The damage runs deep, and it will take a lot more of doing the right thing to repair it.
TELFORD VICE in Johannesburg
ONE of your team’s batters tops the list of run-scorers in a series. Another has been the most successful bowler. Two more are in the top five in each category. You’ve won the rubber, surely. Or have at least done well enough for your supporters to be satisfied that you are on the right track as a team. Not if you’re South Africa, whose 3-1 Test series drubbing by England was completed at the Wanderers on Monday.
No-one scored more runs than Quinton de Kock’s series total of 380, or took more wickets than Anrich Nortjé’s 18. Rassie van der Dussen’s aggregate of 274 and Kagiso Rabada’s 14 strikes — matching Stuart Broad for the series’ second-biggest haul — were also up there.
But the devil is in other details. Not one of the three centuries scored was for South Africa, who owned only one of the five century stands — despite banking 12 of the 28 partnerships of at least 50. If a score of 30 is accepted as a good start, South Africans made 23 of the 53 that were registered. Only 10 were converted into half-centuries. England turned 12 of their 30s into 50s, and Dom Sibley, Ollie Pope and Ben Stokes made them count still more by going on to centuries.
This kind of disappointment is becoming an unhappy habit for South Africa. Not since the first Test against India in Visakhapatnam in October, when Dean Elgar made 160 and De Kock 111, has any of the 120 trips to the crease their players have begun reached three figures. South Africa have gone 28 innings, stretching back to March 2018, without making a declaration. Only twice in those innings have they not been dismissed. Batting unit, you have a problem.
Hashim Amla’s removal from the Test equation after the home series against Sri Lanka in February last year is an obvious factor in South Africa’s decline, but even this great player’s contribution wasn’t worth a century in his last 27 completed innings. Closer to the truth is that the remaining senior batters — bar De Kock — are faltering.
Famously, the Lankans became the first Asian team to win a series in South Africa — and inflicted the first of the eight defeats Faf du Plessis’ team have suffered in their last nine Tests. In the same period Elgar and Du Plessis have performed significantly below their optimum levels. Elgar has scored 519 runs at 30.52 with one century in his 18 innings. His career average is 38.49. Du Plessis has batted more than 10 points below his overall average — 29.00 versus 39.80 — for his 493 runs, also in 18 trips to the crease, in which he hasn’t made a century. Only the other old hand, De Kock, has pulled his weight, scoring a hundred and averaging 42.11 — better than his career mark of 39.12 — and racking up 758 runs in 18 innings. That’s 239 more runs than Elgar and 265 more than Du Plessis, and from the same number of opportunities.
And while newer members of the batting line-up like Van der Dussen and Pieter Malan have made decent beginnings at this level, and Temba Bavuma has returned after re-affirming his credentials at franchise level, whatever progress they make will be blunted by the struggles of the established players. Nortjé, who bowled his heart out and batted with courage and discipline against England, will not get all of the praise he deserves because the bigger picture is too dark to allow his light to shine fully.
Not that the bowlers are without blame: the next time Rabada fails to control his emotions on the field, Cricket South Africa shouldn’t wait for the ICC to act. They should dock their hotheaded ace his entire match fee and a month’s salary, and tell him that punishment will double the time after that.
It’s one thing for inexperienced players to be able to harden their game in the protective shadow of those who have been around the block, quite another for them to have to carry the side in the absence of responsible performances by their elders and, supposedly, betters.
But before we disappear down a rabbithole of gloom, let’s show what has been earned: respect. Elgar and Du Plessis have stood rock solid for South Africa, as players and fine examples for others to follow, for years. They are at the heart of a team who, 11 months before the start of their current slide, became the first South Africa side to take a home Test series off Australia in one of the most dramatic rubbers yet played. Generations from now, cricket tragics will still talk of the Sandpapergate series.
Also, let’s not expect the effect of months of shambolic administration — as things stand, the players are taking the board to court over a plan to restructure the domestic system that would lead to job losses — to be resolved by the appointment of respected figures like Smith. The damage runs deep, and it will take a lot more of doing the right thing to repair it.
Even so, it is a worry that Du Plessis not only employed tactics during the England series that were at times difficult to credit, but defended them. Elgar, meanwhile, has succumbed to increasingly ragged strokes. At the Wanderers, he unleashed a wild flap to point and, in the second innings, a looping hook back to the bowler that was worthy of a lower order player.
Once were warriors. Indeed, they always will be. But, while they’re playing, they need to perform. As the freshly retired Vernon Philander could tell them, the adulation comes only after you call it a career. For now, all that matters is runs.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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