Leaving No Stone Unturned
Simon Harmer's journey back to the Proteas squad.
It has taken Simon Harmer seven years to be back in the Proteas set-up. He has left no stone in his path unturned. He is older, wiser, fitter, faster and stronger.
“The setbacks and everything that has happened in my career have created the player that I am today,” Simon says.
If you are not a subscriber of Stumped!, join more than a thousand other professional athletes & ex-pros, coaches, commentators & analysts and casual sports fans that receive the newsletter in their inbox each week — it’s free:
In September 2016, Simon Harmer packed his bags and flew to Mumbai, India. He booked himself into the MCA Sachin Tendulkar Gymkhana. For the next ten days, Simon made the 45-minute to Umesh Patwal's iThinkSportz Academy. He was there before 7 am and didn’t leave before 6 pm.
Simon had first met Umesh during one of Cricket South Africa’s spin camps in India. Umesh Patwal was the Director of Cricket at Global Cricket School at the time. CSA worked with the Global Cricket School when they organised spin camps. A veteran coach, Patwal is something of a ‘spin bowler whisperer.’
“He is Simon’s bowling guru,” says Simon’s older brother, Matthew Harmer.
“I liked his ideas and how he put them across,” Simon says. “He always challenged you, didn't give you the answers. He made you think about things and figure them out.”
Watching an athlete figure things out is not a pretty sight. But it is a sight that one will encounter when visiting talent hotbeds, as author Daniel Coyle found when he researched talent hotbeds for his book Talent Code.
When Coyle visited the best talent factories, he expected to see genius-level performances from the youngsters enrolled there. Yes, he saw that. But, not always. Half the time he saw something else, extended moments of slow and fitful struggle.
“It was as if the herd of deer suddenly encountered a hillside coated with ice. They slammed to a halt; they stopped, looked, and thought carefully before taking each step,” Coyle wrote.
Before athletes reach the point where they attain effortless, mesmerising speed and grace in execution, progress is a matter of small failures. Under Umesh’s guidance, Simon failed a lot and he also learned a lot. Umesh was there to guide him, like the guru that Matthew Harmer says he is.
Simon says, “Having to figure things out helped me to understand my action and the feel of what was right. Understanding why the ball was not landing in the right place and how to fix it.”
This trip provided a different experience to what Simon had had during the spin camps he had been part of with the Proteas. During those camps, it was often up to eight batters and eight bowlers learning from a few coaches. There was limited time for one-on-one player-coach interactions during the five or so days that the camps lasted. There isn’t a lot of individualised training.
This trip was different. Simon’s 10 days with Umesh were a crash course in spin bowling. When they were not busy with drills, they talked cricket. It was an immersive experience.
Simon had been bowling spin for about 11 years when he went off to work with Umesh. Naturally, he felt that he had a decent idea of the craft. After all, his spin bowling had earned him many individual accolades along the way and it had also made him South Africa’s first-choice spinner at one point.
But Umesh had other ideas, he flipped Simon’s world upside down.
“The first few days were quite frustrating. He kind of just threw everything that I thought I knew about spin bowling out of the window,” Simon says.
The first thing that Umesh taught Simon to do was how to hold the ball properly. Until then he had never used his thumb when holding the ball. Umesh wanted him to use his thumb. Throughout his career, Simon had worked under the impression that he needed to grip the ball tighter if he wanted to spin or get more revs on the ball. Umesh told him that the opposite was true.
“In addition to making changes around the awareness of how to grip and release the ball, we also worked on his stability and flow during the run-up,” says Umesh Patwal.
Simon’s metronomic action, which isn’t stressful on his body, was born then.
“I realized that I knew nothing about spin bowling,” Simon says. “I had to like almost start again, which is probably a good thing. Those first few days were incredibly tough.”
Learning new things is hard. Unlearning what you knew to learn new things is even harder, it is very uncomfortable for the brain. It is even more difficult to do so in extremely humid conditions that feel like 40-degree heat.
