Is Tristan Stubbs The Next AB De Villiers?
Stubbs is finally finding his footing in the proteas squad, which is raising some very exciting comparisons.
There once was a time when the Eastern Cape used to produce international sportsmen – as the old saying goes – like it was going out of fashion. The honors board is surprisingly long. It goes off in a couple of unexpected directions too. Here’s a list off the top of my head.
Hannes Marais, the former Springbok captain, was a Somerset East lad, while Rassie Erasmus, the spreadsheet visionary, was an outlier from Despatch. Think, too, of Danie Gerber, another Despatch player, and an outlier because of his unique, bulldozing brilliance.
Think of Peter and Graeme Pollock, of Peter’s spikiness as a tearaway fast-bowler, and his brother’s easy-going introversion. Easy-going, that is, until he took up a heavy bat in his gloved hands and thrashed you to all corners without so much as breaking sweat.
Think of former ‘Bok eighthman, André Vos, a rugby player who, at least for a time, played in a period of serial blood-letting and unhappiness in South African rugby, so one who is liable to be forgotten.
Think of the scrum-half and once Springbok coach, Allister Coetzee, a man of Makhanda down to wintergreen in his kit bag. In a less radiant light, given the latest revelations about his match-fixing lark, think Lonwabo Tsotsobe or, controversially, Luke and Cheeky Watson.
Think of those who were born somewhere else but attracted to the Eastern Cape as a place in which to make their name. Kepler Wessels was born in Bloem but found himself drawn to the Windy City after his time in Queensland.
Steve Tshwete, the first Minister of Sport in South Africa’s first democratically-elected government, was born in Springs, but, as a boy, his family moved to Peelton, outside of King William’s Town. Tshwete and Wessels were captured in one of the iconic images of South Africa’s transition. After South Africa’s victory in the opening match of the 1992 World Cup at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Tshwete, wearing a black suit, walked into the South African dressing-room to offer congratulations.
As he put both arms around Wessels’ neck and looked Wessels in the eye he teared up, while Wessels beamed back at him, a tear or two in his eye. Tshwete knew a thing or two about suffering. He was imprisoned on Robben Island for 14 years, roughly a quarter of his all-too-brief life, and when sporting liberation came along, he knew how to celebrate. The snap was so emotional it brought a tear to the viewer’s eye. It was a real tear-jerker.
There is a third related Eastern Cape category. Think of those who left the playing of sport behind only to realise they weren’t going to be allowed to do so, and engaged with sport in a different capacity – as administrators: Danny Jordaan, Ngconde Balfour, Gerald and Khaya Majola, who died tragically young of cancer. The list is conceivably longer.
While the Eastern Cape honours board is lengthy, it has also stopped growing – or stopped growing at the pace to which we were accustomed. This is what makes the emergence of Tristan Stubbs, the frontline batter, all the more striking.
Stubbs, he of the Thomas Hardy-like first name, falls into our second category, that of sportsmen born elsewhere who came to the province in search of better things. Stubbs went to Knysna Primary in a nominally neighbouring province.
The story is told that he played cricket at Grey High as a primary schooler and returned home with an instruction to his parents. He wanted to go to high school at Grey, he told them, and they were wise enough to oblige.
He arrived at Grey in 2014, taking his place in Meriway Hostel, in many ways the school’s soul, for five years. “Stubbs saw the Pollock Oval when he visited,” says Mike Smith, Grey’s former director of cricket. “And liked what he saw. He told his parents he wanted to move when he returned home to Knysna and so off he went.”
At Grey Stubbs was not a schoolboy prodigy according to Smith, a man who knows the Stubbs game better than most. The path upward was steady, not dramatic. Here was no smasher of records, a la Matthew Breetzke, who is 18 months older than Stubbs and was two years ahead of him at Grey.
Smith observed some interesting things as Stubbs progressed through the grades. He noticed, for example, that players gravitated to Stubbs. They liked him and instinctively sought his counsel.
In Grade 12, according to Smith, who is now the batting coach for the Tasmanian state side, Stubbs was made captain of the Grey first X1. This was item worth recording on the honours board in and of itself. But it was also noteworthy because Stubbs had never captained a cricket team before.
From a technical point-of-view Smith noticed that Stubbs had the ability to bat at what he calls “different tempos” and had a suppleness of mind to go with a suppleness of hand and foot. Schoolboy cricketers tend to bat in one of two ways: they either bash or they block. Stubbs was different, he could do both, within an over, within an hour, within an innings.
He was a shape-shifter, so he could adjust his game to the shape of the game itself. Smith remembers a T20 match against Jo’burg’s King Edward, the school that produced Graeme Smith, Quinnie de Kock and Neil McKenzie, and who always put out a handy, well-drilled side.
“He scored 65 off 40 and he never panicked,” says Smith, the ability to keep calm being another noteworthy feature of the emerging Stubbs game
We tend to conceive of coaching actively – to coach is an active verb – but when not to coach should sometimes receive it’s due. Smith says that because Stubbs bats with an open blade, slightly unconventionally, in other words, he might have been over-coached, with coaches seeking to close the blade slightly and make his stance more orthodox.
Smith and another Grey coach, Richard Gilbert, resisted the temptation to make Stubbs more conventional, perhaps realising that Stubbs was always going to be the player he wanted to be, rather than the player others thought he should become.
Allied to his open blade is Stubbs’ uncanny reach. He’s a tall man, 6 ‘5 in old terms, and this means in Smith’s words that he has “unbelievable hitting zone reach”. As he left school, this is exactly what others saw, and Stubbs was typecast, a little lazily, I think, as the merry young finisher of St George’s.
Stubbs, understandably, did nothing to challenge the view. In fact, he inadvertently encouraged it. His T20 debut for the Warriors against the Dolphins in Durban during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 is a case in point. Here Stubbs came in late in the innings as the Warriors attempted to set the Dolphins a competitive target.
Ottniel Bartmann, no slouch, was bowling to him but Stubbs paid him no mind – and hit Bartmann for six off the first ball he faced. Although he didn’t bat for long, Stubbs’ figures make for interesting reading: 10 runs, six balls faced in six minutes with one six at a strike rate of 166.66.
If you were inclined to see deep meanings in numbers, not to mention astrological or occult profundities of a frankly stellar order, you’d be pretty impressed with that string of sixes.
Six days later – this, incidentally, is factually verifiable – the Warriors again batted first and set about the tricky prospect of setting a target in the playoff game between them and the Lions. Stubbs batted at five and scored 37 runs in 26 balls with two sixes and two fours. The Lions were at full strength, with all the heavy artillery and zippy, non-spinning spinners and lip that goes with being a Lion.
Stubbs didn’t take a backward step. He took 14 runs off KG Rabada’s last five balls including what Smith calls a “massive six.” “People thought,” continues Smith, “wait a minute – this kid can play.”
Stubbs’ debuts haven’t, however, always pleased the eye – or the scorers’ – so comprehensively. Just over a year after making his debut for the Warriors, Stubbs made his debut for the Mumbai Indians in the 2022 Indian Premier League (IPL) against the Chennai Super Kings.
He took guard, in all likelihood slightly outside of leg-stump to free his swing and his hitting arc, and was promptly adjudged leg before off the bowling of the Chennai left-armer Mukesh Choudary.
He spoke to Smith shortly afterwards and what you’re about to hear might strike you as funny, although it might simply be an illustration of Stubbs’ matter-of-factness. “I just forgot to watch the ball,” he told his mentor as he reflected on his second-ball duck.
If I was playing my first IPL with legends like MS Dhoni and Rohit Sharma and Darren Bravo floating about, I might forget to watch the ball myself.
If Stubbs’ IPL debut had an element of bathos, his Test debut – against India in the 2024 New Year’s Test of at Newlands – played itself out in a different emotional tone. Facing the freakish Jasprit Bumrah and an on-song Mohammed Siraj is bad enough, but batting at four in your debut Test on a Newlands snake-pit is a task beyond even the reach of the blessed.
Stubbs scored three and one, and the match was over in the blink of an eye. Later his coach, Shukri Conrad apologised for throwing him in at the deep end.
Smith has a saying. It might even be a mantra. “Character trumps cover-drives,” he says, and Stubbs seems to support the claim. Both Stubbs’ IPL and Test debuts have been unmitigated disasters but Smith’s protégé hasn’t appeared to let it get to him. If he has, he’s hidden it well.
Stubbs doesn’t seem unduly fazed. He’s keen to learn and keen to play. He’s fit as a freak and has regularly been the fittest player in the teams for which he plays. If the reverse-sweep or reverse lap strikes him as on, he’ll give it a go. Smith thinks that because of Stubbs’ hockey and his scandalous reach, the reverse lap and sweep have been refined into being the safest of shots.
Stubbs’ arrival in the game was through the medium of T20 cricket, so it’s natural that in the public mind he’s a T20 cricketer first and foremost. This, however, is something against which Stubbs rails.
Last June, for example, the SA “A” squad travelled to Sri Lanka for three “unofficial” ODIs and two “unofficial” Tests. It transpired that Pallekele, the venue for the first Test, wasn’t South Africa’s happy place. They got bowled out for 131 and 185, with Stubbs scoring a first-innings duck and not batting in the second because of – as far as I can tell – illness. South Africa A lost the Test by 160 runs.
Come the second Test in Colombo and it was time to set the record straight. Tony de Zorzi was out first ball of the South African innings, leg before to Vishwa Fernando, so Stubbs, next in, effectively opened the innings. He batted for a ball short of 66 overs in scoring 117, the only century of the two Tests by a South African. His partners were three: first Breetzke, followed by Keegan Petersen, who made way for Zubayr Hamza, after Petersen had gone to fifty.
In the context of what is likely to be a long and lucrative career, Stubbs’ 117 against Sri Lanka “A” will become a mere speech bubble in a lavishly illustrated story. It was enjoyed by precious few and noticed by even fewer.
It did, however, show Stubbs’ crazy competitiveness after his duck in Pallekele. And it set him up nicely for his second Test hundred – again against Sri Lanka, this time at Kingsmead two weeks ago – against some of the very bowlers he faced in the winter like the canny old stager, Fernando.
It also proves, if proof were needed, that Stubbs is no T20 circus tent performer, the kind of freak that delights for a minute or two but who can’t hold himself together for any longer.
As far as Smith’s concerned, Stubbs always wanted to play Test cricket and held it in high regard. He has a robust enough technique – open blade or not – to bat for long periods of time. Something he clearly enjoys doing.
When I put it to Smith that Stubbs is fast-reaching a crossroads, where he must decide on his identity as an international cricketer, Smiths says that such decisions have already been taken or, if they haven’t, are in the midst of being taken.
Stubbs can, and has, said no to tournaments, such as Major League Cricket in the USA, so he’s pacing himself. The head on the Stubbs shoulders might be young. But it is also, apparently, wise.
Sport is remarkable because it is unscripted. Sport is remarkable because it has a wonderful capacity to surprise. Who would have thought, for instance, during South African cricket’s Dark Ages only four years ago, that the T20 side would come within a whisker of winning a World Cup final?
And who would have thought that the Test side, for so long the poor relatives of the flashier white-ball game in South Africa, would be within three Tests – all of them at home – of reaching the final of the World Test Championship? Stubbs, of course, isn’t the only player to whom the side owes thanks for its current position, but he’s brought good energy and a kind of swashbuckling poise. He is the kind of batsman you want to change your plans for.
Under Temba Bavuma the side has never lacked for commitment. But it has been grim and sometimes unnecessarily intense. Whether by accident or design, Stubbs has changed that. The team is clearly enjoying its cricket. They are catching like men possessed. Why is it, in the emotional architecture of the game, that the two invariably – forgive the pun – go hand-in-hand?
