Older and Wiese
David Wiese's second innings.
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"How's it going? Listen, let's get your international career back on track."
Those words, from Albie Morkel to David Wiese, made up the text message that started David Wiese’s second innings. David did not need convincing, not many people get a second chance to play international cricket, so he accepted the proposal with open arms. In October 2021 he became the 12th man to represent two countries in T20Is.
David Wiese is in his element.
He sets the treadmill at 15km/h. There is a temptation to nudge it up a bit to 16km/h. But, he doesn’t want to exert undue stress on his body, he wants to have a good workout, and 15km/h is the most ideal speed for his minute-long sprint sessions. He goes hard at it, one minute sprinting and one minute of recovery. The session lasts 20 minutes.
David adjusts the dial to 18km/h. It’s time for the 30-second sprint followed by 15 seconds of recovery. After 10 minutes of interval training, he sets the speed to 22km/h. He is now doing 20 seconds of sprints followed by 10 seconds of recovery.
It’s an intense workout, it leaves him spent, but David loves it. He enjoys being in the gym, it’s one of his favourite places to be in.
“I enjoy doing the fitness side of things,” he says, “It's also almost an escape for me to just get away for couple hours.”
Wiese has a lot of energy to burn and always has. It helps that he always tries to keep himself busy, and occupied.
That’s how he developed into an allrounder. In his early years, David often got bored and grew restless if he just had to stand in the field and not bowl or get involved in any other way. So, he started as a part-time spinner, it was his way of increasing his involvement. David even tried his hand at wicketkeeping.
“I always tried to do as much as I can,” he smiles. “When you're young you want to go and do it all. That was my way of playing the game, I just wanted to do everything myself.”
Now older, he doesn’t try to do it all anymore. David is less restless and more present in what he does, even if it is something as ‘boring’ as fielding. At 36, he has developed an internal sense of control. He no longer lets his bubbling energy direct him, but can now channel it where he wills. There is a redirection of attention from the future to the present.
“He brings such calmness to the side. and it makes other players feel safe when they are around him,” says Pierre de Bruyn when I ask him about David.
The reason for this could be age. There is a study that looked at the shifting meanings of contentment and happiness. As we grow older, there is a change in the way we relate to our environment, we grow calmer and seek less immediate excitement. We develop equanimity.
The second reason for David’s change, which is linked to the study that I mentioned above, is the year 2018.
Towards the end of 2016, David signed a Kolpak contract with Sussex, effectively closing the door on his international career. He had represented South Africa in white-ball cricket for three years and had three T20 World Cup games under his belt. He had achieved his childhood dream and now, he figured that there was a new challenge to be faced, new mountains to climb and new worlds to conquer. At the time, the idea was for him to maximise on his white-ball abilities before the sport spat him out.
A cricket career is not particularly long. When you reach your 30s, age becomes an issue, a liability, a lot of times. Cricket is a sport with a high failure rate. But, failure is acceptable when you are a younger player, but the moment you are into your 30s, each failure is taken as a sign of your waning abilities. You are washed, they say. Suddenly you need to make way for the next generation. It's almost as if you spend much of your career working on your trade only for you to be pushed out when you develop a better understanding of yourself as an athlete.
And so, at 31, he was already thinking ahead and thinking of ways to secure his future.
“The idea was to play County Cricket and a lot more of these tournaments, you know, the T20 franchises,” he says. “But that didn't happen for me in the first year.”
2017 was a wake-up call for him. Nothing went according to plan, his County Cricket career didn’t take off on a flyer and no T20 franchises were lining up for his signature.
“I just thought everything was going to be peaches and cream and everything's gonna work out well,” Wiese shakes his head. “I had a tough season that year, in my first season in the UK. I had to go back and re-evaluate things. And if that season never happened, you know, again, I might not be sitting here. I might be, I don't know, working, you know, office somewhere.”
He might have become an internal auditor for some company. Wiese has a degree in internal auditing.
In 2018, for the first time since 2008 when he had signed his contract with the Titans, David Wiese considered the possibility that he might be on his last legs as a cricketer. It struck him that with the way things were going he might have only a couple of years of professional cricket left in him. The realisation that the end could be closer than he had thought triggered a change in his mindset.
