Will the smalltown boy’s sensibilities be hit in the big city of Delhi? ©Getty Tristan Stubbs is put together like a wandering albatross. That’s not to say he looks like one. Albatrosses don’t have his booming smile, wildly alive eyes, hectic hydra of hair or enthusiasm for all things cricket. And they wouldn’t be seen dead wearing his moustache. “He’s done a lot of things right on this tour; a lot of things,” Tony de Zorzi said in an episode of Protea Tour Diaries recorded during South Africa’s Test series in Bangladesh in October. “The moustache he has is not one of them.” It’s an almost apologetic, utterly unimpressive strip of bristle bereft of emphasis. There’s an incongruousness about it languishing on the top lip of someone so unapologetically and boundlessly emphatic in everything they or their teammates do on or around a cricket ground. A wicket falls without his intervention. Stubbs celebrates as if he is the bowler. A teammate reaches a century. Stubbs springs upright in the dressingroom or dugout and jubilates. Someone is required to hare up the 48 stairs from Centurion’s boundary to the dressingroom during drinks to fetch a pair of fielders’ helmets and race back down again. Stubbs is your man. Someone needs to keep the fans happy during a rain delay in Centurion. Stubbs is out there signing autographs. Someone is fielding in front of The Oaks on Newlands’ eastern boundary, which is littered with hats, caps and miniature bats. Stubbs turns around and signs as many as he can between deliveries. Someone needs to be replaced for an over or so. Stubbs rips off his substitute’s bib like Super-Man emerging from a telephone booth and leaps the boundary as if he’s on his way to the circus. Maybe to watch, maybe to perform, maybe both. It’s difficult to say which. Stubbs is fielding at extra cover on the third day of the Test against Pakistan in January and dives headlong to try and snare the crisply driven ball, which beats him. He rises from the turf, wheels on his heels, tears into a chase with the bright orange soles of his boots flik-flakking through the heavy summer air, hauls in his quarry near the boundary, slides, bolts back onto his feet, and fires his throw. He saves one run. The effort and urgency involved in denying the opposition that single makes it seem the most important run not scored in the history of the game. What is it about all that evokes a stoic seabird? Physicality. Put yourself close to Stubbs and an albatross looms in the imagination. He has the wraparound wingspan, the easy but unmissable muscularity, and the height. And a calm consistency of presence and steadiness that comes with having emerged from smalltown South Africa to step onto some of cricket’s most important and glittering stages. Those stages are international level, the SA20 and the IPL. Stubbs isn’t interested in playing any other professional cricket. That makes him a rarity in today’s cluttered game, but he’s comfortable with the distinction. “I play my best when I’m fully invested in the team, so I don’t want to spread myself too far and then give a half-hearted effort; I’d rather commit to fewer teams and give them my all,” Stubbs told Cricbuzz. What about all the money he might make were he to take on more commitments? “I am very fortunate in that my SA20 and IPL deals are very good financially. That gives me the freedom to plan my calendar, whereas some guys might feel they have to play a few T20 leagues to make that extra buck.” Is he one of those people who want only enough money not to have to think about money? “Me and my mate were chatting about this the other day. He said was he wants is a roof over his head with a garden outside. I was like, I’m not much different. I keep it simple.” That doesn’t mean Stubbs is simple. Indeed, a keen intelligence whirrs behind those wildly alive eyes. “The biggest thing in the red-ball game is to be mentally fresh and disciplined. In a T20 you have to be the exact opposite and be willing to take a risk. After a Test match it takes two or three days for me to calm down. The body’s alright, but mentally it’s draining. “When you’re fielding you don’t want to make a mistake and when you’re batting you have to be so switched on. Because you’ve got to come back tomorrow and what happened yesterday is probably still in your mind.” Does he struggle to sleep at night during Tests? “I do. Even when the Test match is done, because you’re thinking about it the whole time.” Stubbs lives in Gqeberha, which means when South Africa play at St George’s Park he is based at the home he shares with two friends. “I get back after play and we talk some nonsense for a while. But I’ll close my door at nine o’clock, and that’s it. I’m done.” Stubbs was born in the northern, landlocked city of Johannesburg, but “in 2007 or eight”, his family moved to Knysna on the southern coast. Few places could be as different from each other. Joburg, South Africa’s biggest conurbation, is a messy melange of traffic, steel, glass, urban decay, pollution and crime, all of it strewn atop some of the world’s deepest, most dangerous gold mines. People live there to make money, or to work for those who make money. Knysna, bang in the middle of the Garden Route that connects Cape Town to Gqeberha, is in the embrace of the Tsitsikamma Forest and the Indian Ocean. The Heads, a pair of mighty sandstone cliffs the best part of 100 metres tall that face each other from east and west, guard the entrance to the marina and create a limpid lagoon. People go to Knysna to sail yachts, eat oysters and immerse themselves in nature at its most stupendous. You might think Stubbs has left all that behind. He hasn’t: “It’s definitely nice going back. When I go home, I don’t think about cricket at all.” Even though he is now, along with Quinton de Kock, the town’s most recognisable face? “It has its pros and cons, but in Knysna everyone’s really friendly. Often there’s a