In detailing Stubbs’ story, there’s one question we haven’t asked. It’s a question on everyone’s lips now that the Kevin Pietersen and AB de Villiers similarities have rolled perhaps a little too easily off the showroom floor of comparisons. The question is this: “How good is Stubbs going to be?”
Smith, for one, is in no doubt. “He hasn’t yet scratched the surface of what he can do,” Smith says. “Trist will have lulls as a cricketer – he will have dips. Look at Marnus [Labuschagne] who is going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment, but that’s all part and parcel of his journey. We’ve just seen the beginning.”
We have already heard some comparisons. Let me add another: Jonty Rhodes. The quicksilver backward point was there at the beginning and his identity as a cricketer is tied up with the feelings of innocent joy that went with South Africa’s welcome back upon re-admission.
Stubbs has similar qualities. Like Rhodes, he is effervescent. Like Rhodes, he finds a way to work his way into a game when he isn’t directly part of it. Like Rhodes, we feel the stirrings of something fresh and vital when he’s around. We are – and this is precious, because it doesn’t happen very often – at the start of something, you rather feel, in the bright morning of new beginnings.
This is a difficult burden for Stubbs to bear. If I were his ever-supportive parents, Chris and Mandy Stubbs, I would worry that the ratcheting up of Stubbs fever is only going to lead to unrealistic expectations. Stubbs is in a team sport. And he’s only one man.
He has yet, for example, to face Josh Hazelwood in fading light at the Sydney Cricket Ground. He has yet to face Washington Sundar on a Bunsen burner in Chennai. All of that will come. And it will come soon enough, sooner of Cricket South Africa start to realise what they have on their hands and start arranging some three-Test series at least and possibly even four and five Test series.
There are other comparisons too. Stories are told of both WG Grace and Don Bradman, and the unusual ability they had to not only empty attacks of their desire to bowl but to empty offices and floors, even entire buildings.
“People discussed Grace as they discussed prime minister William Gladstone and the national debt,” wrote Neville Cardus, making the point that Grace was “institutional.” And we all know what happened when the Don, with his too-large pads, pitter-pattered to the crease on dainty feet.
Excuses were found, secretaries excused, meetings and assignments cancelled. Like thousands of others, you went to the cricket in the hope of catching a fleeting glimpse of something fabulous you understood and couldn’t name.
We began this week’s story with the story of the Eastern Cape as a producer not only of cars and car tyres and automotive parts, but top-class sportsmen. We commented that the conveyor belt of talent appears to have slowed. The one name we didn’t mention – and it was intentional – is that of Siya Kolisi, the Springbok captain, who matriculated from Grey High in 2009, five years before Stubbs arrived at Merivale Hostel.
What is there left to say about Kolisi, the Springboks’ first black captain? One commonplace might be that Kolisi has given black sportsmen in this country inspiration. He has certainly given Bavuma, and others like him, a great deal of it. But inspiration is not mono-toned? It contains a pinch of envy. And envy can be good. It can be galvanizing. Cricketers want to be as successful as Kolisi and his ‘Boks, and that has to be a good thing because international sport is tough enough as it is.
Stubbs might yet take over from Bavuma, although you wouldn’t bet on it, given Cricket South Africa’s inclination to racialise decisions to the exclusion of all else. This aside, Bavuma, now 34, has a couple of years to reach for the Kolisi high bar.
As he does that, he will have a group of fast-maturing young cricketers beside him. They are capable of shooting out the lights and the next five weeks – between the beginning of December and the start of the 2025 edition of the SA20 – will provide us with one of the more compelling cricket stories of the last five years. Who said the Eastern Cape was done and dusted?
Up until now, I’ve spoken about the Eastern Cape honours board in purely literal terms. Let’s put a slightly more metaphorical twist on the notion. Tristan’s parents surely deserve their honours board. Smith tells me that Mandy was a brilliant travelling supporter who sometimes found the challenge of support, well, rather challenging.
Having been the father of cricket-playing sons, I know how difficult it is to politely will your son to success in the knowledge that you can finally do nothing about it. If you’re looking to develop as a father – rather than simply hoping for development from your son – some-day you should try it.