IT is not every day that you are in the company of a World Cup winner, especially if you cover South African cricket for a living.
Okay, jokes asides because that’s more painful than we sometimes want to let on. It was actually a former Rugby World Cup champion that I had the pleasure of sitting next to on my marathon journey of 27 hours that took me from Cape Town to Auckland via Johannesburg and Sydney.
So, who was he? Brendon Nasser. Okay, no, so really who is he? Well, Nasser was the former Wallaby loose-forward who sat on the Australian bench in the 1991 World Cup final against England at Twickenham. Nasser never actually got on the field.
As he says “those were days when a player needed an actual medical certificate to be replaced”, but he still received a championship medal for playing in the previous pool games.
Impressive as this may be – Nasser also played for a World XV against the All Blacks in New Zealand in 1992 – it is his achievements off the field that really caught my attention.
While Nasser admittedly played in the previous amateur era, he is an Oxford Blue and medical dentist by profession, but is now involved in setting up an exchange programme between UCT and Pretoria University’s previously disadvantaged students and indigenous Australians. It is a noble venture that I believe can only benefit both parties.
He also spoke at length about older players who could not “cross over” once the lights had been switched off and they were no longer the crowd’s darling.
This got me thinking of a couple of players in the Proteas team who may just be hanging on a little too long than they should purely because life after cricket may just be too scary to actually contemplate.
Retirement is not an easy thing for anybody to process. Even more so for an international cricketer who has only known the road, hotels, airports and his teammates for sometimes longer than a decade.
It’s an insular life and if a post-playing career is not well prepared for, there can be disastrous consequences.If cricket agents don’t accept the education process as their responsibility, then surely Cricket South Africa must make it their business to firstly manage their young players’ careers, and then slowly follow due processes with their more senior players. It will make retirements and future planning so much easier.
What’s the Land of the Long White Cloud been like thus far?
Well, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the warm weather experienced so far in Auckland and Wellington, although locals have warned it is the calm before the (literal) storm.
It’s been the same with the cricket, as the Kiwi media have dubbed South Africa “the Silent Assassins”. Expect the Proteas to be the genuine article of the summer after fellow southern Africans Zimbabwe were crushed continuously for the last month.
New Zealand is an intriguing place, especially Wellington’s Basin Reserve, which has a public thoroughfare causing the Proteas security chief all sorts of nightmares.
He is accustomed to police escorts for his team, not cyclists carrying their daily shopping as luggage passing the Proteas by. Think of a club match on the Cape Flats on any given Saturday that gets stopped routinely for pedestrians, and the picture becomes clearer!
But I’ve got five weeks to go here and I’m sure to experience something even stranger, especially as I head to Christchurch, where shopping malls regularly close indefinitely because the earth still moves below because of the earthquakes of last year.
At least the Proteas were handed whistles, yes whistles, as safety precautions for their match today.
TWEET OF THE WEEK
@Dwayne Bravo – West Indies all-rounder
To all the sweet ladies out there, happy valentines day, hope you all getting spoilt today.
WHO TO FOLLOW
@VincentBarnes50 – The former Proteas assistant coach heads up the Impi in the Twenty20 this season. Follow “Vinny” and his team as they set out on their maiden T20 journey.
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