family with a little kid, and they want to take a picture with you. And because I remember being a kid, I understand that and I try to be nice. Because we were all there. “I remember how you would come to a game here and you’d want someone’s autograph afterwards. So I try, whenever we play here especially, to try and sign as many as I can after the game. Because as a kid you remember.” Two things: several times during our interview, when he is asked a question beyond what’s important here and now, Stubbs pauses, lays down an honest stare somewhere between amazement and disconcertion, and says, “I’m 24!” He is too young to wonder what he might do with his time after he retires from playing, but young enough to know what it’s like to be a child in the stands. The other thing: we are talking in Gqeberha, some 260 kilometres and a three-hour drive east of Knysna. It’s December 4 – the day before the second Test against Sri Lanka – and we’re at St George’s Park, which is Stubbs’ home ground. And far more. South Africa’s oldest Test venue lacks the pretentiousness that that status would prompt in other countries. St George’s ark is an apparently random clutter of squat, dated, faded, windswept stands, staircases, landings, concourses and roofs that happen to be arranged around an outfield, which has itself been draped – accidentally, it seems – around a pitch block. The recently upgraded floodlights stick out like F1 cars in a wagon museum. Unlike some soulless stadium, St George’s Park is a warm, welcoming, wonderful place in its own right where you are as likely to happen upon De Kock smoking a cigarette outside the dressingroom as you are to hear a long and winding riff on “Stand by Me” played by the resident brass band as you are to see an owl alight onto the covers as darkness descends into dusk. There is nowhere better in the world to be within seeing, hearing, touching distance of a cricket match. Stubbs is far from the only person to hold that view. “We used to sit in the corner up top there,” he said, casting his eyes into the eastern edge of the Frielinghaus Stand that slumps around the southern boundary. “I’d rope in a mate of mine, and we would sit there and watch cricket. Mostly the Warriors, but also South Africa.” Stubbs’ first match of note at St George’s Park was a first-class game for Eastern Province against Western Province in March 2020. He scored one and five, conceded a single off his only over, and did not take a catch. WP won by an innings and 23 runs inside two days. But, at the same ground in November 2023, Stubbs’ 130 against a Gauteng attack that included Wiaan Mulder, Kwena Maphaka and Bjorn Fortuin was key to EP’s 305-run win. That remains his only first-class century in 16 innings at St George’s Park, but he has also scored two hundreds in his eight list A innings there. Then again, St George’s Park means more than mere success runs to people like Stubbs. “I get more emotional playing here than anywhere else, because I’ve been in the crowd. Now a lot of my friends are watching me and family often come through from Knysna. It means more playing here than in other places. I love playing here. It feels like a community.” Stubbs moved to Gqeberha in 2014 as a boarder at Grey High School, where the cricket ground is named after Graeme Pollock and the rugby field after Siya Kolisi – the institution’s most renowned alumni. For now. Gqeberha’s population, estimated at 1.3-million, is almost 18 times bigger than Knysna’s. But, as Stubbs said, “Even Gqeberha is a small town by world standards.” Could he imagine living somewhere else? The question seems to shock him: “Would I move? No. I’m definitely a smalltown boy. The big cities are too busy for me.” With a look that said this should be obvious to everyone, he added: “I’d never not play for the Warriors.” Mumbai is not a small town. Maximum City is home to 22-million people, nearly 17 times as many as those who live in Gqeberha. Mumbai is to Gqeberha what Gqeberha is to Knysna. Yet Mumbai was where Stubbs began his IPL career in May 2022, two months before he first played for South Africa. He featured in just two games and as many in 2023, never scoring more than 20. Stubbs moved to Delhi last year, when he had four half-centuries in 13 innings. Only six players had a higher strike rate than his 190.90, only seven foreigners scored more runs than his aggregate of 378, and only Rishabh Pant made more runs for Capitals. Delhi’s population is 34.6-million. If Mumbai was a jolt, how much harder might Delhi have hit a smalltown boy’s sensibilities? “The first year in Mumbai was tough,” Stubbs said. “The biggest thing I struggled with was that it was cricket all the time. Without knowing it, by then I had become quite good at getting away from the game. Even though I love it and play it all the time, I would still go surf and play golf. “And then, on my first trip to India, I would go from the ground to the hotel, and from the hotel to the ground. At the hotel, all the TV channels seemed to have cricket on. In the lobby, everyone wanted a picture. So I needed to make quite an adjustment.” Clearly, he did so successfully. And is now primed to “give [Delhi] my all” again this year. Not before time. If you’re wondering why an interview conducted in December hasn’t been published before now, it’s because the nature of these things is to put them out there on the back of a good performance. We spoke five days after Stubbs had completed his 122 against Sri Lanka at Kingsmead. Two Test innings earlier, he had scored 106 against Bangladesh in Chittagong. That followed his 112 not out in an ODI against Ireland in Abu Dhabi 25 days earlier. Stubbs’ next starring role was surely imminent. In his 19 innings since the interview, Stubbs’ highest score was 47. Cricbuzz is sure it isn’t anything we asked or said, but if we can get him over the hump at the IPL by tempting fate this way, why not. ShareTweet