Had Simon made this trip the previous year, there is a good chance that he might have packed his bags and headed back home. But, he was fitter, stronger and had greater endurance. The months of work he had put in with his friend and CrossFit Gym owner, Jaco van der Vyver, were paying off.
“He would never leave the ground till we had achieved what we had planned for the session,” says Umesh Patwal.
In 2016 Simon Harmer was making changes.
Simon Harmer took guard, he was around five or six years old. He was probably wearing his oversized Vernon du Preez Northern Transvaal jumper. The jumper was his pride and joy. Legend has it that he didn’t take it off in the first two weeks of owning it. It was the Northern Transvaal spinner’s match shirt, not a replica. Du Preez had given it to the boy when they had met at Menlyn Mall.
After the first two weeks, Simon wore it at any given opportunity.
Simon looked up, he was ready, bat grounded, no backlift. He was facing a boy who was around 12 or 13. The boy had wandered to the Harmer yard, as many kids from Moreleta Park did in those days.
The Harmer home was a magnet for kids from the area because of two reasons, one, the Harmers had a great strip in the front yard that was perfect for cricket matches. It helped that the area had a few trees surrounding it, the shade meant that the boys could play for hours on end.
Two, the Harmer boys owned ‘hey-ho’ balls. ‘Hey-ho balls’ were the cool old cork GM balls that were on the market back in the day.
“There was a slogan on TV for the balls, or the Benson and Hedges series, where the line ‘hey ho’ was included. That’s where the name came from,” Matthew recalls.
Every kid wanted to play cricket using ‘hey-ho’ balls in the 90s.
On most days, the Harmer boys were joined by four other kids for a match. The set-up was always two batters, a bowler and three slip fielders. This is probably where Simon developed his slip fielding skills. In high school, he was nicknamed Tentacles. He always looked like his arms could reach everywhere, and he never dropped a catch in the slips. At Essex, they call him Buckets.
Naturally, Matthew, Simon and their friends took turns to bat.
Anyway, the pitch was half the length of the standard pitch. The older boy that Simon was facing had opted to bowl from a further distance, he had offered to measure a distance that is approximately 20.12m long, the standard pitch length.
“But, Simon being Simon, he was like, ‘You're not taking it easy on me. I know you're older than me, but I'm better than you, so you will bowl to me from the same distance as everyone else,’” Matthew narrates.
If Simon didn’t regret his words the moment they left his lips, he must have regretted them when he was hit in the ribs by an absolute ripper. Young Simon fell in pain and cried. It was a nasty hit. He cried for some time afterwards and had a solid bruise to remind him of his decision for a few days.
“He has always had that bulldog mentality,” says Matthew. “He never backed down.”
From a young age, Simon was always playing up. In sports, playing up is when younger and smaller athletes compete with older, stronger and better athletes. Simon took it as a matter of fact that he had to compete with older kids, he didn’t know any other way. At school, he was the youngest and smallest kid in class. Simon went to school a year early.
“Throughout primary school, he always played an age group higher than his,” says Matthew.
At Bakers Mini Cricket he played for the same teams that Matthew played for, which annoyed the hell out of Matthew. The worst moment, for Matthew, was probably when Simon went for trials for the same team as him. It felt as if he saw Matthew as a peer, and felt that he was fit to compete where his older brother competed.
It’s a mindset that was difficult to shake off, seeing Matthew was his first and constant opponent. Simon observed, imitated and then sought to outplay Matthew. That’s how he got into cricket, and that’s also how he got into tennis.
“Matthew was always the guy that I looked up to,” Simon says. “When he got into cricket, I wanted to get into cricket. When he started playing tennis, I wanted to start playing tennis.”
Simon played tennis because his older brother played tennis. Matthew played tennis because he grew up around the sport.
“The tennis court was there, and the racquets and balls,” says Matthew Harmer. “I watched our mother play in tournaments, so, monkey see, monkey do.”
Matthew and Simon Hamer’s mother was once a professional tennis player. After she stopped playing she started coaching tennis.
She coached at Glenstantia Primary School, the school that Simon and Matthew attended. She also coached at St. Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls. In addition to these schools, she conducted one-on-one sessions and had development projects in Mamelodi and Soshanguve.
Throughout her coaching career, no other student gave her a hard time like Simon. Simon’s father found his wife’s attempts to coach their younger son quite amusing. He'd watch from the window smiling, knowing that he was watching a ticking time bomb.
“We used to clash a lot, I think we were very similar in character,” Simon says. “My mom and I probably never had a tennis lesson for longer than five minutes because I'd be trying to hit the ball as hard as I could, and my mom would be trying to coach me and we'd be having an argument.”
Anyway, growing up surrounded by the sport, it was easy for Matthew to fall in love with tennis. He was happy to learn to play the sport and enjoy it. Simon, on the other hand, only had one goal, and that was to beat his brother.
If he couldn't beat Matthew, he would at least try to hurt him. Simon remembers a time when he would run in as fast as he could and try to bowl the fastest delivery he could, aimed at Matthew's body.
“I think I was just more intense in my pursuit of being better than my peers or being better than my brother,” Simon says.
Simon Harmer is very competitive. His desire to outplay his brother, and the drive to wipe him off the tennis court, are not unique to him. It is a trait shared by younger siblings, often the result of playing up. Despite being 13 years younger, Gary Kirsten always wanted to out-perform his older brother, Peter.
According to a study, Sibling Dynamics and Sport Expertise, younger siblings show a ‘greater commitment’ because they want to be better than their older siblings. This is one of the reasons why all he wanted to do was learn to hit the ball harder whenever his mother tried to coach. He wanted to out-hit Matthew.
“I used to compete with my brother every day. I wanted to want to wipe him off the tennis court every time we played,” Simon admits.
When he was not trying to outplay Matthew, Simon combined with Matthew to form a formidable doubles team.
“I think we set a few records at our primary school,” Simon smiles. “Yeah, I think we made a good team. We complemented each other well, being my brother, we understood one another's game.”
“I don't think we were ever beaten as a team,” says Matthew. “Us playing against each other was always a good match. But us playing together was like a beautiful thing.”
When Matthew and Simon played together, they played like twins. Their doubles team always played against Matthew’s age-mates.
It was an intervention of sorts. Simon Harmer’s family was concerned about his future. They always were. His career didn’t seem to be going anywhere, it had stalled. First, he was dropped from the Proteas, then he lost his place in the SA A side and then the Warriors were talking of restructuring his contract. They were going to cut it down to a red ball only contract.
“We were all like, ‘Don’t you think it's better that you kind of pursue your law degree and do something that's a little bit more certainty?’” Matthew shares.
The feeling was that Simon had given cricket his best shot, but it didn’t work out and now was as good a time to move on as any. There is no shame in that. It would have made his father feel a lot better if he went back to finish off his law degree, the uncertainty of the sports world did not sit well with him. He had chosen a career in academics over pursuing a rugby career.
Simon’s father is a professor, and Matthew is a doctor, he specialises in radiology. Simon preferred to colour outside the lines.
“I've always kind of been the black sheep, if you want to call it that,” Simon says. “My passion was on the sports field, and not necessarily in the classroom. So, I probably half-assed a lot of my school career, and I could have done a lot better.”
The talk made Simon incredibly upset. This was not the first time that his family had had this talk with him. In previous times, he had responded by taking a five-wicket haul in his next match, scoring a half-century, or both. These talks always led to Simon taking his game to the next step.
Simon Harmer does some of his best work when his back is against the wall.
“I think like that underdog mentality, that having a chip on your shoulder, you know, playing with a chip on your shoulder, and that helping bring out that fighter and that dogfight in you,” Simon says.
You can’t tell Simon that he cannot do something, he revels in proving people wrong. Just before he left South Africa for his first season with Essex, many people told him that spinners don't take wickets in England, especially not in the first innings. In response, Simon told them, ‘Well, I think you're kind of wrong guys.’ He racked up wickets for Essex.
This is one of the reasons why he is a Tom Brady fan. Tom Brady’s career was all about people who had judged him as not a top quarterback. He was the 199th draft pick in the sixth round. He wasn’t considered a top quarterback of his draft year, despite it being a weak class.
In 2020, Tom Brady posted the list of all the quarterbacks who were picked ahead of him in the 2000 draft. He never forgot. That was his motivation for years.
Brady and Simon Harmer are not the only athletes who have this mindset. Harmer’s Proteas and Titans teammate, Tabraiz Shamsi, thinks in the same way too. You can’t tell him what he can or cannot do. The list of international stars motivated by the chips on their shoulders is endless.
That chip on his shoulder is what drove Simon Harmer to India to work with Umesh on a one-on-one basis. His international career had come to a sudden end, after only playing five Tests. It was a heartbreaking ending for him. He was crying when he called Matthew to tell him that he felt as if his international career was over.
He wasn’t ready to walk away just yet, so he went over to improve his skills. He was going to prove to everyone that they had made a mistake. That’s how he ended up at Umesh Patwal’s iThinkSports Academy.
So, his family’s timing for an intervention couldn’t have been worse. Simon had just picked up the pieces of his cricket career and had decided to rebuild it from the ground up.
“We told him, ‘Maybe it's time that you hang up your boots. You have achieved your lifelong goal to play for the Proteas. You've got your Proteas blazer, and you've got your Proteas cap, you have covered our family in glory, but maybe it’s time to walk away from this career,’” Matthew shares.
Simon did not respond as to his family’s suggestion, at least not immediately. The talk upset him. They should have known better. He did respond later by making the trip to India. His cricket career was far from dead.
Stumped! is a reader-supported newsletter. Those who opt to leave tips (buy coffees) or become patrons are taking an active role in the work that I do by providing vital assistance to bolster my independent coverage of cricket. Feel free to forward this post to family and friends interested in cricket and/or cricketers.
This was a new frontier, and Simon had no idea what to expect. He had never worked with a psychologist before, as he had never felt the need for one. Up until now, he had had one solution for cricket problems: roll your sleeves and work as hard as you can. It had worked.
It hadn’t worked this time, though. He had done the hard yards, got fitter and improved his bowling. The last time he had worked this hard on his fitness was when he was called up to SA A. Before joining the SA A side, at 24, Simon Harmer was blissfully unaware of skinfold tests, nutrition and everything else that comes with fitness standards required at the highest level.
Greg King, the then SA A fitness trainer, had to teach him everything from scratch. King told Simon, in no uncertain terms, that if he wanted to further his career, he needed to lose weight and get fit. And he needed to do that very quickly. It was a challenge that Simon took on with great zeal.
“Being that close to representing your country and seeing what was to come motivated me to lose the weight and get fitter,” Simon says.
For as long as Matthew can remember, Simon has always wanted to play for the Proteas. It is a lifelong dream. With SA A, Simon suddenly found himself within touching distance, he was not going to waste the opportunity.
“It made me realize that I was a lot closer than I thought and that everything boiled down to me and how badly that I wanted it,” Simon says.
It was a question of whether he was willing to put in the time and effort and whether he had the discipline to lose the weight that he needed to lose. He had it all in spades.
Now he had gotten fitter, again, and worked on his bowling, but on his return, he wasn’t taking wickets. He just couldn’t buy a wicket in the games that he played.
“It was very frustrating because, in a way, I felt like I deserved to be doing better because I put all this extra work into my game,” Simon says.
On the plane back from India, Simon had been sure that he would dominate franchise cricket and take bags of wickets. He felt that the crash course and the changes he had made were going to allow him to unlock his ‘beast mode.’
Anyone who played or is familiar with the video game Altered Beast, which was released by Sega in the late 80s would understand how I am employing the phrase here.
