four early on with Quinton de Kock, Rassie van der Dussen, Aiden Markram and the skipper back in the hut. At this stage it looked very much like a handy toss to lose as Hazlewood in particular bowled immaculately.

De Kock’s wicket (to a splendid running catch by Cummins) was the big one in the sequence. This was his last match for South Africa in the format and yesterday will have been a bittersweet swansong for the pathological contrarian they call “Quinnie.”

He scored a 14-ball three and then dropped two catches standing up to the spinners. He did manage to grab one, an excellent dive to dismiss Steve Smith after the ball went so high it appeared to kiss heaven, but yesterday was not the best day for one of South African cricket’s finest.

You need to buckle up when Quinnie’s at the crease. And the reason South Africa were in the semi-finals at all is in no small part because of his remarkable four centuries early on in the tournament. Privately, however, he will have been upset to have gone out of the format not with a bang but a whimper.

At 24 for four it looked that you might be better served spending your afternoon on a boat trip punting down the nearby river Ganges, except David Miller had other ideas. He combined with Heinrich Klaasen (47) for a fifth wicket stand of 95 and played both the Roundhead and the Cavalier as South Africa sought respectability.

Miller likes playing against Australia. Three of his six One-Day international centuries have come against them, and yesterday’s was reached with a six. Had he not been there to rescue things the batters wouldn’t have been able to give her bowler’s anything to aim at. As it was, the Proteas total was probably 40 or 50 runs short.

If seam had dominated for Aussie, then spin did the trick for South Africa. Markram accounted for David Warner and Keshav Maharaj accounted for the dangerous Travis Head, Warner’s opening partner, a couple of wickets later with a peach.

Tossing it up outside Head’s off-stump, Maharaj induced the drive, for Head to be bowled through the gate. Maharaj will be telling his grandchildren about the “Golden Ball in Kolkata” in 50 years’ time.

Not to be undone, Tabraiz Shamsi, who might not have played quite enough in this World Cup, stepped up with a few magic tricks of his own. Shamsi is a handy amateur magician and he got Marnus Labuschagne to disappear back to the pavilion in double-quick time before repeating the trick by bowling Glenn Maxwell.

Magic was in the air for the South Africans at this point, but it all ended on a rather more mundane note. Josh Inglis played intelligently for the Australians in wrestling the match back and so, too, did Cummins and Starc. It was a case of close but no cigar for the Proteas, and there was no c-word.

For their part, the Aussies turned their campaign around after a sloppy start in which they dropped catches and lost their mojo on the road to Ahmedabad. They will play India in Sunday’s final, and deservedly so.

What does the future hold for this South African side? Coetzee, with 20 wickets and a gunfire-quick second spell yesterday, was a revelation in this tournament, which is ironic given that he was only there because of injury to Anrich Nortje.

Although he faded as the World Cup progressed, Jansen was very good, too. Klaasen’s 100 against England in Mumbai was spectacularly destructive and Markram, the captain elect, is a sublime striker of the ball. Lungi Ngidi, although he missed yesterday’s match through injury, bowled with smarts throughout.

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that South Africa finished second on the log after the round-robin stage, only losing to the Netherlands (an aberration) and India (deserved). Along the way they beat Australia, England, New Zealand, Pakistan (in a nail-biter), Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, several of whom they could easily have slipped up against in conditions which were never entirely to their liking.

There was no magic in winning seven out of nine before yesterday. They did so because they scored big and defended their totals, catching well and backing each other. Losing to Australia was disappointing but it wasn’t unexpected.

And there’s the 2027 World Cup to look forward to. Next time around it’s here in South Africa. Playing at the Wanderers, with the Bull Ring lit up like a Corlett Drive space-ship, well, there’s no better feeling in the world. In this tournament the Proteas didn’t bring back the ultimate prize, but they got cricket folk to sit up and take notice. That wasn’t the case four years ago in England, when they finished seventh, wilting long before the end.

Once there, they will behave in exactly the same way. We know it in our bones.

During the World Cup in India they have tweaked the theme, taking far longer to break our long-suffering hearts than they usually do. In truth, they have played some accomplished cricket in the tournament so far.

They have beaten (undercooked) England, Australia, Pakistan (narrowly) and New Zealand, but this coming week they stand on the threshold yet again. It is semi-final time — South Africa have never progressed beyond the semi-final stage in a World Cup — and so the moment of heartbreak is upon their fans. How well we know this story.

The semi-final match-ups aren’t cast in stone but South Africa will probably play Australia, while India, who will finish top of the log as the only unbeaten side in the 10-team competition, will in all likelihood play New Zealand or Pakistan.

