December 2022 – Bulletproof Truth

Push comes to shove for South Africa

“I wanted to see us give the Aussies a tough time and taking pride in our wickets. The way it unfolded is disappointing.” – Dean Elgar

Telford Vice / Cape Town

TAKE a breath. Step back. Go for a walk. Think about something else. Because it’s been this bad before. Worse, in fact, although at the moment it won’t feel that way. For now, as Dean Elgar said in Melbourne on Thursday, “You have to keep reminding the guys that they’re not crap cricketers.”

He’s right, and he might want to tell all cricketminded South Africans the same thing. But the truth to be countenanced is that Elgar and his team haven’t been good enough — neither in the last two Tests of their series in England in August and September nor in their first two in Australia in the past 13 days.

South Africa have lost all four of those matches, usually because their batting has been brittle. They have gone down in as many or more consecutive Tests 10 times in the past, most recently from February to October in 2019 when they lost two at home to Sri Lanka and three in India. Since readmission it’s also happened in 2001/02 and in 2005/06, when South Africa lost five Tests on the bounce. Both times their opponents were Australia, who have also inflicted — or been part of — two of the South Africans’ other lengthy losing streaks.

That’s why this hurts more than 2019. Being beaten at home by the Lankans was a shock, but it could reasonably be explained as what happens when determined opponents are given conditions that cushion their weaknesses — the matches were staged on the comparatively slower surfaces of Kingsmead and St George’s Park — and are thus able to punch above their weight. When the Lankans returned in December 2020 they were blown away by an innings and 10 wickets on the pacy pitches of Centurion and the Wanderers. Losing in India in 2019 was no surprise: South Africa have won only five of 19 Tests and one of seven series there.

Besides, South Africa always feel being beaten by Australia, home or away, more than they do defeats by any other side. Even England can’t do to them, emotionally, what the Aussies can. Like competitive siblings, South Africans measure themselves against Australians.

It’s a tendency caught up in cultural connections and contrasts, and in the fact that many South Africans of means have escaped their nation’s many problems by moving to Australia. Seen through some South Africans’ eyes, Australia is a functioning, successful version of what their failing country might have been. To others, it’s where rich racists go to continue being racist. Particularly to Western Australia, where there is a ready market for South Africans’ mining expertise. The first Afrikaans church in Perth was founded in 2004. There are now three congregations of the same persuasion in Perth and surrounds and another in Brisbane.

Some of those congregants will have cheered South Africa to victory in Australia in three consecutive rubbers from 2008/09. The last time they would have had to put up with a series defeat was in January 2006. That will only add to the weight of this result, as will the meekness of South Africa’s capitulation.

“I made peace with it last night,” Elgar said after the Australians had taken 62.5 overs to reel in the nine wickets they needed to dismiss South Africa for 204 and win by an innings and 182 runs before what would have been tea on the fourth day at the MCG. “Whether it was today or tomorrow it was always going to be a tough pill to swallow.

“The negatives outweigh the positives. It was a weak performance in conditions that were in favour of good Test cricket. We’re disappointed about how things ended up. I wanted to see us give the Aussies a tough time and taking pride in our wickets. The way it unfolded is disappointing.”

Elgar puts plenty of store in the virtues of courage and character. How much did he see from a team who have been bowled out for fewer than 200 in seven of their last eight innings while conceding more than 400 and 500 in two of those matches?

“I don’t think there has been a lot of it. There’s been more with the ball. Even though the Aussies batted us into the ground [in declaring at 575/8] I saw a lot of character come out in our bowlers, not as much in our batting.”

South Africa have five days to regroup and reset before the third Test starts at the SCG on Wednesday. What would normally be a dead rubber has been lent relevance by the visitors needing to win it as well as both of their Tests at home against West Indies in February and March to stay in the running for a place in the WTC final at the Oval in June.

What message will Elgar deploy to scrape his players off the canvas? “It’s going to be about positive affirmation. You can hit as many balls as you want, it’s not going to change you. The game is 80% in the mind and 20% skill.”

He could also point out that, with South Africa scheduled to play just 28 Tests in the next four-year cycle, this is the best chance some of them will get to feature in the global showpiece. But anything Elgar might say to his charges is undermined by, in the current set-up, South Africa’s players featuring in only seven domestic first-class matches a season. Australia’s six state teams play a double round of Sheffield Shield matches and the top two in the table contest a final. How do you compete when you’re on the wrong end of that kind of imbalance? But Elgar had reason to hope change was on the way: “I know it is in the plans that potentially we have more first-class cricket back home.”

Elgar declined to elaborate, but Andrew Breetzke, the chief executive of the South African Cricketers’ Association, told Cricbuzz: “At the SACA annual meeting [on November 30] players passed a resolution for SACA to undertake a review of domestic cricket. Players have concerns related to various aspects of domestic cricket — playing opportunities, facilities, etcetera. This will commence in January. A key issue that has already been raised is that players are not playing enough first-class cricket.”

Asked to interpret what Elgar had said, CSA chief executive Pholetsi Moseki offered: “I think he meant having a relook at our first-class structure, including increasing the number of games that the teams are playing. It is something we’re working on for the upcoming season.”

Australia’s XI in the MCG Test have played, collectively, 32 domestic first-class matches this year. South Africa’s have been involved in 21 — more than third less than their opponents. The Aussie side also have more Test caps between them for 2022; 114 versus South Africa’s 82. That’s a difference of more than 25%.

It’s in Test cricket, rather than in the dwindling domestic game with its deteriorating standards, that Elgar feels South Africa’s players will get the best education. Even if that entails enduring heavy defeats. “Our players need to be exposed to this level,” he said. “We are learning in the most ruthless and brutal way. There’s more learning to be taken out of this than beating a team of similar strength. I’d love our guys to be exposed to more of this so they can be fast-tracked in the international arena. But I’m not an admin guy, I’m a cricket player. I can only ask for what is right for cricket in South Africa. The rest is up to the guys who make the decisions.”

In 2012, the year he made his Test debut at the WACA, Elgar played eight first-class matches. That included the Perth Test and four games for South Africa A. He played 17 first-class games in 2013. Four were for South Africa A, another four for his franchise, the Knights, and three for Somerset. In his six years as a first-class player before he cracked the nod in the Test side, Elgar played 15, 14, 12 — twice — eight and seven games in whites.

Seven, the least, is also the most provincial matches South African players have in a season to prepare themselves to take on the finest teams in the game. Something’s got to give. Maybe it has.

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Manchester chickens come to Melbourne to roost

“If we can bat for two days that would be brilliant.” – Charl Langeveldt gets his hopes up.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

DAVID Warner? Again? The perennial prodigal was indeed on his way to the crease for the second time in the first innings at the MCG on Wednesday, and in rare splendid isolation.

Having opened the batting in all but 11 of his 421 trips to the crease for Australia, Warner hasn’t often stepped over the boundary alone. And only once with 200 runs in his back pocket — against New Zealand at the WACA in November 2015, when he was 244 not out at the start of the second day.

Then, he faced 14 more balls and added nine more runs before Trent Boult had him caught at second slip. This time, having had to interrupt his innings after he reached his double century on Tuesday because of cramp so severe he didn’t have the muscular leverage to remove his pads after retiring hurt, it took just one ball to dismiss him.

Anrich Nortjé nailed Travis Head’s off stump with the third delivery of the day. The fourth cannoned off Warner’s pads and into his wicket. Four balls later Pat Cummins feathered Kagiso Rabada and was caught behind.

Australia were 211 ahead with four wickets in the bank. Mitchell Starc was battling damaged ligaments in his bowling hand. Cameron Green couldn’t bowl, courtesy of a broken finger inflicted by Nortjé. The pitch was the best batting surface the South Africans had seen this year. Was this their way back into the match?

