Duminy's talent will out
First he needs to unclutter his mind and go back to playing his naturally aggressive game. And hopefully he'll have Kepler Wessels to help him on his way back
Telford Vice
March 5, 2010
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JP Duminy is disconsolate after edging the first ball of Graeme Swann's spell, 4th Test, South Africa v England, Johannesburg, 16 January, 2010
What happened to the star unearthed in Australia? © PA Photos
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It's not that South Africans look down on precocious talent. Instead, you might say it puzzles them. Certainly, they don't trust the stuff further than they can spit.
Give them a grizzled, blood-in-the-boots, over-my-dead-body, who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are type of player, and they will love and respect him forever. Put some gifted young git in front of them and they're going to look past him to see where that other fella went.
"There's a feeling in our country that young players need to serve their time before they're given a chance," said Mike Procter, who made his Test debut a few months after his 20th birthday. "I don't believe that should be the case. In other countries, young players are picked all the time." Indeed, as Freddie Mercury told us, "Talent will out, my dears." Which means South Africans are simply going to have to put up with the stuff.
They know this, of course, because every generation or so the cricketing gods curse South Africa by bequeathing them a true talent, sometimes more than one: Procter, Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards, for instance. Or Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock.
In this generation, Jacques Kallis. And JP Duminy. Bugger. It's happening again. What to do?
But as the gods give, so they take away. Duminy, he of the icy confidence and uncomplicated approach, has melted into a puddle of messy mortality. Once, he played strokes that would get no further than the wilder imaginings of other batsmen. Now he flays clumsily at the ball from an unsteady pair of feet that would seem to have been fashioned from Table Mountain's granite.
Duminy fired a shot across the bows of every current Test bowler in his debut series in 2008-09, when he scored 246 runs at 61.50 and made certain of his place in history as a star in the first South African team to win a Test rubber in Australia.
Perhaps it could only go downhill from there. Three series later, his average has plummeted to 28.77. He scraped together 15 runs in the three Test innings he played against India in February, and by the look of him, he felt lucky to get that many. That's a far cry from the young gun who triumphed over Australia's finest and immediately inspired predictions of future greatness. Duminy made Procter, then the convenor of selectors, who saw in him something more than the occasional ODI player he had been, look like a visionary.
"He always looked a classy player and he should have been playing Test cricket much earlier," Procter said. "But he never got a chance because the South African top six was quite settled. Then Ashwell Prince suffered an unfortunate injury, and Duminy was given his opportunity."
Procter is as perturbed by Duminy's troubles as any other cricket-minded South African, but he reckons he'll be back. "To lose form as badly as he has done is concerning. But it's not totally different to what happens to a lot of players as they build their careers. You can see the class is there, and you can't take that away from him."
The route to Duminy's return to form on the international stage, Procter said, needs to wind its way through the wings of lesser cricket. "He's playing in the domestic competitions now, where the bowling isn't of the same standard as at international level. Then he's off the IPL, where it's all about giving the ball a good whack. Hopefully that will help his confidence, because your form is all about your mind. It reaches a stage where you don't know where your next run is coming from."
"To lose form as badly as he has done is concerning. But... you can see the class is there, and you can't take that away from him" Mike Procter
Duminy surely knows of whence Procter speaks. The good news is that his rehabilitation is in the hands of Kepler Wessels, South Africa's batting coach on the tour to India. At first glance, all that could possibly connect Duminy and Wessels is the fact that they are both bat left-handed. Duminy's instinct is to shoot at boundaries far and wide. Wessels' bread-and-butter stroke was the nurdle to third man. As a Test captain in an era when South Africa were veritable toddlers among T-Rex, Wessels was duty-bound to ensure he couldn't lose a match before he tried to win it. Duminy plays for a South African team that likes to believe it is the finest in the game. But no one knows more about keeping a clear, focused head, about discipline and sheer hard work, about the kind of invisible strength that scares some people, which leaps mental boundaries, than Wessels. Assuming he continues to work with the team, what is he going to do with Duminy?
"There are a couple of small technical things we've identified that need to be worked on. He has a problem against offspinners, for instance," Wessels said. "But the main issue is that there is too much clutter in his mind. Too much information has been put there over the course of the last 12 months.
"He needs to get back to playing his naturally positive, aggressive game. Sometimes the opposition gets a handle on you, and the challenge for you is to come back from that."
As someone who scored 162 on Test debut, and followed that with a half-century and two more centuries in his next 11 innings, Wessels seems eminently qualified to guide Duminy through the minefield. When the precociously talented Duminy reaches safe ground - and he will - he should find plenty of love and respect waiting to welcome him.
Telford Vice is a freelance cricket writer in South Africa
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