Elgar's retirement draws curtains on a 'certain era' of South African cricket

There goes Dean Elgar and with him, the last link South Africa have to the team that became and stayed world No.1 in the early 2010s.

There goes Dean Elgar, who scored his first Test runs at Newlands and plans to score his last there, a tribute to the format he has excelled in at the ground that hosted South Africa for more Tests than any other.

There goes Dean Elgar, and with him a particular kind of cricketer from a particular period in time, the likes of which we may not see again.

To call Elgar one of South Africa's post-readmission OGs is not an exaggeration. His entire professional career coincided with the country's golden age in Test cricket and when the gloss faded, he still shone. He will walk away from the international stage among his nation's top 10 batters with hundreds against all but two of the opposition he played against, contributions to some of the team's most celebrated victories and a member of the generation that were the best to represent South Africa in Tests.

Between December 2006 and November 2015, South Africa played 30 Test series and only lost two, both to Australia at home. In that period, they beat England and Australia in away series twice. Elgar made his professional debut in 2006 and his international debut in 2012, in the second of the wins over Australia. By the time he and South Africa got to India in late 2015, the team had gone nine years unbeaten on the road. Kagiso Rabada, the next most capped player after Elgar in the current set-up, made his debut in that series, which South Africa lost 3-0 to begin an unravelling that some would argue has not yet ended. Though Temba Bavuma, the third-most experienced in this outfit, first made an appearance the summer before, it was in fact in that year - 2014 - that South Africa briefly lost their grip on the No.1 rankings.

Elgar was the last to taste the real success of being on top even though his participation was limited to only two of their nine magical years. Still, his emergence on the international stage was evidence that South Africa's domestic system produced high-quality players, who could have long, successful careers. As evidence of that, in the 2009-10 season, Elgar topped 1,000 first-class runs in the domestic competition but he was not the leading run-scorer of that summer. Rilee Rossouw scored 129 runs more than him and Stephen Cook just 47 fewer. Elgar is the last of the generation of players who played enough first-class fixtures to be able to accumulate numbers like that.

As Elgar's Test career matured and his seniors retired (and there was one in every year of Elgar's career starting with Jacques Kallis in 2013), they were replaced by players who did not have his depth of experience. So the onus was on him to carry the responsibility of anchor and aggressor. He did both and he did it well. The lack of depth was evident on the domestic scorecards too as the last time anyone crossed 1,000 first-class runs was in 2015-16 (Heino Kuhn). That same summer, South Africa lost the No.1 ranking definitively when they were defeated by England at home. They have not got it back since.

Being a left-hand opening batter, comparisons to Graeme Smith were unavoidable, especially as there were more similarities. Like Smith, Elgar's technique was not aesthetic and the joy of watching him play was in seeing the success of the struggle.

At the crease, he was stubborn and streetwise and when he decided to have a say on a game, he did. His most decisive statements came in Galle in 2014 when his 103 set up a first series win on the island in more than 20 years, and in Perth in 2016 when a defiant second-innings hundred set Australia an unchaseable target. That knock saw the 'baby-Smith' rhetoric soar but Elgar was always his own person. His most successful Test year was in 2017 when he scored five hundreds, including a 199, and finished as the world's third-leading run-scorer. Like Smith, Australia was a favourite foe of Elgar's and his 141 at Newlands was one of the final nails in the coffin of their misery in that series. His last great knock - 160 in Visakhapatnam - provided a sliver of hope on another South African tour of India that went horribly wrong.

India were also an opposition Elgar thrived against. He led South Africa to a home series win over them in the 2021-22 season, one of the many false dawns that suggested things were getting back on track. By then, South African cricket was on the verge of complete derailment. The COVID-19 years and the Social Justice and Nation Building (SJN) hearings ravaged the game and in that time, Elgar was a symbol of consistency.

Apart from his runs, he offered honesty from a player's perspective at a time when Cricket South Africa (CSA) was trying to recover from an administrative upheaval that left it without sponsors or public confidence. Elgar spoke his mind about what he thought was a lack of support for team management during the SJN and later called the emphasis on the disciplinary proceedings which instituted against then-head coach Mark Boucher and director of cricket Smith as bullshit.

His defence of Boucher came not because he had played with him, but because he played for him. Boucher was the Titans' coach from 2016 to 2019; Elgar moved to the franchise in 2014 and played under Boucher's guidance throughout his time there and the loyalty Elgar had towards him appeared immense. Not to mention that they were cut from similar cloth. Boucher, like Elgar, was known for being hard and uncompromising. Elgar seemed the same when he told Bangladesh to harden up after they complained of excessive sledging in 2022.

"It's a man's environment," Elgar said then, and it was the kind of mantra he lived by. He may also be among the last of this kind of boys' club, one that creates old-fashioned environments of hierarchy and cliques that are becoming relics of a time before the T20 league circuit, which promotes camaraderie and skill-sharing.

Why Elgar never made it on the white-ball stage remains a bit of a mystery. He was often among the top batters in the domestic scene, and the leading run-scorer in the franchise one-day cup in 2011-12. That earned him an ODI debut but modest returns against India meant he was dropped. But the runs kept coming. In the 2014-15 one-day cup, he was sixth on the run-charts and scored back-to-back centuries in the semi-final and final in the Titans' run to the trophy.

As recently as this season's domestic one-day cup, Elgar was among the highest run-scorers and came in seventh but he has attracted no interest in T20 leagues, including the IPL. Perhaps it hasn't helped that he was once quoted as saying he didn't put his name in the auction because he couldn't stand the "satisfaction of retiring in a few years because of a million dollar contract." Neither did he get a team in South Africa's SA20. Elgar always said he'd finish his career in England; with talk of a deal with Essex, he looks set to do exactly that.

So there goes Dean Elgar, who may be among the last of those who will look for their final cricket-playing pay cheques on the county circuit as more and more players turn to T20 leagues instead. He is a certain kind of player, from a certain time, and the end of his international career marks the end of a certain era.