Elgar caps a career of hundreds, hardness and humanity

Unlike David Warner, Dean Elgar knew exactly where his Test cap was: on his head. It was late on Thursday night, and Elgar was in a pub two kilometres from Newlands. Set close to a forest with Table Mountain looming behind, it's the kind of place where you are just as likely to run into a high court judge as a cricketer saying goodbye to their international career.

Elgar sat in a small, tight group with, among others, Aiden Markram. The retiree had a look on his face not of relief or weariness. It was, perhaps, of completion; a job done, an era over, time to move on. Elgar's was the only covered head at the table.

His cap hugged him tighter than Warner's would the Australian. Or would have if Warner could find one of his two, which were later discovered after being mislaid in, it seems, a team prank gone awry. But Elgar's was almost as decrepit. Its green fabric had been worn into holes near the crown and between the badge and the brim on the front panel. The ruptures signalled themselves with protruding hedges of frayed threads. Most of the leading edge of the brim was denuded of cloth. Instead, an indeterminate greyishness peaked out along the curve.

Before South Africa's series in West Indies in June 2021, Elgar's cap had to be replaced because he thought he had lost the original. He found it after he returned home from the Caribbean. So those two matches - Elgar's first as South Africa's appointed captain - were the only time in his 86 Tests that he wore the substitute.

So on Elgar's head as time ticked towards the first day in more than a dozen years that he would not be a current Test cricketer was the same cap he had worn on his debut at the WACA in November 2012, when he fell victim to a pair, and on his next visit to Perth almost four years later, when he made 127; the same one he pulled on in all the 14 matches in which he scored centuries; and in 16 of his 18 Tests as captain, nine of them won.

That wasn't simply a cap. It was an artefact of a man and his time as one of the best cricketers in the world. But, instead of being part of the kit Elgar would have packed for three more days in the bottomless Cape summer sun, it had become a footnote. Hours earlier, the Newlands Test ended in a blaze of ingloriousness on a pitch the ICC on Tuesday deemed, with anal understatement, "unsatisfactory". The inconsistent bounce made the surface damned unfair to anyone tasked with batting on it. A match scheduled for 15 sessions was completed in four-and-a-half - 30% of the allocated time - or 642 deliveries, which made it the shortest of all 2,541 Tests yet played.

Elgar lasted 15 balls in the first innings, when he crooked his downswing to deflect a wide delivery from Mohammed Siraj onto his stumps, and 28 in the second, when he prodded Mukesh Kumar to first slip. This was not the way he would have wanted to go. Especially after, eight days previously, completing an unusually seamless 185 on a not much less challenging Centurion pitch to set up South Africa's innings victory. That meant Elgar had scored centuries on all seven of the home grounds where South Africa played Tests during his career: St George's Park, Kingsmead, Newlands, Potchefstroom, Bloemfontein, the Wanderers and Centurion.

Jacques Kallis and Hashim Amla made Test hundreds at six of those venues. Kallis didn't in 19 innings at St George's Park despite reaching 50 there a dozen times. He fell nine runs short against Pakistan in January 2007, and had three other efforts in the 80s, two of them unbeaten. Amla missed out at Kingsmead, where his 69 against West Indies in January 2008 was the highest of his four half-centuries in 21 innings. Gary Kirsten, Graeme Smith, AB de Villiers, Faf du Plessis made hundreds at five of the seven grounds. De Villiers' case is complicated because he never played a Test in Potchefstroom.

As Elgar noted after he completed his collection at Centurion, "I'm part of a pretty decent list." Who else was on it? Herschelle Gibbs was asked that question between sets in the weights section of a gym on Cape Town's Atlantic Seaboard on Tuesday. Gibbs looked left, then right, searching his mind for a plausible answer. Prompted with the fact that the club has only one other member, he caught on. "Is it me," he asked with genuine surprise.