He felt good about his bowling, but the beast mode stage remained locked. Then he met William Winston. Winston, the Essex team psychologist, visits the Cloudfm County Ground, Essex’s home ground, on certain days a month. He is not there every day, but he is available to the players whenever needed.
Until that point, Simon was not a big believer in sports psychology, but he was always willing to try something at least once if there was even the slightest chance that it would help him get a 1% improvement.
“A lot of the things that I have learned, things that have helped me in my career, I have stolen with my eyes and ears in the dressing-room or just by listening during conversations,” Simon says.
So, on one of Winston’s visits to the New Whittle Street venue, Simon had a chat with him. Having no previous experience working with a psychologist, Simon used him as a sounding board.
Simon says, “At first, I only spoke to him about certain aspects of my game, frustrations and things I wasn’t happy with. He would help me unpack those.”
The more they talked, the more Simon realised that Winston had a lot more to offer, and by using him as a sounding board he was barely scratching the surface of how much the psychologist could help him. Simon realised that his mental state had been a huge role in his underperforming.
“I thought I was fine after being dropped from the national side,” Simon says. “I thought that when something like that happens, you just take it on the chin, and you keep going.”
But he was wrong. After losing his place in the Proteas side, Simon alienated himself from his family and his girlfriend at the time. He internalized everything and didn't speak to anybody about it. That didn’t just affect his relationships his feelings towards the game were also affected.
“I was probably falling out of love with cricket at that stage in my career,” Simon says.
Going to India helped him upskill himself, but it was not the solution to his problems at the time. What he needed to do was work on himself. William Winston helped him realise that.
“He also opened my eyes into what high-performance thinking is,” Simon confesses.
William Winston, like Umesh Patwal, is now one of the people that Simon is in constant contact with. Like a few others, Winston is part of a support system that helps Simon perform to the best of his abilities. It doesn’t matter where Simon is, Winston is only a phone call away for him.
It took Simon about 12 months before he started to see the results of the work he had done with Umesh Patwal. It was 12 months of doing drills that Umesh had given him, and a lesser number of months of Simon working on himself.
“It was quite humbling that I still had to go and keep working at it and keep trying to be better rather than there is this magical thing where you go to India for 10 days, and you come back, and that's sort of all your problems sorted,” Simon smiles.
“He is one of my best guys,” says Umesh Patwal. “His Hindi is coming along well too.”
Simon makes lists. He has been writing his lists for about seven or eight years now. He does it because it keeps him honest and is a way for him to be accountable for his plans. After every year, he goes back to his list, and he crosses off everything his accomplishments.
“It is a good way to reflect on the year, have a look at what you have achieved and the things that you still need to achieve,” Simon says. “I think as we get older we get lazy in that sense, we don’t keep resetting our goals. It’s always good to have something to aspire to, to work towards, even if it’s simple goals, something which you can tick off and look back on.”
At the start of 2019, Simon wrote down earning the overall PCA Overall MVP as his goal for the year. In 2021, he achieved a three-peat of lifting the award. In 2021 he wrote that he wanted to finish his law degree, and now he is on the home stretch.
The degree has been a long time coming. Simon, literally stumbled upon the idea of studying law when he was 17. He was drunk when he had the lightbulb moment.
Outside of playing cricket, Simon had no concrete plans for his future, he had no idea what he was going to study at university if he got in. It took brief detention at Hatfield police station, after a night of drinking that ended with Simon and a few friends causing a little riot at Hatfield Square in the early hour, for Simon to identify a career path.
Simon was always a naughty kid growing up but had never gotten into this much trouble before. Sleeping in a holding cell, being charged and going to court for an offence was a new experience for him. It was an experience that gave rise to an interest in law.
“It was a basic introduction to law, but it was something I thought was very, very interesting,” Simon says. “I think it was then that I realized I could see myself doing this one day.”
He studied law at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. But he didn’t complete his degree there, he is still in the process of completing it. The regulations were that he could not miss classes, and Simon missed several classes when he signed for Warriors. He had to drop out. He recently picked up his studies with the Open University in the UK.