The question remained relevant only until Nathan Lyon sent the second ball he faced screaming over the cordon for four. Australia were far from done batting, especially with Alex Carey in full and fabulous flourish. All of 175 runs flowed between Cummins’ dismissal and the declaration, which came at tea after Carey had lashed 111 off 149 and shared a stand of 112 with Green. It was during those 50.4 overs after Cummins left that South Africa’s reality was pulled back into focus. Welcome back to Groundhog Day, in reverse.

The penetrative, tireless Nortjé was their best performer of the innings by some distance, with occasional but inconsistent support from Marco Jansen. The rest of the attack proved almost as flaccid as the batting line-up has been from the last two matches of the series in England in August and September, both of them lost.

It’s as if someone flicked a switch after South Africa had won the first game of that rubber, at Lord’s, inside three days. Maybe the South Africans flicked it themselves. They had no business changing their XI for the second match at Old Trafford, which had the effect of undermining the thinking and performances that had worked so emphatically at Lord’s. The consequences of that level of blundering self-harm are insidious and difficult to shake, and there’s no going back to fix things. Accordingly, Dean Elgar and his team have yet to recover. If you can’t trust yourself to make the right decisions, how can you trust yourself to play properly?

“It’s been a tough three days for us,” bowling coach Charl Langeveldt acknowledged during a press conference on Wednesday. Unprompted, he held up Rabada, the leader of the attack, as an example of what had gone wrong: “‘KG’ wasn’t on song, and a few of the other guys. The challenge for him is control. He’s one of the leading wicket-takers in red-ball cricket, but playing on flatter wickets is going to be the challenge for him.” Rabada was indeed flatter than the pitch. For only the second time in the 37 innings in which he has bowled at least 20 overs, he leaked more than five runs an over.

Rabada’s lacklustre display wasn’t the only problem. That just one of the 91 overs the South Africans bowled on Tuesday had been scoreless was “a red flag” for Langeveldt: “We pride ourselves on bowling 18 consecutive [good] balls. That’s one of our KPIs [key performance indicators], and we haven’t achieved it in this game.”

Could part of the reason be that help from the conditions wasn’t as forthcoming as it has been in other matches? Langeveldt admitted South Africa had played “in a lot of Tests where it was more bowler-friendly”, but didn’t accept that as an excuse: “This is a good cricket wicket where, especially with the ball, you get reward if you stay patient for longer periods.” As for the bowlers finally running out of road to keep the team heading in the right direction despite their batting woes: “There’s no bowlers versus the batsmen. Bowlers are part of the batting unit.”

Without a pitch deserving of finger-pointing, South Africa have nowhere to hide. Their bowling chickens have finally followed their batting chickens home to roost. Now their batters are out there again, and already up against it with Elgar suffering his second leg-side strangulation of the match. Langeveldt wanted the survivors to take things hour by hour, to “just try and get runs. Bat time and see where it goes. If we can bat for two days that would be brilliant.”

This is what desperation sounds like, and it’s warranted considering South Africa need another 371 to make the home side bat again. Even their diminished bowling resources can’t dent the likelihood that unless the afternoon rain that took two hours out of the Wednesday’s play doesn’t dry up — as it has been forecast to do — and stays until Friday, the visitors are on course for their fourth consecutive Test defeat.

That would cost them the series, and add to the difficulty of reaching the WTC final.

They came on tour needing three wins from their remaining five matches in the cycle to be confident of being one of the teams at the Oval in June. Should Melbourne pan out as expected, victory in Sydney, where the third Test starts next Wednesday, will be imperative. If that isn’t achieved, the two Tests against West Indies in South Africa in February and March become all but irrelevant.

Those are South Africa’s only scheduled matches in the format in 2023, with another likely in their home series against India, which should start in December. With an ODI World Cup coming in October and November, it makes sense that the focus shouldn’t be on the five-day game. But only twice since readmission in 1991 have South Africa played as few as four Tests in a year. Considering how events have unfolded for them since those three giddy days at Lord’s in August, maybe that’s no bad thing.

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Nasty Nortjé’s magnificent moustache

“I was a little bit too late. It was quite quick. I didn’t know what hit me.” – Anrich Nortjé on his encounter with Fox’s Spidercam.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

SNOR. That’s not a typo, and it has nothing to do with sleeping noisily. To pronounce it, add an r or two. Roll them. You’re aiming for snorrr. It’s the Afrikaans term for the thing that has burst its banks along Anrich Nortjé’s top lip.

If you’re old enough and South African enough, you last saw moustaches like it on apartheid-era policemen: a fabulously fecund hedge of hair, replete with furry fenders that slope past each corner of the mouth before being summarily and squarely chopped off. It’s a significant enough appendage, when contemplated in profile, to reach the bowling crease before most of the rest of Nortjé.

Before the Test series in Australia, Nortjé’s moustache was little more than a wiry wisp. Now it could sweep Trafalgar Square, make whole pots of soup disappear without a trace, and easily accommodate a family of meerkats. It’s more Dennis Lillie than Merv Hughes or Mitchell Johnson; closer to Kapil Dev than to Clive Rice. It’s not a snor for the faint of heart, nose or lip. To see it is to know that evolution is a work in progress.

How many litres of sweat might have been generated under Nortjé’s moustache on Tuesday, when temperatures at the MCG reached 37 degrees Celsius in the shade? How much might it have cushioned the blow had he been facing the Spidercam that flattened him from behind as it panned around the ground after lunch?

“So far so good,” Nortjé said during a press conference about his camera collision. “It knocked the [left] shoulder and the elbow. The elbow’s a bit sore, but otherwise it seems to be OK. I’ll monitor it and see how it goes with the doc. I saw cables and then I turned around, moved my head. I was a little bit too late. It was quite quick. I didn’t know what hit me.”

Nortjé said his ability to bowl, nor anything else, had been affected: “It didn’t change my mindset. I tried to stay focused for when Dean [Elgar] asked me to bowl; to try and be ready and to make sure that when I do come on again I give it my best.”

He seemed to shrug off the incident, except to say, “The one thing we’ve spoken about earlier is how low it is. Unless it’s for interviews I don’t think it should be travelling at head height.”

Harm might have been done. It wasn’t. Happy days. Move on. But, this being Australia, over-reaction followed.

South Africa’s team management said the host broadcasters, Fox, had apologised and “put it down to human error”. That would have been enough, but the camera was also “disabled for the rest of the day”. The network said it would “ensure measures are put in place for the remainder of the match and series to ensure that it doesn’t get as low as it did today”.

While they’re at it, could they sort out South Africa’s utter lack of presence in the match? After two days of a game the visitors must win if they are to add to the hattrick of series victories previous editions of their team have achieved in Australia, they are 197 runs behind and fading fast. They have followed mostly insipid batting with largely uninspiring bowling, and have made less of an impression than Nortjé’s moustache — whose owner was the exception on Tuesday.

Nortjé defied the heat, David Warner’s dance with destiny, Steve Smith’s seance with sublimity, and the 239 they shared to all but bat South Africa out of the game and the rubber. The scorecard doesn’t give Nortjé his due. All it says is he bowled 16 overs and took 1/50, and that he dismissed Smith to end the big partnership. It doesn’t say he came out after lunch and, with a ball 36 overs old, sent down four of the more hostile overs even players like Warner and Smith would have faced.

