Follow UsBulawayo, Zimbabwe
It’s the second day of the first Test of the two-Test series, and Zimbabwe are already in deep trouble. The new-look Proteas batting attack have scored 418/9 in just 90 overs. In reply, the Zimbabwean response is characteristic: they are two down for 20-odd in the first five overs, and are staring at yet another collapse.
Then walks out a slightly skinny-looking left-handed batter of average height by the name of Sean Williams, and does exactly what he has done for most of his Test career for his country, which has been on the fringes of the cricket world for the entirety of his career and much more. He bats, and bats and bats.
Craig Ervine assists him well for a while, as Williams pushes singles and plays some quaint-looking square cuts and pulls on errant deliveries. He doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing like left-handers are stereotyped to be. He is functional at best, but solid, very solid!
When the innings ended, Williams' score read 137 in 164 deliveries. The other 10 Zimbabwean batters, meanwhile, could not even add as much as he scored alone, as they were dismissed for 251, having handed a decisive lead to the opposition.
No one who has followed the cricket of this Southern African nation was surprised after the tumultuous period since Robert Mugabe’s rule. Because that’s what Williams has done for most of his Test career — been the saviour of a team that was doomed to fail because the others were just not good enough.
None of it is Williams’ fault, of course. Otherwise, why would he have had to wait years to play a bunch of Test matches in a row? Why would he have still played only 20 games in a career that began in March 2013?
And despite all the constraints of a start-stop kind of Test career, he averages 47.43 with the bat. No other Zimbabwe batter in history who has scored more than 1,000 runs in Test cricket, apart from Andy Flower, has averaged higher. In the visualisation of perpetual Zimbabwean batting mediocrity, he shines like a star, with only the mighty Flower blooming above him with an average of 51.54.
Flower played his Test cricket for Zimbabwe in the period between 1992 and 2002, which can be called the golden age of cricket in the nation. Zimbabwe were a formidable team, with batters and bowlers who could topple any big team on their day.
As a result, Flower played 63 Test matches in his decade-long career. He didn’t have to stop after playing two in a year like Williams, and then wait for god knows how long for the next Test to be scheduled in some arse-end of the cricket world.
The most debilitating fact amongst all this is that we’ll never know if Williams was good enough to average 50+ if given regular games, and a system that incentivises him to work on his Test game. We can only collect the facts we can gather and wonder. And guess what, even these facts present a strong case of him being amongst the best in the Test world at the moment.
Since the COVID pandemic ended and Test cricket returned to relative normalcy, Williams has played nine Test matches. He has scored 985 runs at an average of 70.35 in them, scoring four centuries in the process. If you take a cut-off of 750 runs since 2021, no Test batter in this entire world has averaged more than Williams.
Yes, you can add an asterisk that he played only one Test match against a Big Three nation, but is it his fault that seven out of his 16 Test innings since 2021 have been played against Afghanistan? No, right? He played the opposition in front of him and averaged 103 against the Afghans on slow tracks of Abu Dhabi and Bulawayo, who, by the way, have some really good spinners, as we all know. Williams has averaged 55.9 against spin in this period as well.
At this point, it’s inevitable that if Zimbabwe are in trouble in a red-ball game, Williams will save them. And it’s also inevitable that the cricket world will forget this saviour because he doesn’t hail from a nation that plays the World Test Championship. His achievements as a batter and as a beacon of Zimbabwean sporting excellence are lost in the larger narrative of Test cricket.
However, what isn’t lost is the proof that he’s amongst the best batters in the world at the moment, and that’s how he should be celebrated.