Immigration pitch

As test cricket returns to free-to-air TV, James Borrowdale looks at how the South African diaspora has changed our summer game.

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There was something that kept Mike Hesson, then a young coach of the Otago cricket team, coming back to the left-arm quick he was watching on VHS tape. It wasn't attributes traditionally associated with great fast bowlers - pure pace; height - for this bowler had modest gifts in each. Nor was it a bulging wickets column. As South African domestic player Neil Wagner toiled in the oven of a Pretoria afternoon, he'd had little success. What kept Hesson's finger hovering over the rewind button was Wagner's attitude in the face of those modest returns: "Wags was still steaming in.

He had a big heart... It was just the enthusiasm he had for the game." The flavour of that enthusiasm - erupting in a vein-popping roar whenever Wagner took a wicket - wasn't initially to his adopted country's taste when he moved to Dunedin in 2008. He'd learnt his cricket in a country where the aggression of fast bowlers extended to their vocal chords, and Hesson recalls the exuberance of Wagner's reaction to his first wicket for Otago. The umpires, he says, "might have had a quiet word that, 'Hey, we don't get that carried away over here".

Another South African expat, Auckland fast bowler Danru Ferns, remembers his early days in Pretoria club cricket as a rite of passage, testing much more than his technical skills. "If you're a young fella, you're getting abused from all sides, in all different languages, about all different things." Like Wagner, Ferns soon realised he'd need to adapt if he was to prosper in his new country. It is no different a realisation than that which the thousands of his compatriots - the latest available Census data recorded 71,382 South African-born people living in Aotearoa - who, in the interests of assimilation, have learnt to say ute instead of bakkie, barbie instead of braai.