Team must always come first!

Temba Bavuma (left) and Dean Elgar celebrate SA’s win over India at Johannesburg on Thursday. Pic/AFP

Dean Elgar's guts shone through in South Africa's win over India in the second Test match. If India breached the fortress of South Africa at the Centurion it was the Proteas who stormed India's fortress away from home, the Wanderer's Cricket Ground in Johannesburg. This was India's first loss at this venue in all the tours to this country since 1992.

Elgar finished unbeaten agonisingly close to a Test century, but the win would have more than made up for the missing out on a Test match ton. As South Africa got closer to victory there was a chance if he had got more of the strike for him to get to the three figure mark. Temba Bavuma hit a brilliant boundary just then and that meant that Elgar would remain short of the century.

Imagine if something similar had happened in India. The guy who deprived a batsman nearing a century from getting to the mark would have been taken apart by the fans of the batsman who was thus denied a century. Their argument would have been that there was so much time left in the game, there were seven wickets in hand so why did the batsman, whose boundary hit deprived their favourite batsman from getting to a hundred, not block the over and give a chance to their idol for a hundred.

Yes, there is place in a team sport for individual glory, but the team's need should always be above that. There's the example of Javagal Srinath trying to bowl wide of the stumps so as to not get the final wicket when at the other end Anil Kumble had captured nine wickets. Try as hard as he did, Srinath was not quite able to bowl wide simply because his whole practice process had been to hit the stumps. It's not easy to keep the natural instinct away and play a game which is not natural to you. That one over that Srinath bowled must have been the only time in his career that he would have been hoping that he doesn't get that last wicket. Kumble duly got the 10th wicket next over and another glorious chapter was written in cricket history, but that previous over from Srinath had more drama and tension than any that I can remember. All those at the Feroz Shah Kotla ground and those watching on TV plus the 10 other Indian fielders would have been praying that Srinath didn't get the wicket.

Professional Management Group