There was something that kept Mike Hesson, then a young coach of the Otago cricket team, coming back to the left-arm quick he was watching on VHS tape. It wasn’t attributes traditionally associated with great fast bowlers – pure pace; height – for this bowler had modest gifts in each. Nor was it a bulging wickets column. As South African domestic player Neil Wagner toiled in the oven of a Pretoria afternoon, he’d had little success. What kept Hesson’s finger hovering over the rewind button was Wagner’s attitude in the face of those modest returns: “Wags was still steaming in. He had a big heart … It was just the enthusiasm he had for the game.”
The flavour of that enthusiasm – erupting in a vein-popping roar whenever Wagner took a wicket – wasn’t initially to his adopted country’s taste when he moved to Dunedin in 2008. He’d learnt his cricket in a country where the aggression of fast bowlers extended to their vocal chords, and Hesson recalls the exuberance of Wagner’s reaction to his first wicket for Otago. The umpires, he says, “might have had a quiet word that, ‘Hey, we don’t get that carried away over here’”.
Another South African expat, Auckland fast bowler Danru Ferns, remembers his early days in Pretoria club cricket as a rite of passage, testing much more than his technical skills. “If you’re a young fella, you’re getting abused from all sides, in all different languages, about all different things.”
Like Wagner, Ferns soon realised he’d need to adapt if he was to prosper in his new country. It is no different a realisation than that which the thousands of his compatriots – the latest available Census data recorded 71,382 South African-born people living in Aotearoa – who, in the interests of assimilation, have learnt to say ute instead of bakkie, barbie instead of braai.
South Africans, including this writer, make up about 1.5% of the population; yet the impact of South African players on cricket here far outstrips that percentage. When South Africa begin a two-test tour here in Mt Maunganui on February 4 – free-to-air on TVNZ for the first time in many years – three South Africa-born players could be lining up against their country of birth. The three centrally contracted expats in the New Zealand squad are Wagner, Devon Conway and Glenn Phillips. Others – Dean Foxcroft, Chad Bowes and Michael Rippon among them – have recently represented New Zealand in white-ball cricket.
The influence extends to the women’s game, where Proteas international Bernadine Bezuidenhout moved to Christchurch in 2015 and became a White Fern after a three-year residential qualification period.
Influential imports
When South Africa born-and-raised Grant Elliott was selected for his first test in 2008, he was the 236th New Zealand men’s player granted the honour. Of the 49 subsequent male players to have played tests for NZ, six were South Africa-born. Zimbabwean Colin de Grandhomme also became a Black Cap. They are African to varying degrees: Phillips and his family immigrated when he was 5; BJ Watling was 10 when he and his mum moved from Durban. Their inclusion has coincided, after many years of inconsistency and some of ineptitude, with the uptick in the Black Caps fortunes, initially under Hesson, who became national coach, and captain Brendon McCullum. The rise culminated in New Zealand claiming victory in the inaugural World Test Championship in 2021 and reaching consecutive ODI World Cup finals.
Wagner at the height of his powers was ranked the second-best test bowler in the world – higher than either of his comrades in a much-feared triumvirate, Trent Boult and Tim Southee – and was the second-fastest New Zealand bowler to reach 200 test wickets after Sir Richard Hadlee.
Watling’s indomitable presence as wicketkeeper, and the stubborn runs he extricated from down the order – he was the first NZ keeper to score a double hundred and was twice part of world record-breaking partnerships for the sixth-wicket – saw him described by Wagner as “the heart and soul” of the team. De Grandhomme’s big hitting and complementary medium pace, Conway’s rapid ascension as a provider of big runs, including a debut double century and top score in the World Test Championship final, Colin Munro’s New Zealand-record three T20 international hundreds: the recent history of the Black Caps glitters with contributions from southern Africans who ended up with a silver fern on their chest, whether it was natural currents of migration that brought them here or the conscious decision to seek a shot at international cricket from the launching pad of Aotearoa.
