NEIL MANTHORP: How centurion Klaasen freed himself up to play the game his way

On the top of Jos Buttler’s bat handle, the bit only visible to the person gripping it, are written the words “f**k it”. It’s a reminder that cricket, ultimately, is a game. If he’s contemplating a risky shot and concerned about the potential consequences, he need only glance down at the two words between his hands.

Heinrich Klaasen may just have signalled that a similar approach may be adopted by Proteas teams in future. It has been spoken about often before, and there have been sporadic bursts of fearlessness in the past, but the recent high-scoring series against England and a change in players’ circumstances may lead to a permanent shift.    

“We don’t want to be ‘old school’, rebuild the whole time and then see what happens at the back of the innings. We want to be aggressive and take the bowling on,” Klaasen said after belting 80 from 62 balls in a thrilling but ultimately unsuccessful fightback in Kimberley last week.    

“Nobody will be consistent all the time. The selectors and the coaching staff need to buy into the plan because, if we want to keep playing that way then the consistency will be a bit up and down. Some days it might look bad and other days it will look great, so that’s the big challenge for the management and the selectors,” Klaasen said, echoing much of what Eoin Morgan said in 2015 when he led the revolution of England’s white-ball cricket.    

An often understated but critical cornerstone of Morgan’s captaincy philosophy was consistency of selection. Doors were always open to new players but, generally, once Morgan had identified a player he believed was the best, he stuck with them. The national selectors were, by and large, there to rubber-stamp Morgan’s preferred squads.    

“We’re all natural shot-makers, so playing that brand of cricket is not the issue, it’s what goes on in your head — will you be dropped if you fail,” Klaasen said, smashing the Proteas’ problem nail on its head.    

“I brought it up in a meeting in Sri Lanka,” Klaasen said. “All the coaches want to play aggressive cricket, so I did in two games, it didn’t come off and I was dropped and went back to seventh in the queue. It was tough for me to come back and play that positive brand of cricket.    

“So I basically gave up and said, ‘If this is my last game of cricket for the Proteas then I will go out the way I want to go out’. Since then I have been playing good cricket, so I treat every game and series as though it is my last. That seems to be freeing me to play the way I like to play,” Klaasen said.    

One of the consequences of the SA20 is that the top players, such as Klaasen, no longer need to play for the Proteas. His remarkable 104 not out from just 44 balls on Sunday confirmed that he will be a multimillion-rand player for years to come, and that’s before the Indian Premier League and other dollar-paying domestic leagues around the world.   

“I’m not worried about getting dropped anymore; if they want to drop me, then they can drop me. I’ve learned from experience that if I average four or 60 I can get dropped, and sometimes if I average four then I get selected anyway. If they want you in the team you’ll be in the team, and if they don’t, then they will drop you. After I made that mental switch my game has been more consistent,” Klaasen said.    

He wasn’t complaining, merely telling the truth. There was a time when the national team was harder to get out of than into, but in recent years — and Covid-19 worsened the problem — it has been far too random.    

“If you’re out of form or you don’t perform, then you drop four or five places down the list,” Klaasen said. “In other countries, if you’re out of form, then you just drop to the bench and wait for someone else to lose form and then you’re back in. That’s the difficult part of our system and the way the selectors have been going. You do not want to fail and that holds you back from playing your [natural] game,” Klaasen said.    

Fear of failure holds back top stars. Who would have thought that? Actually, it holds all of us back, not just sports people. The difference between them and us are the consequences of failure. While their rewards can vastly exceed ours, they can also end up with nothing.    

It’s easy for Buttler, earning big dollars in Paarl for a month, to say “f**k it”, but it is not so easy for younger and far less wealthy players. Perhaps, with more and more players becoming less financially reliant on playing for the Proteas, the better they will perform when they do.