South Africa off-spinner Simon Harmer in action in the Kolkata Test against India at Eden Gardens. (Express Photo by Partha Paul)Sometime after he became South Africa’s red-ball coach, Shukri Conrad got a phone call from the semi-exiled off-spinner Simon Harmer. “He told me he is desperate to play for South Africa,” he recollected after Harmer’s Eden exploits. “And I told him I was equally desperate to have him in this team!”
Thus began Harmer’s Test rebirth. Between November 2015 to March 2022, Harmer learned and unlearned, celebrated success and endured heartbreaks, learned about himself and the world, streaked his hair with every possible shade, became a law graduate, grabbed 1000 first-class wickets, nearly became a British citizen but for Brexit, and before the winter of his career crept in, he returned to his roots to resume his biggest dream of playing Test cricket. It was a dream he lived and had to rebuild. Three years into his comeback, he could say he is living his rebuilt dream as he always wanted to. Living, loving, and enjoying the sport.
In eight Tests in his second life, he has grabbed 40 wickets at an average of 20, striking with every 42nd delivery, orchestrating victories in India and Pakistan, and changing perceptions that South Africa is not a spin-bowling nation. He would not make off-spin glamorous, but has reinstated the value of an orthodox spinner, that there is still a niche for his versions, and that variations don’t necessarily mean the ball turning the other way. He once explained the crux of his bowling to the Essex website: “You need to have a stock ball. There are so many variations you can bowl of your stock ball without changing a thing, in the trajectory of the ball, the speed, the line. If someone wakes you up at 3 am and says go bowl and you can’t put it on a length, then I don’t think you can venture off into bowling carrom balls or leg-spinners.”
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His craft is an ode to off-spin orthodoxies; good old turn into the right-hander, revolutions on the ball, and reliance on flight, drift, and drop. Two balls define him: full, outside the left-hander’s off-stump, spinning away and kissing the outside edge; full outside the right-hander’s off-stump, breaking into him and blasting the front pad. He wields his craft with a larrikin spirit, grinning and bantering, changing hairstyles, exuding an unbreakable energy, and imposing his physique and personality on the batters. His teammates called him Buckets; his schoolmates called him Tentacles for his large hands.
One of his friends, Rivash Govind, explained his personality in a chat with Cricketer: “He was brash, he was in your face. When you played against him, you were like ‘this guy’s an idiot” but once you got to know him, you realised that he was this fierce competitor and a really good human being.” In the press conference after the second day, he would prophetically say: “He who cries first, smiles last!” When asked about the missed five-for, he replied: “I am not a stats man, I am a win man.”
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But there was a time when the outward bluster veneered his inner doubts and fears. He recollects in a chat with Cricket South Africa: “My dream was to play for South Africa, and once I’d achieved that, I didn’t reassess – you’ve now achieved this goal. What’s next?” During the Kolkata Test, he revealed another instance when he was reduced to a nervous wreck. “In the 2015 series, I was quite new to Test cricket, and Ravi Ashwin was bowling like a jet and I think he took close to 40 wickets in that series. The expectation that I needed to do the same and dealing with that put me under even more pressure.”
The Test in Nagpur was his last in the first Test iteration. He set out on a journey of self-discovery. He stopped in Mumbai for the 10 days that changed his craft. He landed in Essex, where he would become a cult-hero, spinning them to multiple championships and snaring 513 wickets at 23.7 in eight seasons.
As his career matured, he realised that there is more to life than cricket: “It’s also about realising that cricket isn’t the be-all and end-all. There’s a lot more to life. Now I’m a lot more comfortable in my own skin. I understand what I’m good at and what I’m not so good at; things that I can work on,” he told CSA. He also made peace with the system that once disillusioned him. “Looking back, if you could impart knowledge onto younger players, or my younger self, it would probably be about self-awareness and understanding how certain things work; things that you can control and things that you can’t control. It’s been a process, but I’m a better person for it, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.”
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The realisations also instructed him to plan his exit strategy from a life in cricket. He was never keen on academics. His father was a geologist and his brother a radiologist, but he was inclined to follow his mother’s athletic pursuit. She was a tennis player and a coach, even though their lessons barely lasted 10 minutes, as he would just look to hit the ball as hard as he could. So Simon always hung around the courts and once found himself 18 months out of school. ”I’ve always been the black sheep – always enjoyed my sport, never wanted to be in my room doing homework,” he would say. He aspires to be a tax lawyer, but before that, he would want to embellish his career with more numbers and collect more memorabilia to fill the beach house he dreams of buying with his brother one day.
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