Have Fun
Joe MacRobert, from St John's College, is all about having fun when he walks out to bat
Project ‘49 is a section dedicated to school cricket. Some of the content, like this piece, will be stuff I would have written for Supersport Schools Plus. The intent is to cover this level of cricket through stories of youngsters with the potential of making it as professional cricketers. This will also be the home of my Schools SA20 coverage.
Joe MacRobert had watched from behind the stumps as Armaan Manack and Matthew West scythed his bowlers. It was a blood bath. The St John’s captain deployed eight bowlers to try and stem the flow of runs, but all looked impotent against the duo. They scored a combined 265 as they catapulted St David’s Marist to 346.
“They are about 30 runs short,” Bongani Ntini, the St John’s coach, shared with MacRobert during the innings break. In 2006, Jacques Kallis walked into a dispirited South Africa dressing room after Australia had scored a mammoth 434 and remarked that the visitors were about 20 runs below par.
Everyone agreed that the pitch was good for batting, but Kallis’ comment solidified the belief that 434 was not an impossible total to chase. South Africa scored 438 with a ball to spare and made history. Ntini’s comment had the same effect on MacRobert. It helped encourage him that the task before him was not unattainable. With his mind freed from the fear of failure, he walked out to bat with one thing on his mind, “Go and have fun.”
That’s what his father always told him before matches or tours. “What we have always said to him is go and have fun. Especially on tours, we tell him to go and enjoy the time with friends and meet new friends,” Gus shared.
MacRobert had fun as he scored an unbeaten 183 from 101 balls to lead his team to a six-wicket victory with 10.4 overs to spare. St Johns scored 350/4 in 39.2 overs.
Gus MacRobert has an ESPNcricinfo footprint, and that is not by accident. After completing his studies at the University of Cape Town, where he played first XI cricket, Gus enrolled with Oxford University, whom he represented in cricket. His batting was serviceable and his medium pacers troubled batters enough for him to be picked for the Combined Universities team that competed in the 1995 Benson and Hedges Cup in County cricket season.
His wife, Georgie, played SA schools hockey and senior women’s provincial hockey. Their first two children, Roxy and William were upgrades of their talents. Roxy played first-team hockey at St Mary’s School, Waverley, and was victrix ludorum in athletics, while William was an allrounder during his time at St John’s College.
MacRobert, three years William’s junior, is an amalgamation of everyone's talents at home. In part, because of the genes. The other half was the sporting environment he grew up in. Roxy and William’s sports equipment were his first toys. His older siblings were also his first opponents.
“We tried to make our backyard contests as tough and interesting as possible. We would set difficult fields and targets for each other. William would always try to assert dominance over me,” MacRobert shared.
To be competitive against older siblings, younger siblings have to work a little harder than when they play against their peers. In childhood, a three-year gap is a long time. The disparity of strength, speed and skill is immense.
“Essentially the challenge of playing up - playing with older siblings who tend to be bigger and stronger and so on - accelerates their skill acquisition,” says Tim Wigmore, co-author of The Best: How Elite Athletes are Made.
“His hand and eye coordination and contact points were excellent. Joe was always a step ahead of other kids in his age group,” Vincent Jordaan, who coached MacRobert from U9 at St David’s recalled.
It is a distinction Jeff Levin, the current St David’s Marist Inanda head coach, also noticed when he first came in contact with MacRobert at St David’s Prep, “I coached Joe with 3 of his school friends from grade 0 for a few years. They were a very talented group and I had them playing with a hard ball within a couple of sessions. While they were all very talented, Joe stood out as a natural, whether he batted, bowled or even kept wicket.”
According to both coaches, MacRobert made playing cricket look easy. He had no trouble understanding and executing what they asked him to try. When they asked him to bowl spin, he landed the ball and spun it. When he kept wicket, he was light on his feet and pouched more balls than he let through. With the bat, ‘his balance and positions were excellent and his ball striking was phenomenal,’ as Levin described it.