During that assault, Nortjé walked in the silvery shadow of 150 kilometres an hour and touched 155. Having homed in on Warner’s helmet earlier in the day, Nortjé struck him on the hand to bring the medics onto the ground. That only added to the credit Warner earned for becoming only the second man after Joe Root to score a double century in his 100th Test. In the seventh over before stumps, Nortjé, armed and even more dangerous with the new ball, did the same to Cameron Green, drawing blood from an index finger and forcing him to retire hurt.

The day’s only other wicket, in the ninth over of the morning when Marcus Labuschagne was sold down the river by Warner trying to take two and thus run out, also featured Nortjé: he bowled that over and was on hand to underarm the ball onto the stumps from one knee. As he did so, Nortjé looked not a little like Doug Watson, the South African lawn bowler who won the singles, pairs and team world championship in 1976. Watson also wore the kind of moustache seen on the faces of policemen while they shot hundreds of children dead in Soweto on June 16 of that cursed year.

How did it feel to have bowled so well for so little reward? “It happens,” Nortjé said. “You’re in the heat and you’re trying all the things with the ball. You try a different grip, this and that. But it’s part of cricket.”

Maybe his load was eased by the unlikely alliance he formed with the beery brotherhood in what used to be the MCG’s Bay 13, the rowdiest crowd in cricket. In the 2005 Boxing Day Test they meted out racist abuse in Afrikaans to André Nel, who is as white and Afrikaans as Nortjé. In 2018, India’s players were met by racist chants of “show us your visa”. Nortjé had no such problems. Instead he had the denizens of Bay 13 laughing and joking with him, asking for autographs, which were duly signed, and mimicking the stretches he did on the boundary to ward off cramp in the heat. “They had a great day,” Nortjé said about his newfound friends. “It was nice, fun, a great atmosphere.” Was he surprised at the warm reception he was given by people known for coming hot at Australia’s opponents? “I think they were just enjoying the day. Tomorrow they won’t remember me.” While the gathered reporters laughed at his quip, he added, “That’s just a joke.”

After the two days they’ve had, and however many more they will have to endure in this match, the South Africans could use all the mirth they can find. The sight of Nortjé’s magnificent moustache can only make them smile, but not for much longer.

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MCG Test looms tall, dark and ugly for South Africa

“Today was the first time we had more soft dismissals than not. That’s disappointing.” – Kyle Verreynne

Telford Vice / Cape Town

YOU know you’re in trouble when the opposition captain wins the toss and, on a pitch clearly full of runs, puts you in to bat nevertheless. It’s an insult to your batters as well as your bowlers, and the last thing you need when your confidence is bruised. But that’s the kind of thing that happens when you hit rock bottom.

South Africa dwindled to that point at the MCG on Monday. They were inserted and bowled out for 189 on a blameless surface. Then their bowlers, perhaps weary of being tasked for the umpteenth time with cleaning up the mess the batters had made, allowed Australia to advance to within 144 runs of parity for the loss only of Usman Khawaja’s wicket. Tuesday looms tall, dark and not at all handsome for the visitors.

Monday’s mournful batting brought to seven the number of consecutive innings in which the South Africans have been dismissed for fewer than 200. It’s not a record: the South Africans’ first dozen Test innings, from March 1889 to March 1896, were snuffed out for between 151 and 30.

They were bowled out for fewer than 200 five straight times between 182 and 93 from August 1912 and December 1913. They’ve had three streaks of four in a row — most recently in November and December 2015 — and six of three on the bounce, the last of them between June and December 2021. Seven is in its own league.

Who can say it won’t be eight by the end of the second Test? Or if South Africa won’t rub that 19th century record from the books before the sun sets on the summer? It’s a pessimistic thought, but in the wake of Monday’s mayhem how else are we to see the glass except as more than half-empty and cracked?

The first half-dozen of the sub-200 efforts in the current crisis — and it is unarguably a crisis — were all recorded in conditions designed to inhibit the scoring of runs and make early dismissal probable. That wasn’t the case this time, as Kyle Verreynne acknowledged during a press conference when he compared the pitch to the Gabba’s, which was duly deemed below average after the first Test: “It looks a lot barer, there’s not much grass. It didn’t seem as if there was as much seam movement today. It’s a better wicket to bat on.”

So the visitors had no-one and nothing to blame but themselves. “Today’s [performance is] harder to accept than the previous six innings,” Verreynne said. “If we look back at those games there was a lot of good bowling and we stuck to our gameplans. Today was the first time we had more soft dismissals than not. That’s disappointing.”

Two of them stuck out. Theunis de Bruyn, playing his first Test since October 2019, looked like he meant business in scoring a solid 12 off the first 29 balls he faced. The 30th, from Cameron Green, was short and rose above De Bruyn’s upper-cutting bat. Would he learn that lesson? No. The 31st was also short, and De Bruyn lurched into a reckless pull and sent a top edge skewing behind the cordon, where Alex Carey took the catch.

Seventeen deliveries later, and eight minutes before lunch, Dean Elgar did something he hadn’t in his previous 141 Test innings. He nudged Mitchell Starc into the covers, called Temba Bavuma for a single that was never there and set off. Marcus Labuschagne slid, gathered, and fired off his throw from one knee. The ball hit the stumps at the non-striker’s end with Elgar short of safety by an embarrassingly large margin to mark the only instance of him being run out.

Bavuma edged Starc’s next delivery, a sniping away swinger, to Carey. South Africa — who had been 54/1 — were 58/4, and neither of their batters at the crease, Khaya Zondo and Verreynne, had faced a ball. In the fifth over after lunch, Labuschagne dived to catch Zondo’s cracking cover drive off Starc to reduce South Africa 67/5 and to set the stage for their only partnership of 30 or more.

It lasted for 219 deliveries and yielded 112 runs, and asked more important questions than it answered. How could a wicketkeeper and a fast bowler — both among the most junior members of the team — score more runs than their more experienced elders and, allegedly, betters? Verreynne is playing his 13th Test, Marco Jansen his ninth. Without their contribution, which endured for almost three hours, South Africa might have been on course for another humiliation in two days, like they suffered in Brisbane.

Verreynne’s and Jansen’s dismissals were part of a shocking clatter of five wickets for 10 runs that ended the innings in an inglorious blaze of 24 deliveries. The Australians bowled well, none more so than Green, who stepped into the breach after Starc had left the field with a finger injury to take 5/27. But not well enough for Green, a batting allrounder, mind, to claim his last four for as many runs in a dozen of his deliveries.

South Africa’s malaise goes beyond technique, which shouldn’t be part of the discussion at this level. Instead it is what happens when the gap between first-class and Test level yawns into a chasm, not least because the top batters and bowlers don’t often play domestic cricket. Invariably they’re being rested or they’re somewhere else earning the kind of money CSA can’t afford to pay them. That means the statistics produced in the first-class game cannot be trusted to identify players who have the quality to make the step up. Therefore there are no ready answers to South Africa’s problems beyond the current crop of beleaguered batters battling their way to better days, however long that may take.

That seems unfair on them, given that for almost 24 years the South Africans could count one or more of their top four all-time runscorers keeping them out of trouble. Jacques Kallis made his debut in December 1995 and Hashim Amla retired in February 2019. Their careers bookended those of Graeme Smith and AB de Villiers. South Africa played 235 Tests during that time, and at least one of the fab four was involved in all but nine of those matches. South Africa won 116 and lost 62 of them: a winning percentage of 49.36 and a losing mark of 26.38%.

They have played 24 Tests since the end of the Kallis-Smith-De Villiers-Amla era. The 11 they have won translates into a comparable success rate of 45.83%. But they lose significantly more often: 54.17% of the time. They are, by this measure, 27.79% weaker than they were when Kallis, Smith, De Villiers or Amla, or a combination of them, were in their XI.

