South Africa’s triumph marked only the second time that the top-ranked Test side had lost a three-match series after winning the first game.
Telford Vice | Newlands
A brilliantly clear Cape Town summer afternoon — the sky outrageously blue, the breeze moving nothing but the flags, the mountain shimmering behind the haze, the temperature veering to 30 degrees Celsius — was 14 minutes old when South African cricket came in from the cold at Newlands on Friday.
Temba Bavuma straightened from his crouch until he was on the tips of his toenails, like a question mark unfurling itself into an exclamation point, to put a rising but also widening delivery from Jasprit Bumrah through cover point for four. Asked and answered, you might say. Bumrah shambled back to his mark scolded, as if he had given the wrong answer to the right question, his shoulders rounder, his head lower. Three balls later, the first of them defended, the next left, Bavuma stood flatter and firmer to drive Bumrah through the covers for another boundary. Game, set, match and series. And much more.
There were still 46 to get, but the visceral truth was that South Africa were locked on course for victory. All involved knew it. So did many more far beyond these parts. They also knew that this win, the circumstances of its achieving, what it means, and what it might yet beget, soared past merely winning.
In the ninth over after lunch, the sky, breeze, mountain and temperature as they were, only more so, Bavuma lurched out of his armour of discipline and across his stumps to rip R Ashwin for four through square leg. It was a stroke of relief and release, and it sealed South Africa’s second seven-wicket win over the world’s No. 1 team in as many matches and in the space of eight days. Call them the magnificent sevens. And that after South Africa had lost at Centurion, where they almost always win.
India have been here before, but on the happier side of the equation. Friday’s result marked only the second time that the top-ranked Test side had lost a three-match series after winning the first game. The only other example was in February and March of 2001, when Australia won in Mumbai only for India to prevail in Kolkata and Chennai.
South Africa did not look like winning anywhere near as emphatically for the first 20 minutes of the day’s play, when Bumrah and Mohammed Shami bent the ball past the outside edge at will. Somehow, their hooking deliveries evaded their fish. But you could hear a clatter of wickets approaching. The only uncertainty was how many, and how many runs would be required when it came.
Turns out the answers were one and 57. In the 10th over of the morning, Keegan Petersen, busy with his second half-century of the match and his third of the series, all of them worth the weight of their runs in diamonds, should have been out for 59 when he edged Bumrah to first slip — where Cheteshwar Pujara coughed up a catch that seemed easier to hold than drop. It took India almost another seven overs, in which South Africa eked out another 29 runs, to earn another chance to make inroads.
Petersen needed 18 more runs to reach his first century when he tried to spear a delivery from Shardul Thakur through point. He dragged it onto his stumps instead. Petersen doubled over in disappointment, then dealt himself a soft tap on his helmet using the edge of his bat, and took a long time to leave the scene. It didn’t look like it in the moment, and perhaps he would have struggled to accept it, but he had all but won the match.
With, of course, Rassie van der Dussen. While Petersen was playing with the freedom produced by the collision of talent, skill and temperament, Van der Dussen had to pray he had enough reserves of those qualities to see the job through. He has them, in spades. But he has found them elusive in this series. Consequently, he has had to live on his wits and not a lot else. They served him well in an innings — an undefeated 41 in just more than two-and-a-half hours off 95 balls — that many won’t remember but that he will never forget. Petersen shared half-century partnerships with Dean Elgar and Van der Dussen, and Van der Dussen put on another with Bavuma. Without Van der Dussen’s application and dedication, winning would have been exponentially more complicated.
What might it all mean? At lunch on Wednesday, when South Africa were 100/3 and 123 behind, a reporter in the Newlands pressbox told a radio station during a live crossing that the “whole paradigm of South African cricket could change if they win here”. The programme host seemed taken aback: “You’re talking an awfully big game. I would argue you’re over-stating it. People just aren’t watching as much cricket because of the years of erosion in the fans’ confidence.”
She was not wrong. Cricket has refused to get anything right in recent years. If the men’s team wasn’t in bad shape on the field, the suits were worse in governance and, consequently, financial terms. And often simultaneously. Meanwhile the pandemic in the real world has run concurrently with an epidemic of allegations of racism in the game. Who wants to watch a team that, at some level, represents all that?
A sign that the situation is changing for the better was had before the series when a company that walked away from the game in September 2016 in the wake of fixing scandal in the 2015 franchise T20 competition — which bore the firm’s name — was revealed as one of the co-sponsors of the broadcast for the India series. The other co-sponsor is new to cricket. These are green shoots of hope, even though the returning sponsor signed up with a trusted broadcaster and not CSA.
More hope was to be seen on the boundary during lunch on Friday, when Graeme Smith, CSA’s director of cricket, gave a television interview in which he nudged and winked about reaching agreement with England and Australia to play series in South Africa they pulled out of in December 2020 and February last year.
Of course, these developments were not sparked by South Africa’s success, and they do not mean cricket in the country is out of the woods. Too much damage has been done, particularly while Thabang Moroe was CSA’s chief executive and enjoyed the protection of a delinquent board, for it to be undone so easily. But it would have been much harder to start doing so had Elgar’s team lost this series.
That’s what winning does. It doesn’t fix things, but it makes people — powerful people, good people, people who have money — want to try to fix things. In South Africa, that hasn’t been the case for a long time. It’s a brilliantly clear new day.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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