Neither coach was surprised when MacRobert notched his maiden century for St David’s Prep at U9.
“I lost interest in cricket when I was in Grades 8 and 9. Covid happened and then when we came back a lot of my friends had dropped cricket,” MacRobert shared.
It also didn’t help matters that MacRobert returned a few low scores. Suddenly, without friendly voices encouraging him to keep going, the crease and changing room felt lonely.
Richard Williams, the father of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams, has a public image that resembles Earl Woods, Tiger Woods’ father. Both men are portrayed as hard-driving taskmasters who made their offspring into megastars by dictating their development. However, there is a rarely spoken side of both parents.
There is a scene in the movie King Richard. A famous coach tells Richard that if Venus, then 11 years old, doesn’t play more matches, “you’re going to ruin her”. Richard responds by pulling Venus and Serena out of the junior tennis circuit completely.
“They don’t need all that pressure,” Richard tells the coach. “They need to just be kids.”
Venus didn’t play an official match for the next three-and-a-half years. While Richard Williams saw that his daughters were exceptionally talented, he refused to drive them onto the tennis court. He wanted them to pursue the sport because they loved it. That is the mindset Gus MacRobert adopted with his son.
While he knew of his son’s abilities, he resisted the urge to send him for private coaching. Instead of playing in winter leagues, MacRobert played other sports in the cricket offseason. In the summer he didn’t just focus on cricket, he also played tennis and golf.
“We’ve never really had any deep chats about Joe’s cricket. We never analyze his games, innings or what he could have done better. That’s not to say we don’t pay attention to his performances. No. We go to every match, support him all the way and chat about some stand-out performances,” Gus shared.
Gus and Georgie’s message to MacRobert has always been, ‘Go and have fun.’ They urge him to enjoy the time with friends and meet new friends. So, when MacRobert fell out of love with the game, they were not taken aback. He went for six months without picking up a bat and no one batted an eyelid. When he picked it up towards the end of Grade 10, MacRobert scored big.
“I scored two centuries in a week, one was a 150 in a T20 match against St Benedict’s and the other an unbeaten 100 at the Gauteng trials. That felt good and I started finding joy in the game again,” MacRobert shared.
MacRobert always looked up to two players, Quinton de Kock and Kumar Sangakkara. He emulated Sangakkara’s elegant cover drives and has a technique close to De Kock’s. In fact, his favourite bat as a youngster was an old GM he picked up because De Kock used one like it. He was in Grade 5. Like the two international players, he is a left-handed batter who keeps wicket.
“I only started keeping wicket in 2023 when Coach Bongani Ntini asked me,” MacRobert shared.
He hasn’t wanted to put down the gloves since then. Wicketkeeping isn’t the only feather Ntini helped MacRobert add to his hat. The St Johns College coach also helped the 18-year-old develop a more attacking game.
“Joe’s technique didn’t need any tweaking when I started working with him in 2023. Our training was focused on him to be more aggressive. The dominating nature has always been there, but it was more on the shot selection side of things. When to switch on and when to switch off,” Ntini explained.
Coach and student spent a lot of time practising range-hitting, upskilling him on picking off a good length over midwicket, bringing in slog sweeps and switch hits not only to spin bowlers but also against medium pacers. The results have been outstanding. During the 2023 season, MacRobert scored 1258 runs in 33 innings at a strike rate of 109.97. He was a lot quicker in the 2024 season, with 1077 runs in 28 outings at a strike rate of 137.9.
“I enjoy taking on bowlers and pushing the game ahead. I will do it as long as it helps the team,” MacRobert shared.
His commitment to the team’s effort is probably why his favourite match, out of the 100 innings he has batted in for St John’s, was the 42 runs he scored against St Stithians to help his team win the Johnny Waite title on the second of March, 2024.
“That’s Joe MacRobert, a team player through and through. He always does what is needed by the team,” Ntini said.