When South Africa returned to Test cricket in April 1992 under Kepler Wessels, the philosophy was to make sure they couldn’t lose before they tried to win. More than 30 years on, they have lost even that ability: it’s difficult to imagine any of their players batting for almost eight hours to save a Test, like Faf du Plessis did in Adelaide in November 2012. But how do you think about trying to win when you’re focused on not losing?

England have answered that question in emphatic fashion under Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes by playing with what some would consider outrageous freedom to win nine of their 10 Tests. As Stokes told the BBC on Monday, “If the ambition of winning is always bigger than the fear of losing, you’re always going to be OK.” South Africa are not OK. They have neither the mindset nor, it appears, the skill to play like they used to, nevermind how England do currently.

Part of the reason is that one of the few connections between South Africans of any race, religion, culture or creed is a suffocating conservatism; a desperation to hang onto outdated ideas and ways of doing things for fear of confronting change and new realities. That’s why, more than 28 years after it was peacefully defeated at the ballot box, apartheid is violently alive outside of the ivory towers in which we keep our constitution and laws.

But here’s a nugget of reality that seems worth clinging to, a reason to be if not cheerful then at least not despairing: South Africa are the only team to have beaten England under McCullum and Stokes. That was in August. You know you’re in trouble when it seems like many Augusts ago.

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Welcome to Warner’s world

“You know when you play against him it’s always going to be a fierce battle.” – Dean Elgar on David Warner

Telford Vice / Cape Town

DISLIKING David Warner isn’t difficult. How shall we count the ways? One is that he arrived as a T20 basher and played 40 white-ball internationals before he was granted a Test debut. Another is that he had only 11 first-class caps when he was entrusted with opening the batting in a Test. Who, old-fashioned aficionados asked, did this imposter think he was?

Someone who plays hard but fair, Warner might say. Someone who gives his all for his team. Someone who respects the sanctity of competition. Someone who has carved a career out of never giving an inch as much as he has out of talent and skill.

Others would differ. They will see Warner as someone who, in June 2013, took a swing at the innocuous Joe Root late one night in a Birmingham bar. As someone who, a month later in Pretoria, needed the umpires to separate him and the equally hotheaded Thami Tsolekile from coming to blows, twice, during an A match. As someone who, in January 2015, prompted Martin Crowe, the patron saint of decency in the game, to call for a football-style card system to combat what Crowe called the “thuggish” conduct of a man he deemed “the most juvenile cricketer I have yet seen on a cricket field”.

Others, particularly South Africans, will see Warner as someone who, in March 2018, couldn’t handle the kind of disgraceful verbal abuse he was dishing out as he and his victim, Quinton de Kock, made their way up the stairs at Kingsmead. As someone who, also in March 2018, didn’t have the guts to keep walking past a spectator spewing offensive bile at him at Newlands. As someone who led a ball-tampering plot that was exposed during the same match. As someone who decided he would no longer accept the life ban from leadership positions that was part of his punishment for that act — despite accepting it at the time — and wanted that sanction lifted without revisiting the evidence.

What Warner sees when he looks in the mirror is his own business. What others see in his reflection is the epitome of the ugly Aussie. They also see a player who they would love to have in their team. Warner understands winning like few of his peers. He has a more visceral idea of loyalty than any of them. What he doesn’t know about putting opponents under pressure isn’t worth knowing.

Opinions of Warner aside, everyone will see a player who, against so many odds, will earn his 100th Test cap at the MCG on Monday. He will join Justin Langer, Mark Taylor and Matthew Hayden as the only Australian opening batters to reach a century of Tests. Of them only Hayden has made more centuries and scored more runs than Warner. Overall, just six openers have piled up more runs than Warner and just four have more centuries. At 1.7 metres tall — 18 centimetres shorter than Hayden — Warner is a giant of any era.

But this wouldn’t be much of a Warner story if it didn’t come with the caveat that he has scored only 105 runs in six Test innings this season, and hasn’t made a century in his last 26 completed trips to the crease — or since January 2020 — although he has twice been dismissed in the 90s. At 36, the light of his career is dying. Expect him to rage hard against that happening.

You don’t need to tell that to Dean Elgar. Like Warner he bats left-handed and opens the innings, and brings with him onto the field a view of the world that can seem too hard and uncompromising for modern times. Unlike Warner, Elgar is indeed the captain of his team.

Thus with him stops the buck for South Africa being dismissed for 152 and 99 on an admittedly shoddy pitch at the Gabba last weekend. The bigger picture is that the visitors will have to finds ways to buck a trend that has seen them dismissed for fewer than 200 in their last six innings. Given their embarrassment of bowling riches, it is to be expected that they would depend on ball beating bat more often than other teams. But the balance has tilted too far.

The Australians, whose dismissal for 218 in Brisbane marks the only time they have been bowled out in five completed innings, don’t have that problem. They also have a gun attack, which makes them favourites to end South Africa’s run of three successful series in Australia.

Whether he scores runs or not, Warner is going to be central to the saga. Like him or not, he has been for 11 years.

When: Monday, 10.30am Local Time

Where: Melbourne Cricket Ground

What to expect: The biggest crowd South Africa’s Test team have countenanced since their last Boxing Day match in Australia in 2008. Also, temperatures north of 30 degrees Celsius and a chance of rain on the third day. And, perchance, a better pitch for batting than we saw at the Gabba.

Team news:

Australia: Josh Hazlewood is set to miss a third Test as he continues to recover from a side strain. Scott Boland, who has taken 7/87 at 12.42, retains his spot.

Possible XI: David Warner, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Steve Smith, Travis Head, Cameron Green, Alex Carey, Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins (capt), Nathan Lyon, Scott Boland.

South Africa: Dean Elgar has intimated that the South Africans won’t tamper with their attack, but could fiddle with the batting. Theunis de Bruyn replacing Rassie van der Dussen, who made five and nought at the Gabba, seems a reasonable way to do that.

Possible XI: Dean Elgar (captain), Sarel Erwee, Theunis de Bruyn, Temba Bavuma, Khaya Zondo, Kyle Verreynne, Marco Jansen, Keshav Maharaj, Kagiso Rabada, Anrich Nortjé, Lungi Ngidi.

What they said:

“Yeah, my back’s up against the wall. But it’s in my DNA to keep being competitive, come out here with a smile on my face and take on whatever opposition we’re going to face.” — David Warner tells us what we’ve known for a long time.

“Him and I go back to the under-19 World Cup in Sri Lanka [in 2006], so he’s been around my career as much as I’ve been around his. To have a record like he does is something special, and I’m sure he and his family are proud of that. He’s been a thorn in South Africa’s side along that journey. You know when you play against him it’s always going to be a fierce battle. I think the respect is mutual.” — Dean Elgar on the joys of being among David Warner’s opponents.

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Women deserve a bigger slice of cricket’s cake

“Ninety percent of the time it’s just your dad sitting there cheering you on.” – Nadine de Klerk on the loneliness of the female cricketer.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

“WHERE’S my cake?” Sinalo Jafta’s question was wrapped in wide-eyed mock disbelief. She probably didn’t think she would have to put in an appearance in a mall rammed to the rafters with mournfully shuffling Christmas shoppers on Thursday, her birthday.

But there the wicketkeeper-batter was, cheerfully turning 28 in the midst of strangers going nowhere slowly. Why? The answer shone from a nearby transparent box — which held the women’s T20 World Cup trophy.

In stark contrast to the weary glumness all around, ebullience beamed from the irrepressible Jafta as, in conversation with Cricbuzz, she hammed up the circumstances of her presence: “On my birthday even? Come on ICC! But I’m very glad that I get to share the day around people who love the sport. Previously I’ve spent it with my friends. Now cricket is part of my birthday!

