Lace Up, Lizaad
He came in as a replacement player, but that won't matter to the many people who are wishing him well
One player will have the whole of Vredenburg cheering for him at the ODI World Cup. Lizaad Williams. Williams was a late addition to the Proteas squad, brought in for Anrich Nortje, who can’t go due to injury.
16 years ago, Rosseau Mercuur sat opposite Linette Williams, Lizaad Williams’ mother. A polished coffee table with refreshments was between them. Lizaad could have been invisible. The adults spoke of him as if he was not present. But he was present. This moment was too great for him to be outside playing with his friends. Lizaad was sitting next to his mother.
Mercuur had watched Lizaad outperform and outwork every bowler at an Under-15 tournament held at Huguenot High School two weeks earlier. The boy had a higher work rate than the other kids. He also bowled faster than the average youngster of his age. If Mercuur had known that Lizaad had only started bowling pace early that year, he would have shat himself with excitement.
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Lizaad was an outlier. In his book, On Fire, Ben Stokes speaks of Jof-isms, a term coined by Stokes and his England teammates because of how easy Jofra Archer found it to learn things on the cricket field. Lizaad attracted sporting skills like metal to a magnet. On the rugby pitch, the community called him Tollos, after Jacques Talmakkies, a local rugby legend. That is a huge endorsement in an area where rugby is religion.
It was also generally accepted that Lizaad had an above-average cricket talent. He started playing first-team cricket for his club, Vredenburg-Saldanha Cricket Club, at 13. The adults didn’t give him a pass because he was younger. He had to pull himself up to their level. It was a brutal learning ground.
“It was like being thrown into the ocean and getting told to swim or drown. I learned to give back as much as I got,” says Lizaad.
Mark Boucher described Lizaad as a player with that passion and that desire to win. “You can’t coach that. It’s either in a player or it’s not. He’s certainly got it. He’s one of those guys who, if you’re in the same team as him, you love playing with him. You know he will be by your side and has got your back. But if you’re in the opposition you probably hate playing against him,” Boucher said of Lizaad.
That dog fight and aggression in Williams were nurtured during his club cricket years and it made him an integral to the Boland Under-15 side that concessions were made for him to be available for matches. One time, Lizaad had to attend a Boland Under-19 camp during a period when other Weston High School pupils had to write tests. Esmond Barends had to organise for Lizaad to write the test at school at 06:00 o’clock in the morning. In another instant, Barends had to give the exam question paper to Lizaad’s coach so that Lizaad could write on the day that the paper was written at the school.
“I only started bowling pace because I grew bored with wicketkeeping and bowling offies was not exciting,” says Lizaad, explaining that he tried his hand at bowling pace and quickly realised that if you bowled fast enough, aggressively enough, you could send the batter cowering. Lizaad liked that idea.
Before he got into the details of the Cricket South Africa Scholarship he was offering the family, Mercuur began his pitch by vowing to always look after Lizaad. It was a good opening gambit because Linette Williams worried about her son’s welfare and safety. Besides being away for a day or two playing at cricket festivals, Lizaad had never lived away from home.
Kids from Louwville did not routinely enrol at Huguenot High School. Vredenburg was home to factory workers and fishermen and women. People who could not afford to send their children to boarding school. Huguenot High is no Wynberg or Grey College, it does not boast a sprawling list of alumni that has gone on to play for the Proteas. Most just filter into club cricket. The fortunate ones make it to provincial cricket.
But, for a kid from Louwville who was accustomed to wearing play clothes, shorts and t-shirts, underneath school uniforms on sports days because play clothes were sports gear, Huguenot was a huge step up. They had dedicated uniforms for practice and matches, and they had well-resourced facilities.
“90 to 95% of families from my community have the same background,” says Lizaad. “We all had the same struggles. I don’t think they are any different to the struggles of many South Africans. Maybe we were different in that where I come from fish is the main source of income and it is also the main source of nutrition.”
Huguenot presented Lizaad with a different challenge from what he was used to. Lizette Williams was worried about her son’s ability to cope in that new environment without any support structure. Mercuur was at pains to assure Linette that he would take care of Lizaad as if he were his own son. “I made a commitment that I will guide and nurture him and will look after him. I always knew that he was a special and gifted talent, but this rough diamond had to be moulded and polished,” says Rosseau Mercuur.
Mercuur also assured Linette that he would provide Lizaad with transport to come home during off weekends when the hostel was closed or when he did not participate in sports. Mercuur’s pleas and promises on the issues that matter convinced Linette to put her son into his care. 16 years after Rosseau Mercuur’s visit to the Williams home in Louwville, Lizaad Williams has reached another milestone in his cricket life, he is heading to India as part of South Africa’s World Cup squad.
“Lizaad’s story is almost like a fairytale. I am so happy for him. Of course, we are going to miss him at the Titans while he is at the ODI World Cup, but this is what every player dreams of. I am happy that all his hard work is paying off,” says Jacques Faul, the Titans CEO.
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Thanks for reading. Until next time… - CS