Conrad’s life and career have reflected South Africa’s divided history as well as its culture of sporting excellence
Firdose Moonda08-Jan-2025″This is going to look different.”That was one of the first things Shukri Conrad knew when he took over as South Africa’s Test coach in February 2023.His way was not going to be what some would call the traditional South African way: a style of playing cricket that emerged from the posh, historically white, boys’ schools. Conrad did not intend to follow that mould.”I’ve always felt that we never quite embraced our diversity or saw it as a strength. For far too long, we had this image of what a Protea looked like, and if you didn’t fit that, people would start questioning whether you were really obsessed with the badge,” he said after South Africa qualified for the World Test Championship final to be held at Lord’s in June.”And why? Because some guys come across as too laidback or they have dreadlocks or sideburns and maybe they don’t fit the poster-boy image associated with what an international cricketer looks like. We know there are values and ethics and norms that we always will hold very dear and that doesn’t change, but the boy that comes out of Afrikaans Hoerskool in Pretoria and the boy from Groenvlei on the Cape Flats, or the Indian boy out of Lenasia, the obsession looks different for all of them. I mean, you come down the coast and the guys are so laidback they’re almost horizontal, but they are desperate to play for South Africa, to win for South Africa. It just looks different from everybody else’s.”Conrad knows this because in his life, things have always looked a little different.Related
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He grew up in the 1970s in a cricketing home in the Cape Flats, a low-lying area east of the Cape Town CBD, demarcated for coloured South Africans during the apartheid era, but his father, Sedick, decided to play for a white club. Even in the deepest, darkest days of segregation, this was possible because there were sporadic, albeit token, attempts at integration. Those players of colour who chose to play on the white side made both a sporting and political decision: by playing cricket in a system that was better resourced, they were able to advance their own games but at the cost of being ostracised from their own communities. Sedick was banned by the non-racial Western Province Cricket Board, the body formed as an alternative to the white cricket establishment, and in which people of all races played their cricket.When Conrad was eight, his father was selected in a white South African Invitation XI that included Barry Richards, Eddie Barlow and Graeme Pollock against the Derrick Robins 1975 touring side at Newlands. It was Conrad’s first time at the ground, but he does not remember it as a happy occasion. “That didn’t go down well, because of the state of the country and where my dad chose to play his cricket.”A few years later, Conrad ended up working on the manual scorecard at the ground because one of his neighbours operated it. Keeping the scoreboard ticking was a complex hierarchy that involved making one’s way up from counting the overs to field-spotting and being paid five rand (about two American cents) plus a slice of fruitcake a day. When Conrad talks about it, it is clear those memories are fond.”Down the bottom [of the scoreboard] was the overs, and that’s where you start off. If you did that well enough, you got promoted to doing the bowling analysis, so your maths needed to be okay. You’d be able to count to six and then, obviously, the number of runs scored in that over.”Then you got to do the batters and the runs, but the big job was operating the lights [on the scoreboard]. Whoever was bowling, his light had to be on. The batter that was facing, his light had to be on, but the really tricky one was, whoever fielded the ball, you had to flip that light as well. I spent a lot of my time during school studying who the players were, not doing my schoolwork. I landed that probably at age 12.”1:59
Shukri Conrad on Kwena Maphaka
By then Conrad had also started playing cricket for a coloured club. When Hasan Howa, the founding member of the South African Cricket Board – the umbrella body of non-racial cricket – found out that Conrad was playing what was called “board cricket”, he put a stop to it.”I’ll never forget,” Conrad said, “he was this big, burly character with a deep voice, and he basically said to people, ‘Well, his dad is playing on the other side, he’s not allowed to play here.’ And rightly so.”Conrad was then recruited by an administrator who formed a team of coloured school boys that played against the white schools in the area – thereby becoming a part of the white cricket circuit. Their opposition included SACS, the alma mater of Peter Kirsten, Bishops and Rondebosch, where Gary Kirsten studied. “Their lunches were great,” Conrad said. “We’re talking real privilege.”Conrad played in that system until he finished school, by which time South Africa was a political pressure cooker, with riots taking place regularly. He was encouraged to get a respectable job, in his case as a teacher. “That’s what your parents said to you: ‘You’ve got to work for the government because it gives you security. You get a housing subsidy.'” But the sporting bug in him fought those urgings. “Cricket was what I wanted to do. I wanted to play professionally.”Conrad could have gone to the other side of the country, because he was offered a scholarship at Natal University, but he had a desire to play for Western Province, so his only choice was to “go back to the non-racial side”, which meant approaching Howa again.Sedick, banned by Howa in the past, went with his son to see if they could come to an agreement. To Conrad’s surprise, they did. “After all the animosity, they embraced each other like long-lost father and son,” he said. “I was standing there and thought they hated each other, but that was the greatness of Mr Howa. He was very principled. He wasn’t going to back down on his beliefs. He coined the phrase ‘No normal sport in an abnormal society.'”A young Shukri (front left) with his family•Courtesy Conrad familyIt was a mantra the Conrads had come around to. “We probably didn’t see the wood for the trees. Everything was about cricket at the time. Looking back, would I do things differently? Would my dad do things differently? I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. Knowing what we know, maybe we were ignorant or maybe we just chose not to see some of the goings-on back in the day.”Conrad’s career as a top-order batter never really took off. “I always wanted to play in quite an aggressive way, sometimes too aggressive. I wait all week to play cricket. I don’t want that to be boring too, you know.”After unity in 1992, he played a