It is indeed Gibbs. How could he not know? Because, for him, professional cricket was about scoring runs and having fun; not necessarily in that order. Keeping tabs on the details wasn't a priority. And also because for most of his career Gibbs didn't have to put up with social media - no bad thing considering his erstwhile rockstar lifestyle. For much of Elgar's time at the top he had all manner of stats and facts about him slung at him online like chicken feed. He couldn't not know about his proximity to the magnificent seven. Elgar, guarded and circumspect, has eschewed becoming part of the twittering classes, though he does monitor what is written about him. Gibbs is the most vocal and trenchant critic of South African cricket on social media.

Elgar had to graft hard for every success he earned. Gibbs was blessed with too much talent for his own good. That doesn't make Elgar short on talent or mean that Gibbs wanted for work ethic. But the contrasts between them as batters are akin to those that separate peregrines from penguins. You would pay good money to watch Gibbs bat, and pay Elgar good money to bat as if your life depended on him not getting out.

Even so, there are similarities between them. Each scored 14 Test centuries, all of them while opening the batting, and of course half of them at home and half away. Elgar had a marginal two innings more than Gibbs. Most importantly, both come from the school of cricketing thought that puts hardness above all else. Batting at the top of the order in South Africa against the best bowlers other Test teams have to offer will do that to you.

"We both can understand, especially as openers, how difficult our Test pitches are to bat on compared to the rest of the world," Gibbs said. "Centurion and the Wanderers are probably the most difficult of the lot. We understand what it takes to get a hundred on surfaces like those."

The all-time average for Test opening stands in South Africa is 36.27. That's higher than in England (36.22), Bangladesh (36.19), Zimbabwe (35.77), Sri Lanka (35.02) and New Zealand (34.01). But only in South Africa do openers have to deal with bounce as booming as the seam movement is sizzling.

Along with your wicket you could lose, albeit temporarily, the use of a finger, a hand, an arm or a rib. Or, as Craig Cumming did in Centurion in November 2007 courtesy of Dale Sten, 23 bones in your face. Fronting up to that, and fresh bowlers armed with a new ball, requires hardness. With the retirement of Elgar and Warner, and the sometimes disconcerting niceness of many among the younger generation of players, some of whom morph from opponents into teammates in franchise leagues, was that quality draining out of the game?

"Definitely, because the majority of cricket that seems to be played these days is T20," Gibbs said. "There's no seam movement - it's see ball, hit ball. That's all they do; hit a thousand balls at practice and just try to clear the ropes. They're all worried about getting into position to get enough momentum and strike the ball cleanly with every delivery they face. There's not too much with regard to technique. It's sad."

So Markram's 106 at Newlands, an alloy of method, instinct and commitment forged in difficult circumstances, must have passed the Gibbs test. Not exactly: "I'm not sure what has happened to Markram. For a man who got four centuries in no time [17 innings], I don't know if maybe he hasn't had a coach who understands his mentality. If you look at this last hundred he got, at Newlands, he had such an issue with off-stump - standing on off-stump, then not standing on off-stump."

That performance earned Markram centuries on six South African grounds. He would have joined Gibbs and Elgar had he scored just three more runs in debut against Bangladesh in Potchefstroom in September and October 2017. Elgar made 199, his highest score, in the same innings. The almost four hours they spent together at the crease in a stand of 196 before Elgar called for a run, to backward point, that was never there and a scrambling Markram was run out, was neither their initial nor their last meaningful interaction.

Elgar played his first match for the Titans in August 2014, Markram in September 2015. Their bond is easily strong enough to allow for a few beers in a pub near Newlands late on the night of the day that they would share a ground as Test cricketers for the last time.

"Dean took me under his wing from the first day at the Titans," Markram told reporters after scoring his Newlands ton. "He's a tough character. He's not shy of an honest conversation, a guy you always want in the dressing room, and we will realise it over time, once he's missing, that he leaves quite a big hole from a character point of view. We've become really close off the field, and spend quite a bit of time together. It's sad to see him go but he's been a fantastic servant for the country. He never gave up and he wore his heart on his sleeve."

Along with his hardness and his humanity. And his cap on his head. Until, and beyond, the end.