“I was thinking about it last night. I’m about to tap into the third floor; the 30s. You should have your life together at that point. I’m not a junior anymore, and hopefully the maturity in age can also mature my game.”

Unlike with their jaded male counterparts, positivity tends to come standard in female cricketers. Do women need to be buoyant — or feel the need to be buoyant — to try to prove they are good for cricket and to hold on to their unfairly small share of the spotlight?

The most recent women’s T20 World Cup, in Australia in June 2020, earned 1.1-billion video views across ICC platforms. That represented a twentyfold increase on the previous tournament in 2018, and went up to 1.68-billion for the women’s ODI World Cup in New Zealand in March and April. The 86,174 who were at the MCG to see Australia play India in the 2020 women’s T20 World Cup final was 5,532 more than the crowd who turned up to watch England and Pakistan contest the final of the men’s tournament at the same venue in November. But the ICC said last month that the latter event garnered 6.58-billion video views — almost four times as many as the women’s ODI World Cup six months earlier.

Maybe the exponential difference explains why the organisers of a global event see value in putting players and their prize in the path of the public trudging around a mall during the craziness of the last shopping days before Christmas. Men’s tournaments don’t need to engineer happenstance to earn attention. Instead, attention finds them. That reality is unlikely to be changed by the 2023 women’s T20 World Cup, which will be played in Cape Town, Paarl and Gqeberha in February.

But progress is being made in other areas. “When I started playing we weren’t really professional,” Jafta said. “Now we have the 15 national contracts. Then you have the 10 high performance contracts and six for every province. It’s the perfect start to someone’s career, knowing you can play and still earn something. CSA have done a good job there.”

Jafta made her provincial debut in January 2011 and first played for South Africa in October 2016. Nadine de Klerk and Delmi Tucker, who were also on mall duty, initially turned out for their provinces in October 2013 and October 2011 and for South Africa in May 2017 and this July. In that time, women’s cricket has moved significantly towards the centre of the global game — even in places like South Africa where cricket has, on the whole, gone backwards.

But cricketminded South Africans are notoriously stuck in the past. How much more mainstream they consider the women’s game will be measured in the grandstands and on the grass banks of Newlands, Boland Park and St George’s Park in February. It’s one thing to fill grounds in countries where first-world values hold sway or where cricket is central to the culture, quite another to convince a deeply misogynist society like South Africa’s, where football rules, that a woman’s place in cricket is on the field and not on the boundary keeping score or in the kitchen making tea and sandwiches. Will the women’s T20 World Cup draw spectators in decent enough numbers?

“We were [at the mall] yesterday as well, and a lot of people were asking questions about the tournament,” De Klerk told Cricbuzz. Tucker concurred: “I’m a shy person, but it’s exciting. The badge means something to people. It’s good to wear it and get people coming up to you to ask questions. You can explain what it means to you.”

De Klerk could only dream of the “breathtaking” experience the South Africans had on their tour to India in September and October 2019: “The stands were absolutely packed and we couldn’t hear each other on the field. You want that kind of backing. In South Africa we don’t get big crowds, so I hope there’s a turnaround in this World Cup. Hopefully we get more people than just our families. Ninety percent of the time it’s just your dad sitting there cheering you on.”

Tucker nodded in agreement: “The tension grows if there are more people watching you, but it’s quite exciting if they are there supporting you. We were playing the [T20] Super League [at Newlands earlier this month] and there was no-one. We said we wished there was someone cheering us on. When we played in England [in July] there was a massive difference.”

Wayne Parnell knows about playing in front of big crowds. What he didn’t know, before he made his junior provincial debut in December 2002, was that the game wasn’t solely a male preserve. “My first interaction with any female playing cricket was with Claire Terblanche in Eastern Province,” Parnell told Cricbuzz. “I must have been an under-13 and I saw her with her Eastern Province tracksuit on, and I was told that she also plays cricket. That was the first time I knew that girls play cricket.”

Terblanche, who won 27 caps for South Africa as an off-spinning allrounder and is now a successful coach, was also in the mall mix. Not that long ago, putting four fully fledged female internationals on show in South Africa outside of an actual cricket setting would have been unthinkable. For Parnell, that carried a personal message: “I have a daughter now, so it’s good that cricket is a sport that is also in her sphere. A few years ago it probably wasn’t.”

What would it do for women’s cricket in South Africa if they won a World Cup before the men’s team, who have yet to reach a final? The question seemed to rouse unwelcome memories: Parnell has played in two ODI World Cups, three editions of the T20I variety and two Champions Trophies from June 2009, all without securing silverware. Perhaps the catastrophe that befell the South Africans in Adelaide last month at the T20 World Cup when, somehow, they lost to the Netherlands and crashed out of the running for the semi-finals, was still too raw in his mind. If that was indeed happening to Parnell, he managed to pull himself out of the recollection well enough to say, “Whether it’s in the men’s or the women’s game, we’re hungry for that ICC trophy.”

South Africa’s women’s team have been to seven ODI World Cups and another seven in the T20 format, and have also yet to make it to a final. An upside of not being the men’s team is that those failures sail below the radar. Maybe because she didn’t feature in any of them, or because she was determined to celebrate her birthday despite being marooned in a mall, or as a paid up member of cricket’s most chattering class, Jafta had all the while been laughing and talking and keeping up a stream of general jollity. What is it with keepers and noisiness?

Jafta could only speak for herself: “I don’t want the batters to settle, so if I keep quiet for an over or two it gives them time to do that. I believe in buzzing the whole time. It does mess up your train of thought. I’ve played against noisy wicketkeepers, and I’m like, ‘Shut up!’ But obviously I do exactly the same thing when I’m keeping.”

Then, suddenly, she was rendered speechless. The stumper silencer arrived to due fanfare in an open box. It was round, covered in chocolate shavings and crowned by a lit sparkler. Jafta had her cake. And could eat it, too.

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Pitches, politics and perhaps a chance simply to play: being Khaya Zondo

“You can’t play a game before you’re in it.” – Khaya Zondo declines to wonder what would happen should the MCG harbour another dodgy pitch.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

THE haters won’t like this, but Khaya Zondo’s sense of humour is intact in the wake of the Gabba Test at the weekend, which Australia won in two days. We know this because, told that the most recent Test at the MCG, where the series resumes on Monday, ended in three days, Zondo smiled.

“If it finished in three days that’s longer than the two games I’ve played,” he said during a press conference in Brisbane on Wednesday. “I was saying to one of my teammates that the games I’ve got have each finished in about two days. They’ve both been played on hectically bowler-friendly pitches. But those are the cards we’ve been dealt. I’d love a flat track, and the bowlers would hate it. I’m sure the more opportunities I get I’ll get onto better batting wickets.”

Zondo has featured in three Tests, but his debut sailed below the radar: he was a Covid substitute for Sarel Erwee and his involvement was restricted to fielding for the last hour it took South Africa to wrap up victory by 332 runs over Bangladesh at St George’s Park in April.

But Zondo made a bigger impression at the Oval in September, where his 23 and 16 were among the better efforts in South Africa’s innings of 118 and 169 in a match England won by nine wickets in less than two days of playing time. At the Gabba, Zondo suffered a second-ball duck in the first innings but batted for almost two-and-a-half hours and faced 85 balls for his unbeaten 36. By all three of those measures he was South Africa’s best batter in the second innings.

