Van der Dussen still has goals even though his Test career seems over

The easy thing for Rassie van der Dussen to do would be to consign the “whites” to the bottom of the clothing cupboard, frame the souvenir “baggy green” Proteas cap and sign up for T20 leagues around the world.

He won’t be doing that just yet, but he is also realistic about his future as a Test player. “A lot needs to happen for me to get back into that system,” he said.

There are, as he pointed out, few Tests for SA in the next few years and even if he does crack the nod again, say in two years’ time, he will be 36.

“I think it’s only fair that the batters picked there now should also be given an opportunity to get experience in different conditions. If you look at the few Tests that will be played, it’s going to take two years at least to do that,” said Van der Dussen.

He played his last Test on a green “trampoline” in Brisbane last December that was marked as “below average” by the International Cricket Council (ICC). That Test finished in two days without Van der Dussen and most of the other players making much of an impression in the runs column.

Yet he got dropped. “The situation in Australia wasn’t ideal. I played that one Test on a pitch where 34 wickets fell in five sessions and then got left out — having made 90 the week before in the warm-up game where I batted really nicely.

“I felt that was a tough call and I wasn’t happy with it. But at the time there was quite a bit happening; the communication as a whole in the system was just lacking,” he said.

Changes to the coaching staff were followed by changes to the playing personnel, with Van der Dussen among those deemed surplus to requirements by the Test side’s new coach, Shukri Conrad.

But he’s not going to hang up his whites this season. “I’ll definitely play four-day cricket for the [Central Gauteng] Lions, I’m not retiring from red-ball cricket. I love playing for the Lions and I love playing at the Wanderers. I’ll play, if for nothing else, then for the love of just playing. That will be my approach, not necessarily to try to win my place back.”

Van der Dussen earned the first of his 18 Test caps against England in 2019, amid upheaval in SA cricket that arose from the administrative implosion just a few weeks earlier. He was one of four debutants in a Proteas team that beat England, but would go on to lose the next three matches in that series.

He had to quickly establish himself as a senior pro and then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which put even more pressure on the players. While he states that he was given a fair go in the team, there is also the sense of a Test career that is unfulfilled.

“I didn’t do as well as I wanted to or as I should have. I don’t have a Test hundred. As a batsman you are expected to make hundreds, and that is one thing I unfortunately couldn’t do.”

Instead, his Test career encompassed a period that history will show was one of the poorest for the Proteas batters. Van der Dussen’s highest score was 98, which came in the fourth Test of his maiden series and over the course of his 18 Tests, the Proteas scored just six individual hundreds.

“The conditions that we played in during the last cycle of the World Test championship [15 Tests from 2021-23] were some of the toughest batting conditions there could be. We came in for criticism and abuse for our batting performances, but the stats say there were two teams playing in those conditions, and 90% of the time we actually outperformed the team we played against, hence we finished third on the table.

“Unfortunately, my career fell in a period when not a lot of big runs were scored by our batters, and it was down to conditions. I don’t think we are lesser players than anyone on the world stage. Considering that, looking back it wasn’t ideal, but we as a batting unit did a fair job of not looking into performance too much, but to try to get the job done, which was to win matches and series.”