Phil Walker hails Temba Bavuma, Wisden Cricket Monthly’s Cricketer of 2025 – this article first appears in issue 93 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to pre-order now.
Back in the Sixties, in a hot time for America, Bob Dylan railed against getting boxed in. The people wanted a spokesman, Dylan wanted to be Elvis. “I’m just a song and dance man,” he would say, holding up his hands, until one day the prodding became so great that he pulled away completely, retreating to his family home in Woodstock and barely emerging for three years.
Temba Bavuma is not about to step back from anything. And yet there remains in him too, something of the reluctant revolutionary. It’s not that he’s put up a wall. As South Africa’s first Black-African captain, he knows his story is tied up in a nation’s sense of self and talks beautifully about the responsibility. But it doesn’t mean a part of him wouldn’t just like to run free.
In an interview in this magazine from earlier this year, he articulated the push and pull at the heart of his identity. “One thing I would have loved is to be seen as just another cricket player,” he told us. “Just a young guy who simply had a passion for the game, who worked hard enough to make his dream a reality.” Of course it could never be that simple. “The symbolism, the sensitivity to our past… you get seen through that lens.”
Hold the thought that cricket is hard enough at the best of times, and imagine running a team that throbs with the weight of your country’s history – and not just racially-politically but sporting-wise too, with all the accumulated angst of those decades of near misses – all while defending the integrity of a culture that’s routinely disparaged by those higher up the social strata, and then cracking out a few runs at the end of it. Something else that Temba Bavuma whispered, at the end of that interview: “It says something about a person who can keep going amidst the burden they have to carry.”
In 2023, Bavuma took on a near impossible job. And two years later, he was bowling around the Lord’s outfield with his country’s first world title.
Lifting that mace was pure defiance. Here was one for the survivors and strivers. For a country which had hung in there, taking Test matches when they came, paying their stars what they could, and still beating whoever was in their way. Even during the game itself, big names quaffing bubbles in the Mound Stand suites were saying how they didn’t really deserve to be there, as if a run of eight wins in a row was some kind of fluke. For what was at stake, and for all the teams that went before them, that week at Lord’s was one of the great cricketing stories of the century.
There were still rumblings when last month he took his team to India. Two Tests? Thanks for coming. The English get five.
Few give them a prayer. In the first match Bavuma makes an achingly cool 55 in the third innings, the only score of note in the second half of a filthy classic which they will win by bowling India out for 93. In the second, on a conspicuously flat one, he lets his batters score mountains and his spinners wreak havoc. Two-nil? No bother. Bavuma strolls off with a captaincy record of 11 wins from 12 matches, and South Africa with a series win in India for the first time in 25 years.
Next autumn, they begin a run of eight Test matches in five months, including three-match series against England and Australia, where grounds will be packed to watch the world champions of Rabada and Jansen, Markram and Stubbs. Those obituaries written about the death of South African Test cricket may have been a touch premature.
Bavuma is the man and he knows it. Just look at the sauce he puts on that walk. If you’re 5ft 5in, in charge of a bunch of alpha dogs twice your size, you find a way of holding your ground. Bavuma does it by being the deepest guy in the room. And by scoring runs.
Important ones too. Since taking over he’s made three Test hundreds and six fifties, and averages 53. He’s always been underestimated and now he’s one of the most clutch batters in the world. Perhaps then, Temba Bavuma is about to get his wish after all, transcending the gravity of his people’s past to become something even more precious: purely and simply a champion South African cricketer.
When we sat down to talk it through, it wasn’t an especially long conversation. Temba Bavuma is Wisden Cricket Monthly’s Cricketer of the Year for 2025.
This article appears in issue 93 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to pre-order now.
