The Last of a Dying Breed

Dean Elgar was a special kind of cricketer

Dean Elgar holds a somewhat mythical place in South African cricket. Small, cheeky, gritty and the only South African batter who can bat on a minefield. In 2017, he spent five and a hours at the crease after coming in to bat with a badly swollen left index finger that had been injured by a Ben Stokes delivery the previous evening. After the blow, Elgar would repeatedly let go of the bat handle following subsequent jarring blows.

“That was probably his best innings. After the tour, Alistair Cook even said it was the toughest pitch he had played on in his career as an opening batter. The whole team struggled and he batted through the innings. Just the way he fought and found a way to not get out and also make a hundred. It is very special. And shows the character of Dean Elgar,” says Heino Kuhn.

Between the 6th and 4th centuries BC, other Greeks commonly accepted that "one Spartan was worth several men of any other state." Lycurgus, the founder of the iconic army, referred to Sparta as having a "wall of men, instead of bricks."

Throughout his international career, Dean Elgar was the embodiment of Lycurgus’ Spartan warrior. He likes to fight in a corner rather can cower in it. “Growing up, Dean used to play cricket daily in the yard with his brother, Dale, as well as our neighbours’ son, Martin. Dean was much younger than them, by about six years, but he would never want to go out to either of them,” says Richard Elgar, Dean’s father.

A few years later, the elder Elgar would witness his son bring the same drive and fight in his grade 10 year when St. Dominic's played against Noord Kaap. The Kimberly-based outfit boasted a few Griqua (now Northern Cape) players. Elgar took down older, bigger and stronger bowlers as he scored an imperious 130 as his side chased down 200-odd runs.

But, the Elgarithm, or the Dean Elgar Method, is more than just battling with your back against the wall. It’s a team-first philosophy. “I’d rather sacrifice personal performance to winning, I would rather win a game or a series, than have personal accolades. For me, personal accolades are not spoken of. But winning is spoken of,” Elgar shared in early 2023.

That was his primary guiding philosophy in his 12-year international career. And if Elgar has one regret over his time in the Proteas shirt, it is that he was a little too selfless. In retrospect, he wishes he had been a little more selfish. Just a touch more. If the level of selfishness was put into numbers, he would have gladly added a 5% dollop of selfishness to his career.

Maybe that dollop would have helped him chase the one accolade that would have made him smile: surpassing Desmond Haynes’ record of carrying his bat. At the time of his retirement, Elgar had carried his bat as many times as the former West Indies opener, three. Carrying his bat four times would have made him THAT GUY.

Days after his last Test, I wrote a piece on Dean Elgar, it puts the Elgarithm into focus: