Sachin Tendulkar isn’t among the people you expect to see at a bus stop in downtown Mumbai. But there he was on Thursday (October 5), smiling brightly from the sidelines of the vast tangle of anything on wheels and anyone on foot that starts before dawn and continues long after dusk on the streets of one of the world’s most bustling cities.
A younger, leaner, more carefully coiffed Tendulkar, that is, who beamed into a hot and humid afternoon from a poster stuck to the wall of the bus shelter. Whatever he was advertising mattered less than the message the sight of him conveyed: you’re in India, where cricket’s preferred currency isn’t the rupee but runs. Near the airport a giant billboard starring an impossibly suave Virat Kohli suggested much the same: here, of all places, bat properly if you want to stay in the game.
If two of cricket’s finest batters say so who could possibly argue? The point was proved by England’s flaccid batting in the opening match of the men’s World Cup in Ahmedabad on Thursday – and, more forcefully, by the Kiwis’ furious response at the crease.
But what if you’re the person responsible for turning opponents’ runs into rupees? In South Africa’s dressingroom that buck stops with Eric Simons, their bowling coach, who told a press conference in Delhi, where his charges begin their campaign against Sri Lanka on Saturday, “I think we’re going to see a high-scoring tournament and good pitches. You’re going to need every cog in your machine working well when it comes to bowling.”
And if some of the key cogs are in for repairs? South Africa’s challenge, and by extension Simons’, is how to get the machine to deliver the kind of performance it might have been capable of had Anrich Nortje and Sisanda Magala not been forced out of the tournament with back and knee problems. Magala’s 19.07 is South Africa’s lowest average for ODIs in 2023 and he has the best strike rate, 18.00. But on this bombastic stage the loss of Nortje’s aggression, which bristles as blatantly as his cartoon moustache, seems the bigger blow.
“One of things Anrich brings is intimidation. I’ve sat in I don’t know how many meetings, and the more the opposition talks about certain batters or bowlers, the more you’re in their heads and ahead of them in the game. Someone like Anrich would have been spoken about.”
In Nortje’s absence should the more silky, less spiky Kagiso Rabada, who matches Nortje for presence and is more seasoned than the other quicks in the squad, get to work on his own moustache? “He’s one of our key members,” Simons said. “He has a lot of experience and he’s someone the opposition respects. Getting him bowling at his best is not just important for him but for us as well.”
Nudging Rabada to that point will be a significant subplot in South Africa’s bid for glory. From his Test debut in November 2015 only Stuart Broad has taken more wickets among fast bowlers in the format – nine more, and Broad sent down 756.1 more overs than Rabada. Trent Boult is the only ODI pace bowling wicket-taker ahead of Rabada during the South African’s career. Measured from Rabada’s first ODI in July 2015, Boult has claimed eight more wickets. But he has bowled 69.4 fewer overs than Rabada.
It will seem an overly subtle, nit-picky distinction but it serves to parse Rabada the supreme Test bowler from his slightly more mortal ODI self. He has played in only one ODI World Cup – in 2019, when South Africa crashed to their worst performance in the tournament by losing five of their eight completed games. So Rabada’s ordinary return in the event of 11 wickets from 78 overs at 36.09 must be seen in that context. It doesn’t define him.
“Kagiso wants to be the best he can possibly be,” Simons said. “It’s every game, every practice, and every time we talk. We had a long conversation, him and I, about tactics to be used at the death in India. It’s constant movement and learning, and every day being better than yesterday.”
Simons enjoys getting granular with the detail: “This is a World Cup, but the more we focus on the fact that there’s a match on Saturday, and it’s going to be 300 balls, and you’re going to bowl however many overs, and break it down to this moment rather than what happened in the past and what might happen in the future, the better it is.”
If all that understated sophistication doesn’t fill the Nortje void there’s always Gerald Coetzee, a bruiser with a wide expanse of bare, often angrily curled top lip where his moustache might be. “Someone’s going to punch him in the nose at some point, there’s no doubt about it,” Simons said. “That’s what this game’s about, particularly in India. How you deal with it is what’s important.”
Coetzee didn’t look as dominant as that makes him sound during South Africa’s home ODI series against Australia last month, when he bowled 27.3 overs in four matches and took six wickets at 35.66. But, Simons said, he had the brain to go with his brawn: “It was a great learning experience for him to come up against Australia, a very aggressive batting line-up. To see him come through it and come away with ideas and plans [tells us] he’s a very intelligent cricketer.”
If anyone can get South Africa’s bowlers to straighten up and fly right, you fancy Simons can. A fast bowler who grew into an allrounder and has become one of the more articulate coaches in the game, he has carved out a career that wouldn’t have seemed obvious for someone who played 23 ODIs and no Tests.
Famously he was India’s bowling consultant during the 2011 World Cup. Less readily remembered is that he was South Africa’s head coach in a dressingroom full of people who failed to read a Duckworth/Lewis sheet well enough to ensure the batters at the crease knew they needed to score one more run than they did to avoid the tie that took the team out of the 2003 World Cup.
Simons said being part of India’s staff was “a very different animal” to his current role. Even so, 10 of South Africa’s 15 players have featured in the IPL, earning a collective advantage that wasn’t available to non-Asians in previous World Cups in the subcontinent. Thus the South Africans “have tremendous experience of India, what it’s like to be here – not just the conditions but the hotels and the travel, and what’s involved with that”.
There was, of course, more than that to winning what, for South Africa, has as yet proved unwinnable: “A lot of it is things the guys know and understand. It’s about being involved in a World Cup and how you stay calm in the moment and focus on – which you guys probably hate us saying so much – the process.
“One of my key mantras as a coach is that if we’ve got a clear plan then all we have to worry about is execution. If your plan is not clear you have stress about what to do plus the execution. So the better prepared we are the better we are.”
Simons fetched from memory the example of Mike Horn, the South African-born explorer who was also part of India’s 2011 triumph: “His message to the Indian team was, ‘If I don’t prepare I die, so what stress are you guys talking about?’ Preparation is crucial.”
Horn was on hand in the build-up to South Africa’s Test mace-clinching series in England in 2012, when he helped Graeme Smith’s team scale those heights by sending them up a mountain in Switzerland. But he couldn’t put the South Africans back together after crass CSA board interference took Kyle Abbott, the team’s best fast bowler at the 2015 World Cup, out of the XI on the eve of the semifinal against New Zealand.
Some things are beyond even the most creative conjuring of the coaching staff. But not this: in India runs are worth more than rupees. Sachin knows this. So does Virat. As, importantly for South Africa’s cause, does Simons.