The study that I cited earlier has this to say, ‘when people’s time horizon is limited, they are more likely to foster current relationships that are satisfying and comforting in the present.’ In David Wiese’s case, the realisation that his career was closer to the end than he had anticipated changed his approach.
“I had to go back and re-evaluate things,” says David. “At the time, I don't think I appreciated the game as much as I should have and it was close to being taken away from me.”
He learnt to appreciate the present more. The knowledge that every single game, every single day, every single training session, could be his last session stirred something in him; he wasn’t ready to walk away from the game that he loved just yet.
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The other thing that he took a look at was his batting.
“I just decided, ‘You know, what, if I'm gonna keep doing the same thing that I'm doing now, I'm probably gonna retire in the next year or two. I need to change a little bit and try something different.’"
The answer to what changes he needed to make came to him in the most unlikely place. He was out on the golf course with Albie Morkel, whom he thought was simply sensational and had almost tried to mould his game around.
“Albie was on the tee box and I was looking at him hitting the golf balls,” says David Wiese. “And as I watched him I remember thinking, ‘But that's exactly the same swing with when he hits a cricket ball.’”
Immediately afterwards, David Wiese started working on reinventing his swing, incorporating as much as he could from golf. It wasn’t very difficult to do as he is a keen golfer himself, he already had the mechanics. He was halfway there.
Wiese played around with different swing planes, trying different swinging techniques. Somewhere during the process, the penny dropped that he also had to take a look at baseball, and in addition to golf videos, he also started watching a lot of baseball videos.
“It was almost like relearn your body how to hit a cricket ball,” he says.
He was approaching cricket in a way that is extremely different from what he had been taught while growing up and what had been the mainstay of his career. His stance changed as a result of simulating golf and baseball swings, the swings that are mechanically better suited for six-hitting compared to classical cricket swings with straight elbows and all.
“I spent a bit of time the nets on the bowling machine, just like having the ball come up near the same place, and then just trying to hit the golf swing the whole time,” shares Wiese.
But, David hasn’t abandoned his cricket technique, it kicks in when the ball is not in the swing arc.
Wiese could afford to spend hours upon hours on that because besides being picked as a replacement player in the Bangladesh T20 franchise, no one else had signed him. With all the time that he had on his hands, he just didn’t work on his batting.
“The question that I asked myself was, ‘How am I going to be successful with a skill set that I have?’”
He spent time in the nets trying different things to upskill himself. David Wiese is a medium pacer, fast-medium if you are generous with the description. And as the game gets shorter the margin of error becomes smaller if you don’t have express pace. Batters find it easier to line you up and hit you all over the park, so your success as a medium pacer rests on whether you can be a step ahead of the batter the whole time.
Accuracy and deception become key. As the formats get shorter, T20, The Hundred, T10, a delivery that concedes a single is a successful one, so he would rather the batter works him around for a single.
So he is constantly working on his changeups, knuckleballs, cutters, and slower balls, tweaking them, making sure they feel right coming out of his hand… He is a thinking bowler and it helps that he sees the world as a batter. David is always working on field settings that allow him to bowl two or three different deliveries without the batter expecting anything different. Anything to create the slightest doubt in the mind of a batter.
“The game is evolving all the time,” he says. “So I am always in the nets trying to find new ways to bowl. With a slower pace, you really have to be on the button. It’s about being relentless with your skills.”
The other change that David made was his relationship with failure. Rob Walter’s words to him ring in his ears. ‘Cricket is just a sport,’ Walters told him once. ‘At the end of the day, you win, you lose and that's it. It doesn't change you as a person. It's not who you are, it's what you do. Just trust your preparation and then give it your all on the field, that is all that matters.’
As an allrounder, Wiese always tried to compensate with one discipline if he had failed with the other.
“When I was younger, it was always a case of okay, ‘Well, I didn't take any wickets, but I've got a chance to score runs today, or, you know, I've got out for a duck, but at least I can go in, and, you know, take some wickets or something.’ But as I've gotten older, I've kind of realised that there are ways to contribute to the team than just scoring runs or taking wickets,” he says.