‘Cut-throat’ system
When the Black Caps toured the West Indies in 2012, Wagner combined with another South African to take his first international wicket. NZ wicketkeeper Kruger van Wyk and Wagner were both alumni of Pretoria’s Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool, one of South Africa’s most-famous cricketing schools. Van Wyk is now the fielding coach of the South African team and spoke to the Listener from his hometown, where he heads the cricket programme at the University of Pretoria. He describes his decision to relocate to New Zealand as the combination of a chance to experience another culture and an opportunity to bypass the immovable Mark Boucher in the South African line-up in a bid to play cricket at the highest level. “I basically had nothing to lose by having a look elsewhere if I really wanted to pursue my international dreams. To break into the South African team was very hard.”
When he debuted for Canterbury in the 2006/07 season, the system he came from looked distinctly “cut-throat” in comparison, he says. Even as a kid, cricket at home was never primarily about skills, says van Wyk, it was about winning and losing.
Left-arm spinner Louis Delport, originally from Nelspruit, near Kruger National Park, and now an Auckland representative, told the Listener that the challenges South Africa faces – it has one of the highest crime rates in the word, and an unemployment rate of more than 30% – factor into what he calls a “dog-eat-dog” sporting culture. “If you’ve got an opportunity to use a talent or a skillset like a sport to potentially earn a living or make a way for you and your family, then that’s something guys really throw themselves into because there aren’t as many opportunities, not just in sports but across the table.”
For van Wyk, “Africa has never been short of resources, you know, and it’s the same for talent. Working within the structures of South African cricket currently, the amount of talent is absolutely scary.” That further fuels the competition to make a career from the sport. “In South Africa, it’s incredibly intense. The stress and pressure under which you play and perform is constant … If things don’t work out for you, in a week or two or a month, there will be another guy knocking on the door.” Cricket in South Africa rests on the principle of survival of the fittest, van Wyk says.
In New Zealand, he found a “completely different type of cricket” – one where teams didn’t rely on a battery of three or four very fast bowlers, where, in the absence of the same level of competition for places, there existed a more “measured approach” to player development and a “calmer sense around how things were done”.
When he came to captain Canterbury in his second season with the team, he realised how deeply his own immersion in the culture of the South African game had affected his outlook. “The New Zealand way of leading is a lot more inclusive. You rely heavily on the intellectual property within your changing room, the knowledge, the experience, the strong cricketing opinions as well.”
He says South African teams tend to be more hierarchical: there’s an old-school focus on earning one’s stripes in the dressing room and a more domineering leader at the helm.
When Danru Ferns first trained with the Auckland squad, he remembers being struck by the willingness of Black Caps like Martin Guptill and Colin Munro to take the time to meaningfully talk with an unknown young bowler from far away. It wouldn’t have happened in the country of his birth.
By the time van Wyk made his debut for the Black Caps, against South Africa in Dunedin in 2012, much of this had become second nature. He’d come to regard himself as a New Zealander – even if being ribbed by Jacques Rudolph, an opponent he’d known since age 10, about something that happened one Valentine’s Day at the school they shared gave him pause to think about life’s ability to send us on diversions we never see coming. It still didn’t stop him feeling like a New Zealander. “I know I had – and still do have – a separate background, and that’s normal,” he says. “It’s like I always say to people, it’s absolutely fine to love two countries.” The lessons he’d taken from both, he says, made him the cricketer he became.
Nice guys
Dean Foxcroft, also from Pretoria, grew up idolising South African great Jacques Kallis and dreaming of following his hero into the South African team. He looked well on the way to doing so when, in 2016, he scored a century in helping South Africa beat New Zealand in both teams’ final game of the Under-19 World Cup in Bangladesh. But after the match he got chatting with the New Zealanders, including future Black Caps Glenn Phillips and Rachin Ravindra. He’d already been toying with the idea of taking his cricket bat abroad, and he remembers thinking, “Geez, these people are nice.”