little bit in the Western Province B side but “probably realised this ship had sailed”. While in his job as an English teacher, he also started coaching, and travelled between South Africa, England and the Netherlands for gigs until the headmaster of his school gave him an ultimatum.”He said to me, ‘You’ve got to decide now, you can’t be upping and coming back and parachuting in whenever you feel like’, so I gave up teaching after ten years. Then I got a call from Ziggy Wadvalla.”Wadvalla, the CEO of Gauteng Cricket, was looking for a coach for the provincial B side. Conrad got the job and spent three years there, turning the team around and winning the provincial one-day cup in 2003-04.He was also heavily involved in development at the Soweto Cricket Club. “A lot of the young players in Soweto were starting to come through the system. Enoch [Nkwe, South Africa’s current director of national teams and high performance] came maybe a year or two into my time. Soweto Cricket was a vibrant place. Things were happening there.”In this World Test Championship cycle, South Africa have won eight out of 13 Tests so far•AFP/Getty ImagesWith a growing reputation as a coach who could make things happen, Conrad was lured back to his home team, Western Province, and coached them for five seasons, winning trophies in all three formats: the 2006-07 one-day cup, the 2008-09 T20 competition, and the 2009-10 first-class title. From there he moved on to Cricket South Africa’s high-performance centre and national academy, where many of the current national players passed through. But although Conrad enjoyed working in player development, and was doing a bit of commentary on the side, he also “missed competition”.In 2022, he took over the national Under-19 side ahead of their World Cup. South Africa did not do especially well in the tournament but Dewald Brevis finished as the tournament’s leading run-scorer, and 15-year old Kwena Maphaka was hand-picked by Conrad as a future star. Later that year, when the national men’s job was advertised, Conrad, who had applied for it unsuccessfully before, decided not only to give it a “last shot” but also to double his chances.”Enoch had decided they would split the roles into red and white ball, and I thought to myself, I am going to throw the hat in both rings,” Conrad said. “I would really have liked the white ball. It’s an exciting format. But in chatting to Enoch, I realise there was probably a lot more graft to be done in this [Test] space. The team needed to be reshaped, remoulded and shifted in a different direction. We’ve always had good players. We’ve always had talented players and we will always have.”Initially Conrad actually got both red- and white-ball gigs, albeit temporarily, because he was asked to also oversee South Africa’s ODI series against England, which was crucial to their 2023 World Cup qualification hopes. Not only did they win 2-1 but captain Temba Bavuma, who had endured a torrid 2022 T20 World Cup campaign, played himself back into form and scored the hundred that sealed the series. That knock came after a well-documented conversation with Conrad in Bloemfontein, and it helped the coach with his decision to make Bavuma his Test captain.Sedick Conrad, Shukri’s father, played for South Africa’s Invitational XI against a touring international team in 1975•Courtesy Conrad family”I was pretty clear in terms of who was going to be the captain,” Conrad said. “It was always going to be Temba, and [the conversation in Bloemfontein] played a part. That just solidified everything but we needed to go in a new direction with new ideas.”Conrad brought plenty of those. As sole selector, his first series, at home against West Indies in February 2023, included sweeping changes, such as dropping Kyle Verreynne, Lungi Ngidi, Sarel Erwee and Rassie van der Dussen.”I looked at the type of cricket I always wanted to play and at the time [Heinrich] Klaasen had been with me at the national academy and he was playing really well in white-ball cricket. That was the type of cricket we wanted to play as well. It was tough on guys like Kyle, Khaya [Zondo], Sarel and Rassie,” he said. “But I was always going to select the character. I think we’ve all got ability. There’s some technical things here and there, but for me, the character was important and the test of the character was how a lot of those guys were going to come back if any of them were going to come back.”Verreynne has made a comeback and has credited Conrad for his transparency and backing. Ngidi could well do the same, although he is recovering from a groin injury. The rest may not, but Conrad has continued to make bold choices, picking 35-year-old Dane Paterson, who bowls in the 120s has the ability to get the ball to nip around, and Corbin Bosch, an allrounder who thought his opportunity had passed him by. He has also given chances to Maphaka, still raw and learning, and extended runs to David Bedingham and Tony de Zorzi.Conrad has a broad and deep knowledge of South Africa’s divided history and the politics entwined in its sport, and understands his responsibility to all South Africans – to put together a team that is both representative and that wins.Kagiso Rabada is South Africa’s leading wicket-taker of the WTC cycle, averaging 18.75 for his 41 wickets in nine Tests•Phill Magakoe/AFP/Getty ImagesSo far, he has largely got that right.”When you’re involved in South African sport, it is not an achievement to get a fully representative side there. That’s part of what you’re supposed to do. You understand the past. You understand what this country’s gone through. You understand the issues. When, in our country, the minority are walking for pleasure but the majority are still walking to get to work, you know you’ve still got a long way to go and we embrace that. We’re always looking to get our national side fully representative. And when you sign up for South Africa, you also want to make every single person in the country proud, and they must have a line of sight where they can say, ‘Well, I can dream about getting there.’ And hopefully we’re doing that.”From one victory in their first four Tests of this WTC cycle to a place in the final, Conrad has taken the team to heights that did not seem possible when he took over. It’s not the South African way to dream of more, because of how much disappointment has stalked them in knockouts and, more recently, in finals. But Conrad has a new South African way.”Just dream a bit,” he said. “Allow yourself to dream. There’s no harm, right? Some of the best things happen in dreams. And once you’ve got that little picture, let’s start working on a little map as to how we’re going to get there. We know it’s going to be tough, but we’re starting to do tough. We’ve got to do tough better, but we’re starting to do tough now.”