Graeme Smith has been cleared of racism allegations ©Getty
Graeme Smith is frustrated. England's untroubled batters are nudging, nurdling and occasionally nailing South Africa's pace attack to all parts of Kingsmead. Smith knows what needs to happen, but he can't make it happen.
A television commentator between stints behind the microphone, he is standing at the top of a flight of stairs outside the press box. And fuming about what he can and can't see on the field. When another four streaks through the slips, the ball rushing to Smith's end of the ground, Dean Elgar turns and jogs to do the fetching. Smith sticks out his chin and stands taller and broader to try and catch Elgar's eye as he runs towards him.
He does. With a motion that betrays the urgency of his annoyance, Smith rips his empty right hand through the motions of an imaginary off-break. Get a bloody spinner on! Elgar nods in agreement, but turns his palms upwards, tilts his head sideways in resignation, grimaces and shrugs. Dude, I'm not the captain. Neither are you.
It's December 2015: almost two years after Smith's abrupt retirement, which was announced during the Newlands Test against Australia in March 2014. Letting go is difficult when you've captained a Test team more times and won more matches - 109 and 53 - than anyone in cricket history, and walked away from it all, for reasons that had nothing to do with cricket, a month after your 33rd birthday.
So the fact that, eight years on, Smith has no formal connection to the game in his country should come as a shock. Especially as it didn't have to be this way. From December 2019 to March this year, he was CSA's director of cricket and instrumental in the resurrection that was required in the wake of chronic maladministration. Insiders talk with awe about the brutally long hours he put in to secure India's tour last summer, which pumped millions into CSA's coffers. But he has declined to continue the relationship, and within hours of the announcement of him being
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