What after Smith, Kallis and Boucher?

Individually, Smith, Kallis and Boucher will leave some of the deepest impressions on South African cricket that will ever be left. Collectively, they have ruled the Proteas’ dressing room for almost 10 years. The most emphatically competitive of them is the one who will be the first to go. I have known Boucher since he was a shy, flop-haired schoolboy and I will never know a human being more focused on winning.

Kallis always seems to be somewhere else, even when he is in the next chair at a dinner table. Few cricketers are blessed with his talent, but his greatest gift is his supernatural ability to shut out everything unneeded as he goes about wielding all that talent at the opposition. There is no captain in cricket quite like Smith, who wears his heart not on his sleeve but on a chin he juts at the world with cartoon carelessness.