It set the teenager on a course that took him to Napier. He remembers calling his dad in South Africa when he first made the Central Districts team. “I was like, ‘I don’t think I want to come back. I want to stay here and try to play cricket for New Zealand.’” He’d decided, “This is me, this is my home country now.”
He later moved to Otago, returning to South Africa in 2020 to complete university exams. Covid struck, and the closure of New Zealand’s borders prevented him from returning for nearly two years. He sometimes thought he might never get back, that his dream of playing for New Zealand would go unfulfilled (the enforced exile interrupted the three-year residency condition required to qualify for his adopted country).
But in Pretoria he connected with van Wyk, picking his brains about all things New Zealand and cricket, and never stopped feeling like the Kiwi he’d committed to becoming.
When he was allowed back in 2022, he celebrated with a season that saw him named New Zealand domestic cricketer of the year. He will “cherish forever” his inclusion in the national T20 team that toured the UAE last year.
He says people might “think you are still South African, but for me I made a commitment to New Zealand. I would say I see myself as a Kiwi, but you are obviously born in South Africa and my first language is Afrikaans.”
Not that within cricket circles he has much chance to use it – Foxcroft preaches the virtues of trying to fit in. Even when he first met Wagner, for instance, it was with a “full-on English conversation”.
Delport, asked whether there was a sense of fraternity among South African cricketers in New Zealand, said it was more an unspoken understanding of a shared experience. “You know the sacrifices they’ve had to make to potentially get to where they’re at and push on. I wouldn’t say it’s a club, but I think there’s respect for seeing someone … being willing to do it, and then doing it.”
Much to prove
For Hesson, this was the factor that made South Africans such a potent force in the New Zealand teams he coached: not necessarily the lessons they brought with them from their home country, but the motivation such a move required, and the desire to prove themselves it implanted in the players who had done it. “If you move to New Zealand, then it means a lot more to you, doesn’t it?” he says. “You’re actually playing for your family back home, and obviously playing for your adopted country. And you’ve got a heck of a lot to prove. Because no one wants to go home with your tail between your legs.”
It meant the South Africa-born players he coached were “desperate to win games for New Zealand. Those are traits that I certainly loved and I think New Zealand sports fans loved as well.”
He makes special mention of the man whose career he played such a big hand in. “If you see a player like Neil Wagner running in on basically a broken foot, running into the wind, bowling 10 overs on the trot, and every ball steaming in like it’s the most important ball in the test match, it inspires you. You can’t all of a sudden at the other end be bowling two or three overs of powder puffs. You just can’t ask someone to bring that energy and not bring it yourself.”
Weight of history
The Black Caps have never beaten South Africa in a test series. The upcoming attempt represents New Zealand’s best-ever chance, as South Africa’s first-string players are unavailable. In what South African coach Shukri Conrad described as a scheduling “balls up”, they are required to compete in the country’s domestic T20 competition that coincides with the tour. Half of the visiting squad, including captain Neil Brand, are yet to play a test match, but any South African squad, as Black Caps coach Gary Stead has said, will inevitably pose a threat: “We’re certainly not going to be taking them lightly.”
The Black Caps are desperate to create history. A different kind of desperation, the immigrant’s struggle to prove themselves in a new land, has found a home in New Zealand cricket, and it’s that hunger for success – more than Wagner’s wickets, Conway’s runs, that magic moment when Grant Elliott swung Dale Steyn into the Eden Park crowd to send NZ to the 2015 World Cup final before extending a hand to console his supine former compatriot – that is perhaps the real gift that South Africans have given cricket in New Zealand, percolating through the country’s pavilions.
For van Wyk, the dressing room is a democratic institution, a melting pot where personalities, ideas, and nationalities mingle. “I think everyone taps into everyone. I’d like to believe that we did have a positive impact in a lot of ways.”