That’s where the haters come in. Zondo took ugly flak on social media after he was trapped in front by Scott Boland in the first innings. His detractors demanded to know why Theunis de Bruyn or Ryan Rickelton didn’t play ahead of him. De Bruyn’s and Rickelton’s first-class averages are 10.69 and 22.40 points higher than Zondo’s 31.47. It has taken Zondo 220 first-class innings to score his 13 centuries. De Bruyn has 16 tons from 136 innings, and Rickelton 14 from 78.

De Bruyn played the last of his dozen Tests — in which he averaged 19.45 — in Ranchi in October 2019 and has reached or passed 50 only once in 13 first-class and T20 innings for Northerns this season. Even though Zondo has yet to reach a half-century after batting 14 times this summer, it’s disingenuous to say De Bruyn, on current form, has a greater claim to a place in the Test XI than Zondo.

Rickelton is not in the Test squad. He has been ruled out by torn ankle ligaments and troublesome bone growth, in the same ankle, and requires surgery that he has elected to delay: a reasonable decision considering he is due to earn the equivalent of more than USD58,000 for playing for Mumbai Indians Cape Town in the inaugural edition of the SA20, which starts next month. He is able to keep playing with the help of injections, and has scored four centuries and a 99 in 14 innings across the formats for Gauteng this summer. CSA’s reluctance to take Rickelton to Australia considering his condition is understandable and in line with their policy of not selecting injured players. Replacing him there should he break down would be complicated and take time.

A theory doing the rounds is that an exception has been made for Temba Bavuma and his elbow. So why not for Rickelton? Bavuma sustained the injury during a T20I in Rajkot in June. He decided against surgery, but was passed fit in time to play in a T20I series in India in September and October in the lead-up to the T20 World Cup in Australia. He was rested after the tournament and did not bat in the first innings of South Africa’s tour match in Brisbane from December 9 to 12 because his elbow had flared up again. Malibongwe Maketa, South Africa’s interim coach, suggested the issue returned because of the high amount of preparation Bavuma did in Australia to ensure he was ready for the Test series: “We pushed him hard in the volume of work he did once we got here.” That’s not the same as picking an injured player, or arriving on a tour injured. Besides, Bavuma faced 92 balls in the second innings of the tour match and 70 and 61 deliveries in the Gabba Test. If he’s struggling to hold a bat, it’s not showing.

South Africa’s last Test before they came to Australia, and the only one Zondo and Rickelton have played together, was the game at the Oval in September. Rickelton scored 11 and eight and faced 20 and 15 balls. Zondo made more than double Rickelton’s runs and faced 108 deliveries; more than three times as many as Rickelton. How, then, is replacing Zondo — the incumbent, remember — with Rickelton justified?

Zondo and Bavuma are black. De Bruyn and Rickelton are white, as are most of those who are making the case for them to play. The complexities of cricket in South Africa are daunting for the uninformed, but sometimes it really is that simple. This seems like one of those times.

About batting in Brisbane, Zondo said: “It was a matter of making sure you defended your stumps, because that’s where the dismissals were happening. There was too much in the pitch for the bowlers to bowl short, and if they did they were wasting their time. But if they put the ball up to the bat and tried to get your pad or nick you off, there was a lot happening.

“Any movement off the pitch — whether it was up or down or sideways — you had to make sure you were ahead of it so that you could adjust accordingly. In the first innings the ball that nipped back for me hit me quickly. In the second innings I made sure I watched the ball more closely and moved quicker, in case it nipped or bounced or stayed low, so I could react.”

Despite being dismissed for 152 and 99 the South Africans managed to limit Australia’s victory margin to six wickets, a testament to the conditions. A green pitch that wasn’t hard enough on the first day allowed the ball to make indentations that hardened overnight to facilitate variable bounce on the second day. Thirty-four wickets fell and just 469 runs were scored in the match. In the previous Brisbane Test a year ago, it took three days as well as just more than a session for 31 wickets to fall and 889 runs to be scored in Australia’s nine-wicket win over England.

The surface for the South Africa game was rated “below average” — only the third time an Australian pitch has fallen foul of the ICC since the ratings system started in 2006. The other two instances were a “below average” verdict for a women’s T20I at North Sydney Oval between Australia and England in November 2017 and a “poor” assessment of the MCG pitch for the Ashes Test in December the same year.

The Melbourne strip had the opposite problem to the Gabba: just 24 wickets fell but 1,081 runs were scored, among them two centuries and a double century, and the drawn match went all five days. “The bounce of the MCG pitch was medium but slow in pace and got slower as the match progressed,” match referee Ranjan Madugalle said at the time. “The nature of the pitch did not change over the five days and there was no natural deterioration. As such, the pitch did not allow an even contest between the bat and the ball as it neither favoured the batsmen too much nor it gave the bowlers sufficient opportunity to take wickets.”

Of the four Tests played at the MCG since, only one has crept into a fifth day. Last December, Australia completed their win, by innings and 14 runs, over England in the first session of the third day. Jokes aside, Zondo wasn’t keen to wonder might happen should another dodgy pitch present itself in Melbourne — “You can’t play a game before you’re in it” — but he seemed confident that wouldn’t happen: “I don’t think they will prepare a pitch like they did [at the Gabba] because it’s been deemed below average. I think it will be more fair for bat and ball.”

Not that the South Africans are about to consign their batting failures at the Gabba to the pitch. “We must apply ourselves and get focused, make sure we’re present at the crease all the time,” Zondo said. “You need to be really focused on the ball and have all of your soul and mind there.” Giving a better account of themselves at the MCG would mean “having stronger defences, making sure we keep the good balls out. There’s a lot of them in Test cricket. If they can’t get you out you’ve got half-a-chance of scoring runs.”

Zondo is one of eight children fathered by Raymond Zondo, South Africa’s chief justice and among the few beacons of integrity in a society that is running out of reasons to hope the future will be better than a present ruined by inequality and corruption that has been built on a past ruled by the evils of apartheid. Was his father a cricket person?

“I try not speak too much cricket with him or the rest of my family,” Zondo said, another smile on his face. “I’ll just let them know how I’ve done and how things are going. They’ll check up on me here and there. He’s a man of the law and I’m a cricketer. It’s two different things.”

Indeed, but they’re both in search of justice.

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South Africa’s short, sharp shock another rude awakening

“There needs to be an element of patience and understanding, but you can’t advocate for bad performances.” – Kagiso Rabada

Telford Vice / Cape Town

ANOTHER day, another rude awakening for early rising South Africans. Bowled out for 152 on Saturday, Dean Elgar’s team were dismissed for 99 on Sunday. They batted for a total of 86 overs in a match that was shorter, in terms of deliveries bowled, than all but seven of the 1,699 Tests that have been won and lost.

Only once has a Test in Australia been decided in fewer balls than the 866 needed to settle the issue at the Gabba. That was at the MCG in February 1932, when it took only 656. The visitors then were also South Africa, who were dismissed for 36 and 45. Australia won by an innings and 72 runs. But, because there was no play on the second day and what would have been the third was a Sunday — and so, in that far different world, a rest day — the match stretched into a fourth. On Sunday the game was put out of its misery when Australia won by six wickets just more than an hour after tea on the second day. Or, on a weekend morning in South Africa, before many had brushed their teeth.

Asked during a television interview if he could understand why that had happened, Nathan Lyon said: “I can, because you’ve got the two best bowling attacks going at each other.” He might have added that those attacks were bowling on a pitch that started out as merely challenging and morphed into a monster. Indentations that formed when the surface was too soft on the first day had hardened into craters from which the ball exploded unpredictably.

Dean Elgar and diplomacy aren’t often on the same page, but in his television interview he managed to limit himself to labelling the pitch “pretty spicy” and musing that he didn’t consider the match “a fair contest”. His excoriation came at the press conference that followed.

