The champion class of 2012 ©Getty
It's a photograph from another world and a different time. Here be dinosaurs and denizens, and a type of happiness that has been rendered extinct in South African cricket. In its place is fear and loathing, and monsters real and imagined.
It was before South Africa earned a second successive Test series win in Australia in November 2016, before India curtailed a tour to South Africa in 2012/13, taking, at current exchange rates, more than USD20,000,000 out of CSA's coffers, and before the 2015 World Cup semi-final. It was before many other milestones, good and bad, and it represents the top of those milestones. The photograph captures that truth as faithfully as amber does a fossil.
In it, Jacques Rudolph looks leftward and up, apparently into the stands. A smile as wide as a river ripples across his face. Over his left shoulder, AB de Villiers gazes and smiles at the same thing, his right thumb tucked under his chin in thoughtfulness.
To the right is Albie Morkel, arms folded across his chest and his head turned towards De Villiers, as if he is asking him what he is looking at. To Morkel's right is Imran Tahir, staring up at a different spot and with his left thumb under his chin in a mirror image of De Villiers' gesture. He seems more bemused than amused.
Paddy Upton is slightly out of focus on the extreme right, talking to someone not in the frame. A bottle of champagne rests in his left arm at an easy angle, its base cradled in his hand, the neck nestling against his inner forearm. It is unopened, but surely not for long.
Graeme Smith stands in the centre of the scene, hands on hips, fingers forward and spread wide, the hair on his serious arms abundant. His hands are noticeably paler than his arms, testament to how much time he spent in batting gloves. His cap is pulled low enough to cast a deep shadow across his brow. His eyes are darkly narrow, his mouth a sealed strip of silence, his stubble standing to attention. He alone looks at the camera; glowering down the barrel of the lens with what could be triumph, anger, pride, or sadness.
The picture was taken at Lord's on August 20, 2012 in the moments after South Africa had confirmed themselves as Test cricket's finest team. Across Smith's match shirt, someone has written in black marker pen, "We miss u Bouch".
Mark Boucher, his career ended on the first playing day of that tour by an eye injury, made it back to Lord's last month. The team he played 147 Tests for and now coaches won, by an innings and a dozen runs, the first Test of the series that ended on Monday. Their happiness wouldn't last. England won by an innings and 85 at Old Trafford and
