Proteas will miss Elgar’s resilience and dogfight, says Conrad

South Africa will miss the hard bastardry that Dean Elgar brought to his role at the top of the batting order, his brief stint as captain and more generally in the dressing room when he walks away from Test cricket after the New Year’s Test at Newlands. 

Shukri Conrad used more pleasant phrases like “resilience”’, “dogfight” and “determination” to describe a player who will always be less appreciated by those outside the dressing room. Elgar will play his 85th and then 86th and final Test against India, and will walk away as the last connection to the great Proteas team that was ranked No 1 at the start of the previous decade. 

“Dean epitomises what a South African cricketer and even a person is about: resilience, dogfight, pride in performance and the ability to never back down,” Conrad said on Saturday.

“If some of the young bucks who will be stepping up into those big shoes can have half of those characteristics I think we are in a good space.”

While not wanting to go into the minutiae of a relationship that has reportedly been rocky — which is understandable given it was Conrad who dropped Elgar as captain at the start of the year — the Proteas head coach said he wasn’t surprised by the left-hand opening batter’s decision.

“The conversation, the decision, the outcome is exactly how Dean and I discussed it,” the coach said. “That South Africa doesn’t play a lot of Test cricket is part of the reason we arrived at the decision we arrived at.

“Ideally we’d like to play more Test cricket because that gives us more opportunities to blood young cricketers. The less opportunities we have, as is the case currently, leaves me little chance to blood young cricketers and that sometimes leads to a decision like with Dean now. We arrive at it because of a lack of cricket.”

Conrad has hastily pushed a changing of the guard, forced to do so in one sense by the next SA20, which will see him pick a Proteas ‘C’ team to tour New Zealand. A natural general shift has also occurred, meaning players like Tony de Zorzi and Tristan Stubbs are deserving of a chance.

As for Elgar, he is somewhat of a relic of the old school, who emphasised the importance of putting in the hard yards at domestic first-class level over signing up for lucrative T20 contracts. He could also come across as brusque. He ended the Proteas’ last Test series in England refusing to say ‘Bazball’, calling it the ‘b-word,’ as if mouthing the phrase was the equivalent of ingesting poison.

But this South African team is trying to move on, to forge its own identity, which differs from the somewhat antiquated methodology that Elgar used. The current bunch smile more: De Zorzi makes TikTok videos, cracking jokes about the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu; and Nandre Burger about his new teammates’ batting ability.

“Nice guys can be resilient and all of the rest as well. You don’t have to be a knob to be resilient,” Conrad said. “The characteristics we display on the field needs to speak to what, typically, a South African looks like.

“A lot has been bandied about, about his and my relationship. Dean’s a great guy, we will keep the core values of what a South African cricket team is all about. Tony and some of the nicest people in the world will always embody that — that is what we will continue to strive towards as well.”

In keeping with that old school way, where not every good deed needs to be filmed on camera, Kyle Verreynne, who is looking to re-establish himself in the Test team, said Elgar’s “other side” came through away from the spotlight. 

“When you are playing with him in the Test side, he’s always facing pressure head on, always looking for a challenge, but in the changeroom, he is easy to get along with,” Verreynne said.

“It might not always appear that way, but he’s got a lot of care for the younger guys coming into the team. He made a real effort to get you to be part of the team culture, which is the stuff you don’t see when he is out on the field.”