Kagiso Rabada, who took 4/13 in four overs in Australia’s awkward albeit nominal run chase to finish with 8/89 in the match, managed to find, somewhere in his fast bowler’s soul, a touch of empathy for the eternal enemy: “It looked quite bad out there for the batters. The ball was absolutely doing heaps.”

But, maybe because South Africa’s batting problems weren’t his to solve, Rabada was able to see the bigger issue: “The batting line-up we have is quite inexperienced. In fact, the team we have is relatively experienced if you look at other cricketing nations around the world. Dean Elgar’s our most experienced player followed by, I think, myself and Temba. I’ve played 50-odd Test matches and others haven’t played much.” Elgar has played 80 Tests, Rabada 56 and Bavuma 52. Keshav Maharaj, who has 46 caps, is the only other member of the side who has reached 20 Tests.

“It can get frustrating,” Rabada said. “I don’t mean to single out the batters; I mean that it’s frustrating as a team. You have to understand that sometimes this is what happens in a rebuilding phase. I’ve played in a team with a star-studded line-up, where you’re playing with greats of the game. I don’t think that happens frequently. There’re a whole lot of players who’ve come in who have the ability but need to get used to the international circuit. There needs to be an element of patience and understanding, but at the same time you can’t advocate for bad performances.”

The team in which Rabada made his Test debut, in Mohali in November 2015, took 357 caps into that match. Their ranks included Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers, Vernon Philander and Dale Steyn, who had a combined 293 at that stage. The XI at the Gabba arrived with 304 caps.

That doesn’t seem like a chasmic difference, but South Africa’s top six in Brisbane had 167 caps. In Mohali they had 227. Amla and De Villiers had 182 between them — 15 more than the Gabba top six. The Australians had 561 caps before the Brisbane Test, or 257 more than South Africa. The home side’s top six’s caps equalled the South Africans’ total for their entire XI.

Three of the four teams involved in the Tests that coincided with the Gabba game went in with more experience than South Africa. Bangladesh had 310 caps in their match in Chattogram against India, who had 452. Pakistan’s 233 appearances was the exception. They are in Karachi playing England, who arrived with 373 caps.

Not that experience made much difference for South Africa in Mohali seven years ago, when India dismissed them for 184 and 109 and won by 108 runs after tea on the third day. Then as now the pitch, which raged with turn, was a major factor. All the South Africans could do in the second match in Bengaluru, where the surface glinted almost as greenly as in Brisbane, was look on as four days of the match were lost to rain. Perhaps that wasn’t the worst outcome: Philander, their most potent threat on that kind of surface, was ruled out with an ankle injury two days before the start. The most atrocious conditions manifested in the third match in Nagpur, where the surface was duly rated poor. South Africa lost that series 3-0, and by increasing margins.

They also lost the aura of being Test cricket’s ultimate road warriors, having suffered their first defeat in the 14 away rubbers they had played in nine years. Stung by what they saw as India’s unfair manipulation of the conditions, their response was to ratchet up the South Africanness of their home pitches. That approach reached its zenith — or was it its nadir? — at the Wanderers in January 2018, where play against India was suspended and veered uncomfortably close to being called off because of a pitch that Michael Holding called “shit”. The ICC declared it simply poor. India won by 63 runs inside four days — a milestone on Virat Kohli’s team’s journey towards the belief that, unlike previous India sides, they could succeed anywhere.

That series marked a turning point for conditions in South Africa. Before it was played, the overall Test batting averages at Newlands, Centurion and the Wanderers — the venues for the matches — was 31.08, 31.63 and 30.17. Since then at those grounds the averages have been 25.96, 26.85 and 26.40. There have, of course, been fewer Tests after the 2018 India series than before, and so the comparison can’t prove a decline in batting conditions in South Africa. But it does offer evidence for that argument, and suggest that the upshot is the kind of failure to come to terms with a lively pitch that we saw in Brisbane.

“Ruined” was how Wisden described the pitch for South Africa’s match in Melbourne in 1932. It wasn’t the only reason they were bowled out for next to nothing in both innings: the game was the fifth and last in a series in which Australia had won the first four. And it could have been worse. Donald Bradman, who had scored two double centuries — one of them an undefeated 299 — and two mere centuries in his other five innings in the rubber for a series average of 201.50, twisted his ankle on his way out of the dressing room to field in South Africa’s first innings and was ruled out.

Leg spinner Clarrie Grimmett, who had taken 33 wickets in the series, 14 of them in the previous game in Adelaide, didn’t bowl a ball in the game at the MCG — where Bert Ironmonger, a left-arm finger spinner despite having lost the forefinger on his bowling hand, took 5/6 and 6/18. But the South Africans were not free of Grimmett just yet. He would return to haunt them at home from December 1935 to February 1936 in what would be his last four Tests. He ended his stellar career with a hattrick of 10-wicket hauls in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. Magically, the 44 wickets he took in the series matched the age he turned on Christmas Day that year.

More recently, and more happily for South Africa, they responded to being beaten by an innings and 276 runs in just more than two days in crazy conditions at Christchurch in February to complete victory by 198 runs at the same ground 10 days later.

Less recently, and less encouragingly for the South Africans, the most recent Test at the MCG, where the series resumes next Monday, was over before lunch on the third day. Last December, Australia beat England by an innings despite scoring only 267. They dismissed England for 185 and 68 on a pitch of zip and zap and on which only Joe Root and Marcus Harris passed 50. Neither made it to 100.

Do more rude awakenings await South Africa’s supporters? It’s difficult not to think so, just as it was after the first Test in Christchurch in February.

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Going, going, Gabba: cruising for a Brisbane bruising

“Is that a good advertisement for our format?” – Dean Elgar on the Gabba pitch.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

DEAN Elgar has slammed the Gabba pitch on which Australia beat South Africa in less than two days, and said he was ignored when he asked the umpires about the dangers of batting on the surface. But he stopped short of branding the conditions unsafe.

Australia completed their victory an hour after tea on Sunday; just five-and-a-half sessions into a match that was scheduled to end around sunset on Wednesday. The game was decided in 866 deliveries — the second fewest in the 355 men’s Tests that have been won and lost in Australia. South Africa were put in to bat and bowled out for 152 and 99. Australia made 218 and 35/4.

By stumps on Saturday, the soft, green, seaming pitch was already studded with divots — which hardened on Sunday to add inconsistent and sometimes steepling bounce to the sideways movement batters had to contend with throughout. Consequently most of Elgar’s post-match press conference focused on his thoughts on the pitch, starting with the first question.

“Let’s not waste any time,” Elgar said with a hollow laugh. “You’ve got to ask yourself — is that a good advertisement for our format? Thirty-four wickets in two days; a pretty one-sided affair I would say. We want to see the game go to four or five days.

“The nature of how it started to play, with some seriously steep bounce with the old ball, you’re on a hiding to nothing as a batting unit. Only three batsmen applied themselves half decently and scored runs. I don’t think that was a very good Test wicket.”

Travis Head’s 92 in the first innings proved the matchwinning batting performance in a game in which Kyle Verreynne’s 64 was the only other score higher than Temba Bavuma’s 38. Fifteen of the 34 dismissed batters faced 10 or fewer deliveries.

Had Elgar raised his concerns with the umpires, Chris Gaffaney and Rod Tucker? “I did ask the umpires,” he said. “When ‘KG’ got Head out down leg [on Sunday], I said, ‘How long does it go on for before it potentially is unsafe?’ Then Nortjé was bowling those short ones that were flying over our heads. I know the game was dead and buried. It was never to change or put a halt to the game, but that was where the umpires’ discretion comes into play; not us as players.”

