It’s a question he’s grown accustomed to, but it’s one Gary Kirsten still thinks about carefully before answering.
What’s your secret? “It’s difficult to answer,” he offers initially, before giving it a proper try. “All I do is help set up the environment for the players to thrive. It’s as simple as that, that’s my coaching philosophy.”
Of course it runs deeper than that for Kirsten. Establishing a proper playing environment involves a multitude of different aspects, plans, people and ideas. It also takes time. Kirsten’s had plenty of that.
The gaps in the international schedule for South Africa allowed for that. He could properly scheme how the South African team would approach the tour to England. That two warm-up games was indeed enough. That the massive amounts of time between Tests meant players would be given lots of time off to play golf and jump on amusement rides.
Much of Kirsten’s work depends on trust and taking responsibility.
Those two ideals, which coincidentally have been at the heart of the drama that unfolded in the England camp in the last fortnight, lay at the core of the environment Kirsten has created with South Africa (and previously with India).
“I think that what’s happened is that we have created an environment in this team where the players are driving the culture, the team environment. We have got a lot of different cultures in our team and the way we have harnessed our diversity as people has probably been one of our strongest points,” said Kirsten.
“Every player has respect for the environment we’ve set up because when that environment is protected, and in a good space, people can then go out and play with freedom knowing they are fully backed by the guy next to him.
“It’s easy to talk about, but to actually live that language ... so let’s say, you’re having a bad day and you don’t have a smile on your face, do you bring that bad energy into the team environment or do you lift yourself? Do you say ‘I don’t want to bring bad energy into this environment, I don’t want to sap energy, I want to drive energy.’
“That’s where the players have been outstanding. It started in Switzerland where we really put a strong emphasis on team unity, we really pulled together having been put under pressure physically, we pulled together as a group of people.
“That set the base and the foundation for us. We’ve been (in England) for six weeks, which is a long time and only played three Tests – there hasn’t been a cross word in the six weeks and it’s credit to the players and the way they have respect for that (environment).”
However, for all the talk about a positive environment and everyone getting along with each other – which they genuinely appear to do – it’s results on the field that the spectators who pay for their tickets, the folks watching on TV and the people who commentate on the game see. And those results in the last few weeks have been bloody special.
“It’s important that we focus on what we do. We need to get our skills up, we need to sort ourselves out, mentally and within our skill work.
“We believe that if we do get that right and we execute like we know we can, we are going to be a difficult side to beat.
“That’s exciting; what we are saying to the opposition is, ‘this is what we do, you are going to have to come up with a way to exploit us’.
“You will have your plans against certain players and we certainly would find areas which we can exploit in the opposition and really target those areas, we spend a lot of time focusing on that. In Test cricket, though, you can have up to four different plans for a batsman, but at the end of the day it comes back to hitting good areas with the ball and playing disciplined cricket with the bat. That will generally bring you more success.
“Whilst you do have ideas and the way you want the game to pan out, invariably it doesn’t work out that way and you find another way of getting someone out or another way of getting runs.”
South Africa’s execution was precise – none more so than in that amazing first Test, where the then world No 1 team was annihilated. Each batsman – only three of them were required at The Oval – worked out their respective approaches and then applied those plans with calculated ruthlessness.
That was no more clearly spelled out than how Graeme Smith, Hashim Amla and Jacques Kallis played off-spinner Graeme Swann, highlighted before the series as one of England’s major strengths.
They all played with their bats, taking DRS out of the equation – Smith as a left-hander is vulnerable as Swann’s stock off-break delivery spins away from him – but he played the ball so late and was always keen to get off strike, so the spinner couldn’t build pressure. Amla batted on or outside his off-stump (a pointer to the different plans of which Kirsten speaks) and whipped the ball through the leg-side.
Kallis looked to get forward, which put Swann off his length.
Above all, they were patient – “they’re not bullies”, was how Steve Finn described the South African batsmen – and when the time came to attack they ripped England to shreds. The scoring rate for the final two hours of the partnership between Amla and Kallis at The Oval was 4.92 an over. “This South African team can win games in that way because when we put it together with bat and ball, that’s the kind of performance we can produce, it was very special. But you don’t get that all the time in Test cricket,” said Kirsten.
Indeed not, and the next two matches were more closely contested but in emerging triumphant at Lord’s in those tight circumstances, Kirsten hopes he will further build the belief in the South African side.
“There is incredible learning out of that, to be put in that situation, to overcome it and win it, especially for the South African team where we have had some scarring in the shortened format of the game and to come through that is going to be big for those players.”
Of course there were outstanding individual performances – Amla’s triple century still boggles the mind, Kallis’ 182 and the six catches he took, the fifers for Dale Steyn and Vernon Philander, the discipline of JP Duminy at Lord’s – but Smith’s captaincy was outstanding.
He has always had an enormous influence over the side, but in this series there was great subtlety in his leadership, and it begged the question that surely he wouldn’t want to give up the captaincy soon as he previously stated this year.
“He is only 31 ... as long as he is enjoying it,” Kirsten chuckled.
He was influential in Smith, who wanted to stop being Test captain last year, staying on in the position.
“He’s got tremendous value to add, he’s a great captain, everyone has known that. Guys enjoy him as their captain and I’ve certainly enjoyed working with him. He is in a new cycle of his captaincy now. I would sense he is a lot more mellow and hopefully I’ve been able to help in terms of working together, just trying to find new ways for him to get the best out of his team.
“I think he has embraced that and is doing a stunning job.
“I always had a sense with Graeme that the world is on his shoulders and the responsibility lies solely with him.
“Hopefully we are getting to a space where he feels he doesn’t have to take all the heat, there’s lots of us that will take the heat and he can back off a little bit and he doesn’t have to be the fall guy.”
He most certainly isn’t.
And Smith, like Kirsten, has already spoken about the importance of retaining this No 1 ranking, something India and England couldn’t do.
“For us it’s not the end of the road, we have a big tour next – to Australia – and we want to stay there now, that’s a very important part of the process, to ask ourselves ‘what do we need to do to keep the consistency up?’” – The Star