Practising law is Simon Harmer’s exit strategy. There can only be so many coaches, consultants and ex-professionals running academies. Simon wants a clean break from the sport. It has given him so much, and he will find ways to give back to it, but he wants to develop a life separate from the sport after retirement.
A beach house that he will co-own with his brother, Matthew, is also on his list of things to do. The house will have a bar which will act as a little museum. All of Simon’s cricket memorabilia will be displayed there. Everything from his Vernon du Preez jumper to the last signed ball, bat or shirt that he will collect.
“The beach house will be a place for the family to come to for the holidays,” says Matthew. “The centrepiece of the house will be the bar that is where we will display all of this memorabilia that we have collected over the years.”
Simon is something of an amateur mixologist. He enjoys creating cocktails and all that. So, the bar will be one place where he will spend a lot of time.
Simon Harmer’s Proteas cap was in an airtight container, safely tucked away in a garage in Kent-on-Sea, along with the other bits of memorabilia for the bar. The cap found its way into the container in 2016 when he signed his Kolpak contract for Essex. He was sure and had come to terms with the fact that he might never play international cricket again.
After Victor Mpitsang’s call, Simon called his mother-in-law to fish it out and ship it to him in South Africa.
The beach house is in the future. And while the Harmer siblings search the market for the best deal, Simon’s focus is on the present, his cricket career. Simon doesn’t have a number, but he is sure that he has a few more years of cricket left in him. In those years left, he is working flat out to be the best that he can be. He doesn’t want to leave room for any regrets.
“I don't look back on my career and be like, I could have been fitter, I could have been stronger, could have worked harder,” Simon muses.
Simon Harmer has come to terms with the fact that even though the situation around him being dropped from the Proteas could have been handled better, he also could have done better on the field.
“When I was in India, if I was taking bags of wickets, I wouldn't have lost my place in the side,” Simon says. “I needed to be better and do better to keep my place in the side. I had an opportunity to make a name for myself, and I probably didn't take it with both hands.”
He is not going to make the same mistake the second time around. Whatever the team requires of him, he is going to do it the best way it can be done. That includes carrying drinks as 12th-man or playing music in the dressing-room. Whatever it is.
“Every sportsperson has to watch Chasing the Sun,” Simon says. “There are guys that went to the World Cup and didn't even play. Those guys took it upon themselves to do the analysis of the opposition, whether it be of the breakdown, the scrum, whatever it may be, and they helped the playing guys with preparation. When you are in a team you need that understanding that even though you're not playing you, you can still contribute and still have a job within the team.”
Simon plays for the big moments. He is a player for big occasions. He wants to take five-wicket hauls and he also wants the accolades. But, he prefers it if the team wins. The team comes first. That is what he does at Essex, he serves the team on and off the field. He is about helping create a healthy and nurturing environment.
Anyway, Simon certainly hasn’t repeated the mistake from 2015 during his years with Essex. At Essex, Simon has become such an integral part of the side that the club will almost bend over backwards to keep him.
Simon says, “I'm going to work harder and I'm going to be that competitive in every environment. If if we take in the stairs, I'm going to try and beat you up the stairs. If we are playing soccer and warm up, I am going to try to outplay you. It doesn’t matter what it is, I will be ultra-competitive.”
As a schoolboy, Simon played for the same side as Chris Morris, he had a front-row seat to watch real talent. He has never considered himself one of the most talented people around and attributes his success to his competitive drive. As far as he is concerned, that is the difference between making a name for yourself or drifting into oblivion. Simon has not reached the point where he is content with being put out to pasture.
“When I started my career, I was being outworked by a lot of people,” Simon says. “But once I figured out what I needed to do, I think it now drives me to make sure that I'm working harder than everybody else, and making sure I leave no stone unturned.”
Thank you for reading. I am entirely freelance and some very nice people help me to continue producing more content by donating a little here and there. Some do so by supporting my work on Patreon.
Others prefer to leave tips:
Others also support sharing posts that they enjoy. You can do all three.