SAZI HADEBE | If only SA football had leaders like Dean Elgar

The word leadership has been abused and cheapened in SA.  

Criminal political leaders have led us into nothing but devastating poverty and deprivation which might take decades to undo.

What I want to tackle today is how real leadership is critical to the success of the teams and, sometimes, individuals in sport.

This type of leadership can be employed in many spheres of our lives, including politics, if only to better the lot of the ordinary and most vulnerable in society.

In these times we desperately need true leadership from those we call our leaders. We’re gatvol of charlatans masquerading as such when all they want is to use poor people’s misery and ignorance to climb to the highest office.

Just as ethical leadership in politics, business and elsewhere is critical, so too is it in sport, where you can’t expect success if there is a leadership vacuum.

I was reminded of this when watching our national cricket team, the Proteas, win the three-match Test series against India last week. 

The names of legendary former and current captains of our sports teams, such as François Pienaar, Siya Kolisi, Lucas Radebe, Neil Tovey, John Smit and many others, came to mind as I noticed the impact our Test captain, Dean Elgar, is making with his team. 

You begin to appreciate Elgar’s effect on the team when you listen to what he said to his charges after they lost the first Test in Pretoria, before bouncing back with crucial, memorable victories in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Elgar said he had to show some tough love to his teammates, which he believes was behind their turnaround in fortunes as they completed a seven-wicket victory over India at Newlands in Cape Town on Friday to claim the series 2-1.

I [have] a bit of an old-school mentality, with a new-school twist, but I laid down some proper challenges to some senior players to stand up and respond. It was brilliant to see the guys take the message on board. If you want to be world No.1 in the future, you have to compete and beat the best.

—  Proteas captain Dean Elgar

“Ultimately, if you want to operate at a high-performance level you need to have tough, hard chats. If guys don’t like it. [That’s up to] them to deal with,” he said at the conclusion of the series when asked how they turned things around.

“We are by no means the finished article, but I am already thinking about the next series, which is something I need to try to manage and control because I will burn my brain out.

“I [have] a bit of an old-school mentality, with a new-school twist, but I laid down some proper challenges to some senior players to stand up and respond. It was brilliant to see the guys take the message on board.

“If you want to be world No.1 in the future, you have to compete and beat the best.”

One of the players Elgar spoke to was SA’s ace bowler Kagiso Rabada, whom he encouraged to lead the team in changing the course of the Tests.

Luckily, Rabada is always eager to listen and lead the team to success.

When we talk about leadership in sport or anything else for that matter, Elgar is the type of guy you need as your skipper. 

For him it was not only about encouraging his teammates to play better. He too demonstrated what he is made of with the winning runs he scored, especially in the second Test in Johannesburg. Talk about leading by example.

As I appreciated what Elgar was doing with the Proteas, I wondered if part of the reason our football has delivered some poor performances in the past two decades is due to lack of leadership from our captains.

For instance, when Chiefs were a dominant force Tovey was their captain. He went on to captain Bafana to their only Africa Cup of Nations Cup (Afcon) trophy in 1996.

While rugby continued to be victorious after the 1995 World Cup with Pienaar, followed by Smit in 2007 and Kolisi in 2019, our football has stagnated. It just hasn’t produced inspirational captains.

The game had Aaron Mokoena leading Bafana in the 2010 World Cup that SA hosted. However, the defender failed to inspire the team to avoid earning the horrendous title of being the only host of the global showpiece to bomb out in the first round.

To be fair to Mokoena, leadership in sport doesn’t start and end on the field. It has to be seen and felt in the boardrooms, where decisions about proper grooming of players and those who ultimately lead the teams on the field are cultivated.

For more than two decades now SA football has fielded leadership that behaves in exactly the same way some cadres of the movement that has driven the country to the precipice it is at now.

We have footballers who are eager to occupy leadership positions, but once they get into those shiny, air-conditioned offices they seem to forget why and what they need to do to improve our football.

We all know about the leadership shambles our cricket administration has been beset by in recent years, but credit has to go to captains such as Elgar who have focused their energy on what they need to do on the field.

Football and other sporting codes could learn a lot from what Elgar is trying to do with the Proteas. He admitted they’re not a finished article and have a lot of players who lack experience, but what’s important is that he’s there to guide and help the team improve.

How I wish SA football could produce inspirational captains like Elgar. If it did, I doubt we’d be sitting in our living rooms today watching an Afcon with tiny island nations such as Comoros and Cape Verde — with a combined population that’s less than a quarter of ours — while Bafana is not there.

Our football administrators show no signs of providing proper leadership, so it is critical that those we choose to lead our national teams are capable of courageous leadership.

The cadres of that movement like to appoint people with no leadership skills to key positions, but this cannot be allowed to happen in sport, football in particular.

No, we simply can’t descend into that.