Having said this, there is a fly in the ointment. Afghanistan are loitering just outside the top four or five and should they beat South Africa on Friday, they might just sneak into the play-offs. South Africa would prefer not to lose to them but if they do it doesn’t matter — they have already qualified for the semi-finals. We just aren’t sure whether it will be in second position or third.

In the 2019 World Cup in England, the heartbreak was swift and brutal. The Proteas lost their opening game to England at the Oval and subsequently lost to Bangladesh and India.

The Bangladesh loss was excruciatingly galling. Bangladesh batted first and scored 330 for six on the back of a sub-standard bowling display. South Africa were competitive in the chase with 62 from Faf du Plessis, 45 apiece to JP Duminy and Aiden Markram and 41 to Rassie van der Dussen but they just failed to drag themselves over the line, losing by 21 runs. It was heartbreak hotel all over again, a place you can check in to, but never leave.

It is always difficult to recover from losing early in a competition and it wasn’t until match five against Afghanistan in 2019 that South Africa had a win under their belts. By then the front runners were off in the distance. South Africa were left to hobble along like a rag-and-bone man in their dust. They posted end-of-the-tournament wins against Sri Lanka and Australia but it was too little, too late. The Heartbreakers finished an ignominious seventh.

This time around, things look different. The Proteas have a new coach in Rob Walter, formerly of the Titans, after a furlough in New Zealand. Walter has recruited his back-room staff wisely.

Duminy, who played in the 2019 World Cup, is alongside him and so, too, is Eric Simons, for many years Stephen Fleming’s assistant at the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League.

As a bowling all-rounder, Simons played a handful of One-Day Internationals for South Africa in the dark days before readmission. Later, he coached South Africa, having done well with his native Western Province domestically.

It was a difficult period for South African cricket, coming, as it did, after the meltdown of the Hansie Cronje affair. 

Simons said afterwards that accepting the national coaching job was by far the worst decision of his cricket career. He was young and comparatively inexperienced and didn’t know what he didn’t know.

“There’s obviously a fear that you’ll never be offered the job again,” he told me many years later. 

“If I look back at my time with the Proteas I was probably too prescriptive, in that I told players what to do. Nowadays I’m more focused on outcome and execution. I like to have a conversation with a player rather than telling them what to do.”

Walter and Simons will have been talking to the players nonstop in India, making them aware of their options and treating them with a kind of avuncular respect. The philosophy has served them well. 

Having announced this will be his last hurrah for South Africa, Quinton de Kock has scored four scintillating centuries in this World Cup and Marco Jansen, the left-arm seamer, is among the tournament’s leading wicket-takers.

The Proteas are settled, know their roles and are all worldly-wise. Keshav Maharaj is a left-arm spinner of almost sinister guile and Markram, Van der Dussen and Heinrich Klaasen make up a powerhouse middle order. 

If ever there was a time not to break hearts, it is now.

Against this needs to be weighed the fact that this World Cup looks suspiciously like India’s to lose. Playing South Africa at a packed Eden Gardens in Kolkata on Sunday, India scored 326 for five, thanks to Virat Kohli’s 101 not out and Shreyas Iyer’s 77.

In reply, South Africa badly mislaid their mojo. De Kock went early and wickets tumbled. For much of the time in the South African chase it looked like the school First XI was taking on the under-15Bs, many of whom were playing with mis-matched kit and in school shoes. In the end, the Proteas lost by a mammoth 243 runs. 

Top score? Jansen with 14.

This kind of snotklap can play havoc with a team’s confidence and Walter and Simons will have used all their wisdom this week to counsel calm. 

You don’t suddenly become a bad side overnight, and the Proteas have had a far better tournament than many predicted. 

Maharaj and Tabraiz Shamsi held their nerve in a narrow one-wicket win over Pakistan and the team looks happy and have caught well – a sure sign that they’re in a good space.

Should they play Australia in the semi-final, Walter and Simons will remind them that before they went off to the World Cup, the Proteas played the Aussies in a five-match series here in South Africa. After going 2-0 down, the Proteas roared back to record a 3-2 victory. 

True, Australia were without some of their gun players — Mitchell Starc, Glenn Maxwell and skipper Pat Cummins — for the series, but players have memories. The recent memory of the series victory will serve them well.

Then again, South Africa have developed a reputation over the last while of being a side that like to bat first, setting up big totals and flattening the side batting second with scoreboard pressure. When they are asked to chase, as happened against India at Eden Gardens, they don’t cope so well. 

This puts a disproportionate amount of emphasis on winning the toss and batting. Opposition captains know that if they win the toss it’s a sensible idea to bat first because the Proteas don’t traditionally respond well to chasing.

So there we have it. Will it be a place in the final or a heartbreak? 

On their day these Proteas are a much like the little girl in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem. When they are good they are very, very good, but when they are bad they are horrid.