This realization has helped him to become a better teammate, as he can step back and be content with someone else playing a starring role while he is a supporting act. He is content with not trying to do everything.
“I've learned that you don't always have to put in the performance with the bat and the ball to actually have an impact on the game,” he says.
And this is probably one of the reasons why he managed to integrate himself into the Namibian side so effortlessly. No one in the squad feels as if they have to live in the shadow of his more successful and accomplished figure.
“Look, you can still contribute in the field,” he points out. “You don’t have to be the star every day. You can still help out your fellow players, you can still speak to other bowlers, help out other batsmen in the field, and you maybe take that catch that changes the game, or, you know, just that small little piece of fielding, that changes the game.”
But with David, being in the Namibia set-up is not just about him being the voice of wisdom. He enjoys the role of mentoring others and sharing the knowledge that he has gathered in the course of his 15-year-long career, but he also enjoys spending a lot of time listening to the people around him.
“I think that's the thing that people have forgotten to do, to just to listen to people,” says David the philosopher. “They so consumed with themselves that they forget how much you can learn just from actually sitting down with someone and listening to what they do and their life story and, you know, how they go about things.”
And even when the conversation is not directly with him, David is always paying attention. He is keenly interested in learning stuff about the people around him, it helps him forge better connections. It’s a habit that he developed in his early years at the Titans.
“I always liked watching people, you know, studying what they do what makes them successful,” he says. “I remember especially when I was younger, sitting in the Titans change-room. You would have guys like Albie Morkel, Pierre Joubert, Martin van Jaarsvaldt, back then Faf was still playing, Heino Kuhn, Farhaan Behardien. And then, you know, the opposition will come in, guys like Neil McKenzie, Justin Kemp and others, all of these guys who are used to watch on TV growing up, you know.”
And while they were all having a beer and catching up on life and the game with their contemporaries, David who was young and shy back then would move closer to them. During his time at RCB, he would always pay attention to AB de Villiers, Chris Gayle and other T20 stars as they chatted in the change-room.
“I would always try to just shift myself close enough that I could actually hear what they're talking about,” he smiles. “I wouldn't always be this central focus of the conversation, but I'll always be listening to what they have to say and just to hear what they talk about and how they perceive the game and things that happened in the game. That taught me a lot.”
And now, even in a dressing-room that is filled with players with significantly less experience than he has, he still takes time to allow the spotlight to not always be trained on him. He just slides back and blends in with the shadows and pays attention to the people around him.
David gets ready to have another go on the treadmill. This time it’s not sprints, it’s time for a 5km run, for stamina, he says. His training regime makes me think of tennis players for some reason. Maybe it is the focus on short bursts of speed and endurance. Afterwards, he will do some weights and then cable stuff for his core. All the good things that he misses when he is stuck in bio-bubbles. David just doesn’t like to spend too much time doing nothing.
“My wife always says that I get bored too quickly,” he laughs. “I think in my mind, I play up the idea of, ‘Oh, it'll be nice to not have to do anything for two or three weeks and just chill.’ And then after two or three days, I just start getting itchy.”
He is not a fan of idleness, it makes him feel as if he is standing still and not moving forward. Despite his age, he is still full of a lot of energy. We joke that this energy will sustain his career for a few more years to come and he says something about Darren Stevens who is still playing County Cricket for Kent CCC.
It helps that David is a believer in high fitness standards, so when he is home he spends about a couple of hours in the gym, five or six days a week, working on his fitness. No wonder Pierre de Bruyn, an exacting man when it comes to fitness, only has praise for Wiese.
“Sometimes age comes with a bit of baggage,” says Pierre de Bruyn. “Some players, when they reach David’s age, they don’t really want to train enough because they want to look after their bodies, they get slower. But it’s the opposite with David, his training, his work ethic is right up there. He is physically equivalent to a 22-year-old.”
Of course, David suggests that I should take Pierre’s comment with a pinch of salt, he insists that he feels like an over-30 girl-dad.
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