Dean Elgar will walk out for toss with Rohit Sharma at the Newlands Cricket Ground in Cape Town on Wednesday morning.
He wasn’t expected to do that. Temba Bavuma was, but he got injured.
Elgar went on to play one of the most fluent Test innings of the year. He wasn’t expected to do that. He was expected to grind.
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After making a pair on Test debut, he wasn’t expected to sledge the Australian captain Michael Clarke, either.
That was in 2012. Elgar may have failed with the bat, but South Africa won the Test at Perth by 309 runs. He hadn’t opened, and came in at No. 6, in fact.
It was in 2014 that he opened in a Test match for the first time, against Australia at Port Elizabeth, alongside Graeme Smith. He made 83 in his first Test innings as an opener; he had found his place in the formidable South African batting order (Hashim Amla, Faf du Plessis, A.B. de Villiers, Quinton de Kock).
Elgar has since established himself as one of the finest Test openers of his generation. Opening is one of the toughest jobs in Test cricket, especially in South Africa, where the freshness of the pace bowlers and the wickets that offer them bounce and assistance make it even more challenging.
Elgar belongs to the old school, where the openers were taught to get their eyes in first, leave the balls alone that could be left alone, and build an innings — of your own and that of the team.
England’s Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett may be shredding those lessons into pieces — and who knows there could be more of their like in the future — but cricket also needs grafters, the unglamorous ones who will save you a Test or set up the chase for the more dashing batters down the order.
Rishabh Pant could play a blinder to give India its greatest Test win at the Gabba three years ago because Cheteshwar Pujara faced 211 balls, many of them with his body.
India missed someone like Pujara in the second innings of the first Test here. Only Virat Kohli could stand up to the hostile bowling from the South African quicks.
It was Elgar’s brilliant 185 — his first Test hundred on his home ground — that set up South Africa’s innings victory inside three days.
It was as if he was batting with a kind of freedom he rarely showed in the 84 Tests he played before, as if he was giving himself the luxury of playing all the strokes he wanted in a Test match for once.
South Africa’s coach Shukri Conrad, in fact, said it was his decision to retire from international cricket that made him play the way he did. After Bavuma walked off the field with a hamstring strain in the first session of the Test, he took over the captaincy. Now he will lead South Africa in his farewell Test.
Nobody deserved that honour more.
