Remember cricket before Faf du Plessis? You’re forgiven if you don’t. He has, after all, played 1,092 games of the stuff dating back almost 30 years to December 9, 1996 — when he was part of a Northern Transvaal under-13 side who drew a single-innings match against their Zimbabwe counterparts in Pretoria.

Du Plessis first pulled a South Africa shirt over his head for an under-19 four-day international against England at Headingley in August 2003. None of his teammates in that match are still playing at competitive level.

William Hantam is the most recent of them to retire. He last played in a one-day game for Cape Town Cricket Club against the University of the Western Cape in March 2023. Since then Du Plessis has played 252 matches for 15 teams in 10 countries or regions. At any hour of any day anywhere cricket is being played, it’s more likely than not that Du Plessis will be out there; a 42-year-old in a body that looks and performs as if it is 10 years younger.

So remembering cricket before Du Plessis is challenging. But should we start thinking about cricket after Du Plessis?

To a particular kind of cricket person the question itself will seem shocking. WTF?! Or what the Faf?! Even so, it demanded to be asked when the rosters for next summer’s SA20 were announced on Wednesday. Because Du Plessis was not there.

Look as long and hard as you like at the dozen names released by Joburg Super Kings, but you will not find Du Plessis’s. JSK have played 44 games. Only four of them have not included Du Plessis. The man practically is the franchise. Think yellow and a familiar beard smile spreads across your mind. No Du Plessis?! WTF?!

Rassie van der Dussen and Imran Tahir are also missing. But they aren’t Faf. When he made his first-class debut, for Northerns against Gauteng in Centurion in March 2004, all 10 of the players he shared a dressing room with in his last Test — against Pakistan in Rawalpindi in February 2021 — were still at school.

Yet Faf wasn’t always Faf. Once he was a decentish leg spinner, a whippersnapper in the field and the poor person’s AB de Villiers. He was there and thereabouts without being bound for what he became.

In his first senior international, an ODI against India at Newlands in January 2011, Du Plessis scored 60 off 78. But that wasn’t enough to stop South Africa losing by two wickets. He reached 50 just five more times in his next 28 white-ball innings, and never made more in those trips to the crease than his 74-ball 72 in an ODI against Sri Lanka in Bloemfontein in January 2012. South Africa won that rain-affected match by four runs, but that wasn’t often the narrative in Du Plessis’ early days as a Protea.

They lost four of the six matches in which he made a half-century, one — in the World T20 in Colombo in October 2012 — to India by a single run. In another, an ODI against New Zealand in Wellington in February 2012, Du Plessis scored 66 not out off 49, shared a stand of 90 off 122 and another, unbroken, of 129 off 91, and helped South Africa win by six wickets. The problem, from the perspective of Du Plessis’ quest to show he belonged, was that his partner in the latter, matchwinning stand was De Villiers, who made an unbeaten run-a-ball 106 and was named player-of-the-match.

But we know exactly when the legend of Faf the magic dragon began to unfold — after 44 balls of the third day of the second Test in Adelaide on November 24, 2012. Du Plessis made his way to the middle to replace Graeme Smith, famously losing a boot while going down the stairs and — as he tried frantically to get it back onto his foot — enduring the taunts of spectators who told him he was about to be timed out on debut. Instead the fans would have been timed out watching Du Plessis bat for almost three-and-a-half hours. He was last out for 78.

Even that wasn’t the real Faf. The genuine article stood up after South Africa, set a mythical 430 to win, crashed to 45/4 seven overs after Tea on the fourth day. This time both boots stayed on as Du Plessis went down the stairs.

He was 19 at stumps, which South Africa reached 353 short of their notional target with six wickets standing. They couldn’t and wouldn’t bat for the entire fifth day, surely. They could. They did. And Du Plessis’ undefeated 110, fashioned in almost eight hours off 376 balls, was central to that happening. Consequentl,y South Africa won the series. Arise, Faf the magic dragon.

That a certain kind of cricket-minded Australian has hated Du Plessis ever since is a medal he should wear with pride. He discovered how much he was detested there in Adelaide Airport in November 2016, when Channel 9 sent a camera crew to film their other camera crew — who had clearly been tasked with provoking Du Plessis by repeatedly jabbing a microphone in his face. They got the footage they needed when the South Africans’ security staff reacted recklessly by shoving the hectoring reporter out of the way and kicking his mic down the corridor.

Ostensibly, Du Plessis had earned this treatment by being caught on camera during the Hobart Test using his fingers to apply saliva to the ball. There was nothing wrong with that in those pre-Covid days. Except that he had fetched the saliva from a mouth that hid a mint. He was ball-tampering, plain and simple.

But he was also Faf. Who had batted for almost eight hours in Adelaide four years previously to deny the increasingly grumpy Aussies what they thought was certain victory. So it went beyond Mintgate that the press saw fit to report that, when he bothered to wear a shirt, it was too tight.

Du Plessis went into that series only two matches into his tenure of 36 Tests as captain. He would also lead South Africa in 39 ODIs and 37 T20Is, and take charge of an ICC World XI in three T20Is against Pakistan in Lahore in September 2017.

South Africa have had more successful captains. He made a sorry sight trying to explain not only his team’s dismal failure to launch at the 2019 World Cup, where they were all but out of the running for the knockouts after starting their campaign by losing to England, Bangladesh and India, but also why a halfhearted, casual offer made to him by De Villiers to come out of retirement for the tournament was declined. Nevermind that Du Plessis wasn’t a selector, and that De Villiers was ineligible anyway because he hadn’t been playing domestic cricket.

But few teams, and certainly not South Africa, have been blessed with a captain as intellectually alive and articulate as Du Plessis. That made his press conferences a nightmare for reporters — everything he said was quotable, and once he started saying it, he seemed never to stop. Simply, there was too much Faf.

Now there might be no more. Maybe he angered the SA20 franchise owners — all of them IPL heavyweights — by preferring the PSL to taking his chances at the auction for this year’s edition of the Indian mother and father of all T20 tournaments. Maybe he’s finally tired of another few weeks of living out of a suitcase in a succession of hotels, however luxurious they might be. Maybe he is just too old for all this.

Or maybe he’s not done: JSK still have a wildcard spot available …