“There was always some sort of allegiance with Lord’s when we were growing up in Langa,” Temba Bavuma says of his childhood as a township boy living just outside Cape Town. Bavuma, the first black cricketer to captain South Africa, will lead his country against Australia in the World Test Championship final, which begins at Lord’s on Wednesday.
In the quintessentially English surroundings of Arundel, the 5ft 3in Bavuma looks as if he has gone back to being a kid in the dusty townships. “In Langa we had a four-way street,” he says, his face crinkling with the memories. “On the right-hand side of the street the tar wasn’t done so nicely and we used to call it Karachi because the ball would bounce funny. The other side was the MCG [Melbourne Cricket Ground] but my favourite section of the street was clean, and done up nicely, and we called it Lord’s because it just looked better. So, as a kid of 10, I already had that dream of playing at Lord’s.”
