Proteas were excited to help make Kieron Adam's dream of meeting them come true. The 11 year-old was ecstatic to spend an afternoon with some of his favourite players; Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers and Dale Steyn, talking about life and cricket. Courtesy Proteas Cricket. The afternoon was capped off with a game of street cricket where they were joined by other members of the Proteas team, who played against Kieron and his school cricket team.

The Proteas have some of the best fans in the world and they appreciate each and every one

WHAT does cricket stand for in this country?

Ask yourself: What does Australian cricket REALLY stand for beyond sledging and spruiking the health benefits of fried chicken? What’s the narrative around the game that unifies and binds the nation?

South African cricket might just have answered that question on behalf of the Rainbow Nation in this fabulous, heartwarming video where the national team visits the home of one very starstruck 11-year-old boy called Kieron Adams.

Great stuff, isn’t it. It’s just so moving to see the look on young Kieron’s face when into his humble timber-panelled home walk superstars AB De Villiers, Dale Steyn, Faf du Plessis, Hashim Amla and Vernon Philander. And when Kieron smashes a six in a game of street cricket... well, it’s every boy’s childhood dream come true.

There’s also a telling moment when the youngster reponds to South African batting star (and Test captain) Hashim Amla’s question about what he loves about cricket.

“The way it brings people together,” Kieron answers.

And that, in a nutshell, is what this video is all about. It’s about inclusion and unity and bringing people together, and it’s all part of a very clever marketing campaign by Cricket South Africa.

The campaign, which revolves around the hashtag #ProteaFire, seeks to mirror the national mood which enveloped South Africa two decades ago in 1995, when they won the rugby World Cup on home soil a year after the official dismantling of the host nation’s repressive Apartheid regime.

The rugby team’s eventual victory is now folklore. They even made a rather cheesy Hollywood movie about it. When South Africa’s white Afrikaaner captain Francois Pienaar held aloft the World Cup trophy flanked by President Nelson Mandela, he said the victory was for all 43 million South Africans.

Cut forward 20 years and South Africa’s One Day cricket captain AB De Villiers says he’s now batting for 60 million of his countrymen.

Here’s a little grab from AB’s speech if you don’t have time to watch the above video.

“Each and every one of us are where a million kids dream to be. We get to pull on this shirt and wear the badge on our hearts. We get to sing our anthem and play for 60 million fans. But

what does the protea have to do with that? It has everything to do with it. No matter how the fire burns, the protea will always survive. It’s got the will to grow back stronger, to do what’s got to be done. We are proteas. We are South Africa.”

Brief botanical interlude: it’s true. Proteas, like many Australian species, require fire to survive. Which is kind of a cool sporting metaphor if ever you heard one.

For the record, the large flower was the symbol of the South African cricket team long before marketers clued onto the whole #ProteaFire thing. Then Graeme Smith came along. Remember him? He’s the former South African captain who nearly saved a Test match in Sydney by bravely batting with a broken hand.

That innings, and the culture that grew organically within the team while he steered it through one of its most successful periods, got Smith thinking. He wanted the protea flower to be more than just a logo on his team’s shirts. He wanted a real symbol of the characteristics for which his team stood — which he identified as resilience, fire, truth and adaptability.

And it worked. “We were suddenly playing for more than the salary check at the end of the month or our own individual peformance,” Smith said. “There was something more meaningful to why we were playing for South Africa and what we represented as a team.”

As the ICC Cricket World Cup looms this week, South Africa is the second favourite with most bookies to win the tournament. Australia beat the Proteas pretty easily 4-1 in a series here back in November before the Tests against India, but South Africa has since hit top gear, epitomised by a record-breaking 31 ball One Day century by AB De Villiers.

South Africa has never won the cricket World Cup, let alone made the final. But the team has never been stronger and definitely never been more united. Perhaps this time the stars are aligning?

Regardless of what happens on the field, it’s what AB and friends have done off the field that’s really making a difference.

“I feel very proud to wear this shirt,” De Villers says in the above video. “I think this country’s been through a lot of hardship in the past. A lot of heroes I look up to, guys like “Madiba” [Nelson Mandela], guys who’ve worn this shirt before me, we’ve always talked at the team meetings about the guys who played before us, and hopefully now we can leave that legacy, and the #ProteaFire legacy of youngsters growing up now wanting to wear this shirt as badly as I wanted to.

“And I think that’s what it’s about it for me to wear this shirt. It’s not always about winning big games.”

It’s funny in sport how when a team develops a good culture instead of an obsession with winning games, it ends up winning games. Anyone else ever noticed that? The Sydney Swans are just one example.

Oh, and does anyone else think the South Africans have both the character and the skill to shed their choker tag and finally win a World Cup?