With great power, comes great responsibility

Winning the South Africa U19 Player of the Year award at the Cricket South Africa Amateur awards was an honourable moment for Jonathan Bird, but he had to work exceptionally hard, stay true to himself and conquer criticism on the road to this achievement, writes Khalid Mohidin.

It might be a cliched tale of how hard work can breed success, and how a young boy from Bishops High School is living his dream, but there is definitely a lot to learn from Bird’s short journey so far.

He was awarded the South Africa U19 Player of the Year at the 2020 Cricket South Africa Awards, a moment he described as: “Something I felt very honoured and proud about. I realised at that moment, that if you put in the hard yards it will eventually bring results.”

This may seem obvious to some, but what many people don’t know about, is the pressure he had to play under throughout his career so far. I witnessed this first hand.

At every U19, school or provincial event that I attended, his name was mentioned. Naturally, there was a lot of praise for his ability as an aspiring cricketer, but that also meant he became a target for the opposition.

Like Uncle Ben told Peter Parker: “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

Bird opened up about some of the pressures he had to face – a lesson to all young cricketer and senior cricketers travelling the same path.

“Personally I feel that if you perform well over a long period of time, your name will come out and people will talk about you, whether negatively or positively,” Bird said exclusively to Cricket Fanatics Magazine.

“I feel I have had to face the negative side of that quite a bit during my time at Bishops.

“For a few years, we had a pretty average batting line up and I would hear comments like: “If we get Jono out we win the game”, or “If we get Jono out we will bowl them out for under a 100” and that did put pressure on me.

“That pressure also fueled my performances. I like the pressure on me and it made me perform better, in a way.

“I’d go to a provincial week, and there are people in every team that people highlight. I think you have to be able to take in that pressure and ignore it, or even take in the criticism. I got plenty of criticism in my career, but with that pressure, you have to kind of fuel that fire within to try and prove them wrong.

“I mean, I’ve been to quite a few provincial weeks where, at the beginning of the week, they will be chirping me ‘Aah you’re all talk. Now you’re playing a lower level and you can’t perform.’

“I had to take that in and kind of prove them wrong.”

What Bird did brilliantly to combat that pressure was sticking to his natural game by trusting his own style and ability. Not only did this see him perform for SA U19 to earn this award, but it led to him achieving his main highlight of the year – making his franchise debut for the Cape Cobras, experiencing success in the One-Day Cup and playing with all the payers he looked up to.

“Before I was selected for the SA U19 team, I was putting in quite a few good performances for not only Bishops but also the provincial team. And batting at that time – from like Grade 8 until grade 11 – I kind of had one mentality and that was to go out there and play my natural game.

“Whether I’m playing a T20, a 50-over game or even red-ball cricket, if I get a ball in my area I’m going to try and hit it to the boundary or if I get a good ball I’m going to play it on merit. And I think the selectors liked that and that’s why they picked me for Cubs week.

“Leading into Cubs week I didn’t think too much about it. Being younger than the other guys, I didn’t really think I could have the chance of making SA U19 but a lot of people were talking about it there.

“Luckily I had a very good week, I think I ended as one of the top five run scores. And the selectors of the SA U19 team liked how I played my game – I came out attacking and I think they believed that if they put me in the SA U19 team, I could carry my form into the international level by playing my natural game.”

Consistent performances for SA U19 saw him rewarded by Cricket South Africa and he gave us some insight into which performances in wearing the green and gold was a highlight for him.

“Having played over 20 games for SA U19 it’s quite hard to pick a favourite performance,” he explained.

“But definitely my debut series in England where I scored a hard-fought 50 on debut in the opening game is one that means a lot to me.

“I think I edged about four boundaries in that game, but I made it to 50 and then kind of threw my wicket away, but I helped the team go 1-0 up.

“Then heading into game two, we knew if we won that we would have won the whole series. I don’t think we’d won a series in England for quite quite a long time, and they put 251 on the board.

“We thought, ‘okay, we’re not playing on a huge field here, it’s quite a good deck, we can go out there and get it.’

“And that’s when everything came off for me from the first ball to the last ball of the game. Everything came out of the middle [of the bat].

“I ended up scoring 142 (123 balls) and we won the game. And yeah, this was a very good moment for not only me but for the team because we beat England in England which was a serious achievement for the team.”