Rassie van der Dussen, meet Bishan Singh Bedi. You will have so much to talk about that your conversation will soar through and beyond mere cricket. You won’t agree on everything – that would be boring, anyway – but by the time you say goodbye you will have made not only a friend but a comrade.
Sadly, as of last Monday, when Bedi died in Delhi, this connection is no longer possible. That they never met is indeed a pity, because Bedi was that rare creature in cricket, regardless of the era: a player who thought about and spoke about matters far away from the game. His boundary wasn’t the edge of the ground. It was the full extent of what it meant to live, with integrity, in this imperfect world. Van der Dussen is of the same mind.
Which is not to conflate them as cricketers. Bedi’s bowling action was fluid simplicity in motion, the game’s equivalent of Picasso’s lifelong yearning to paint like a child. Van der Dussen’s batting technique can look as if it’s been cobbled together by a committee for the preservation of ungainliness. And yet, just as the product of Bedi’s apparently beach cricket action was the undoing of the world’s top batters, so Van der Dussen’s spiky angularity reaps runs and adds rectitude to South Africa’s batting.
He is their compass at the crease, just as a lodestone guides him off the field. As with Bedi, Van der Dussen’s boundary encircles everything. His answer, at a press conference in Pune on Tuesday when he was asked what had changed for South Africa’s team – who have won five of their first six games at this World Cup – since the 2019 edition, when they lost five of their eight completed matches, said as much.
“I think the situations we faced in the past four years, whether it be COVID, whether it be Black Lives Matter, SJN [CSA’s Social Justice and Nation-Building project, which exposed deep rooted racism in the game], various political stories that we’ve had to manage as a team, have really forced us to pull together.
“And the effect of us being really tight off the field, knowing each other intimately. We’ve been playing together for a very long time. Between any two members of the squad there’s a real connection somewhere. So I think there’s definitely something different in this team. We’ve had to deal with quite a lot of controversy and that’s stood us in good stead.”
A lot of that would seem to have nothing to do with scoring runs and taking wickets. But, because cricket is part of the real world and not the other way round, those who need to score runs and take wickets will be thrown this way and that by the impact of events beyond the edge of the ground.
Van der Dussen, like Bedi, is not among the unfortunates who believe in the impossibility that sport should be sacrosanct and separate from everything around it. The reaction to South Africa’s loss to the Netherlands on October 17, which leapt far past Dharamsala’s confines, proved that.
“You realise there are people at home who’ve been scarred by South Africa’s performances at World Cups,” Van der Dussen said. And you can’t criticise them for feeling that way – it’s criticism coming from a place of hurt; they’ve seen that movie before. But we haven’t lived that, so it’s not really applicable to us and it’s not affecting us. It’s part of history but it’s certainly not part of us as a team.”
That history is starkly different to the Springboks’, who have returned home to the adulation of their compatriots after winning the rugby World Cup for a record fourth time. The Boks have yet to lose a final. The Proteas have yet to reach a final. That’s a bleak view from the cricket end of the equation, but Van der Dussen said the team were “massively” inspired by their rugby counterparts.
“I think Siya [Kolisi, the Springbok captain] mentioned in a press conference that if you’re not from South Africa you don’t really understand what sporting achievements mean for the people at home and for us. The realisation for us is that we’re no different. Yes, we haven’t won World Cups. But if we do manage to get there it will be an honour for us to be mentioned in the same sentence as those guys.”
What did it mean for Van der Dussen to represent not a country where realities are less contested, or problems are on a smaller scale, or the future seems stable? What did it mean to play, instead, for South Africa’s teams?
“We come from a very divided background, and that sort of mindset is still entrenched in a lot of communities and among a lot of the older generation. What the Springboks and what sport shows us is that, as South Africans, when you do get things right and you do things the right way, what you can achieve. Good things happen to good people. That Springbok team, that’s what they are. They’re all hardworking, good South Africans with a real humility about them, a real hunger for success. It shows, when you’re willing to put differences aside, what’s possible for a country like ours.”
At 34, Van der Dussen lives in a South Africa he knows is at once different and similar to what it was under apartheid. Gerald Coetzee, 11 years Van der Dussen’s junior, is from a different time and, in some senses, a different place. “We’ve grown up to understand each other’s cultures, and when we don’t understand something we try to respect it,” Coetzee said. “Because when you don’t understand something you still need to respect it.”
Coetzee “can’t imagine how hard it must have been” to live and play sport under apartheid, “but our cricket heritage is old and we look up to those players. So as much as the politics was horrible, the players were decent. There’s a balance – looking at the cricketers we’ve produced over the years and being proud of that; also looking at the history and being sad. But also rejoicing about that it’s become so much better and there’s been so much growth. We need to look at that and appreciate it.”
Had Bedi, a cricketer’s cricketer who was so much more than a cricketer, still been with us it would be difficult not to imagine him nodding and smiling in approval. This, he might have said, is how life is supposed to work: one generation making it better for the next.
Before India visited South Africa for the first time from November 1992 to January 1993 – when apartheid was dying but still the law of the land – Bedi, then 47 and long retired, asked Vijay Lokapally, a stalwart Indian journalist who was to cover that tour, “to get literature on South Africa the country and on South African cricket”, Lokapally said. “Bedi sir felt strongly for the blacks. He particularly wanted books that had information on the apartheid days.” When Lokapally returned home Bedi invited him to lunch and a debrief: “He listened to my experiences with childlike enthusiasm. He wanted to know if I had experienced any discrimination because of my colour.”
Famously, Bedi wrote to the Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA) to demand his name be removed from a stand at the Kotla after the ground was relabelled in honour of Arun Jaitley, a former DDCA president and BCCI vice-president but more prominent as India’s minister of finance. To be connected with a figure he detested was too much for Bedi, whose letter scathed: “With honour comes responsibility. They feted me for the total respect and integrity with which I played the game. And now I’m returning the honour to assure them all that four decades after my retirement, I still retain those values.” As if that wasn’t clear enough, he followed up with another volley days later: “I don’t wish a stand in my name when late Arun Jaitley’s statue is erected without any visible shame.”
Even so, the Bishan Singh Bedi Stand still hugs the western boundary in Delhi, offering spectators respite from the setting sun. Cheers rose from those in its seats on October 7 – 16 days before Bedi’s death – when South Africa piled up 428/5 to beat Sri Lanka by 102 runs. Quinton de Kock and Aiden scored centuries, but so did a player who isn’t blessed with their languid left-handedness, a man of angles, integrity, and the courage to speak his mind. Maybe, in cricket’s strange way, Van der Dussen did meet Bedi after all.