Kagiso Rabada had Head caught behind with what became the eighth-last ball of the match, which ended with Anrich Nortjé’s bouncer sailing well over batter Cameron Green and wicketkeeper Verreynne. The ball went all the way to the boundary for five wides, the winning runs.

Did Elgar get an answer from the umpires? “No. There were only a handful of runs left [to get] at that stage, so maybe they thought I was just trying to take the mickey. But it’s not a bad reference point going forward to get a reply. I don’t see it changing anything, but there wasn’t a reply.”

Did he think the pitch was unsafe? “I’m not going to say it was unsafe or it wasn’t safe,” Elgar said, doubtless to avoid the insult of a fine being added to the injury that potentially awaited those who dared bat on the surface.

But he was happy to explain the challenge: “The edges of the divots start to get harder and they become more abrasive because the wicket starts drying out. Back home the wickets are also prone to creating those divots, and it becomes a handful. But generally that only happens later in the game, when those divots start playing quite a big role. This one seemed to start yesterday already.

“I’m not a curator and I wouldn’t know how to prepare a cricket pitch, but it was interesting to see how quickly this one actually did start divotting and how quickly the ball sped up; especially the new ball. Also today the older ball was flying through, which shouldn’t be really happening. The divots had a big role to play, especially with the sideways movement and then up and down. And then the ball that’s got that steep bounce, which is quite something to face.”

Asked what his players would do with their three bonus days off, Elgar said: “The guys know their games well enough, and hitting another 100 or 200 balls a day is not going to make you a better cricketer. It’s just one of those games where you’ve failed. I’d rather see the guys not do anything until we get to Melbourne [where the second Test starts next Monday]. Other guys might feel they need to go and do stuff, and I’m sure the coaching staff will give them the best opportunity to be ready for the next Test.”

What changes to their team might the South Africans envisage, what with Theunis de Bruyn and Heinrich Klaasen the spare batters in a squad that also includes uncapped pace threat Gerald Coetzee? “All options are on the table,” Elgar said. “But you still have to go away and give your batters the confidence and the positivity. The guys in the changeroom have played enough cricket to know that this was maybe one of those instances where … let’s be honest and let’s be real about what’s just happened. It’s not like our guys were throwing wickets away. We were getting absolutely jaffaed out really. And [Australia] bowled properly. You’ve got to take all of that into consideration.

“Coming into this game our batters were confident. We prepared bloody well and we played the warm-up game where most of the guys got good runs and time in the middle. So it’s not like the confidence is low. We just need to be realistic around what’s just happened, and try and rectify it. We do have extra days now where the guys need to tap into their mental spaces, which is your biggest enemy at the moment because you can really withdraw yourself from what’s happened instead of facing it and learning from it.”

Despite losing South Africa ended the match on a high — and with an eye on the last two Tests — by dismissing Usman Khawaja, David Warner, Steve Smith and Head inside seven overs as Australia homed in on their nominal target.

“It was to try and see if we could open some old scars; purely bringing our intensity and maybe get them three or four down and those batters going into Melbourne with maybe a little bit less confidence,” Elgar said. “I guess it was one of the gameplans that worked out for us over the last two days. Can’t say there were many, but at least that one did.”

He hoped the performance of Rabada, who took 4/13 in the second innings, could “inspire our batting unit to get their heads right and knuckle down”.

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What’s for breakfast? Horror or hope?

“When you get a wicket with the first ball of the innings, and when it’s a big wicket like David Warner’s, that lifts everyone up.” – Kyle Verreynne

Telford Vice / Cape Town

SOUTH Africans who woke up to the horror of their men’s team being beaten by the Netherlands at the T20 World Cup last month arose to another awfulness on Saturday: the Test side dismissed for 152 in 48.2 overs.

They saw a green Gabba pitch cast a lurid light in the early morning gloom, and learnt that Australia had won the toss and declined to bat. How much of a factor was that in what had happened? Then they watched the highlights and realised that, while there was some seam movement and the bounce could have been more consistent, conditions were fairer than they looked. Closer to the truth was that the T20 World Cup bubble hadn’t burst. It was another nightmare on Aussie street.

Of Saturday’s XI, only Temba Bavuma, Kagiso Rabada and Anrich Nortjé were part of the team who dawdled, dithered and dwindled to defeat against the Dutch. That happened in Adelaide, some 1,600 kilometres to the south-east of Brisbane, and in starkly different circumstances. Bavuma responded to concerns about his state of mind and his elbow by batting through three partnerships, including a stand of 98 with Kyle Verreynne — who showed discipline and dash in his 64 — that saved South Africa from ignominy, for two solid hours.

But, like wildfires and viruses, these things have a way of leaping even the most imposing boundaries. As hands plopped bread into toasters, the thought crossed more than a few minds that Adelaide was rudely alive and unfortunately well and had bloody well made the trip to Brisbane.

The idea was still banging around as coffee was being brewed. Not for the first time it would be up to the bowlers to keep South Africa in the game. Whistles went on kettles and toasters popped with Rabada at the top of his run, staring down the barrel at David Warner.

It had to be Warner. Of course it did. Long before March 2018, when he launched himself verbally and then physically at Quinton de Kock at Kingsmead and directed the ball-tampering plot that was exposed at Newlands, Warner has served, no doubt unwittingly, as a talisman for South Africa’s players.

Also at Newlands, in an ODI in October 2016, Imran Tahir viscerally channelled his adopted nation’s undying dislike of Warner, for them the ultimate ugly Aussie. First Tahir delivered a furious flurry of words from the bowling crease. Then he unleashed a throw of wonder from the deep to run Warner out. Tahir couldn’t be called a calm cricketer but he blazed with rare passion that night. Warner is to cricketminded South Africans what a lit match is to a braai loaded with kindling and wood.

As Faf du Plessis wrote in Faf: Through Fire, “… no player roused the dog in me more easily than David Warner. It wasn’t necessarily personal. It was rather his behaviour on the field that enabled me to intensify my focus. The way he climbed into me at the Adelaide Oval in 2012 just strengthened my resolve when the team needed me most.

“In all my years of playing against Australia, Warner sledged me the most. That made it easy for me to focus on just one player in order to enter the mental zone I needed to perform optimally. Against other sides, I had to make a real effort to identify an opponent who could serve as a stand-in for David Warner … someone who could get my blood boiling and my focus zoned in. It’s amusing to look back now on the lengths I went to to replicate the feelings I had when playing against Australia. Australia, however, unlocked the fighter in me, and Warner in particular, did this just by breathing.”

Rabada took a breath of his own, loped in on bespoke liquid air, and let loose a delivery bound for Warner’s throat. The left-hander managed to put the splice of his fending bat in the way, and it looked as if he had done enough for the ball to loop over short leg. Khaya Zondo, not the tallest at a touch under six feet, rose and rose and rose some more to pluck the catch, return to earth, and applaud for all his worth — not his and Rabada’s good work but South Africa striking back at the first opportunity. To do so by ridding the scene of Warner, who on his walk back to the dressing room jerked his head around as if he had copped a shard of the flavour of flak he likes to dish out, is as good as it gets.

“When you get bowled out for 152, as much as you want to get the energies up it is quite difficult,” Verreynne told a press conference. “So when you get a wicket with the first ball of the innings, and when it’s a big wicket like David Warner’s, that lifts everyone up.”

Australia also lost Marnus Labuschagne and Usman Khawaja to Marco Jansen and Nortjé inside the first 10 overs. Khawaja’s dismissal was completed slickly at third slip by Simon Harmer, who was on the field while Lungi Ngidi was having strapping applied. That reduced the home side to 27/3, which had a familiar ring to it because South Africa had slumped to the same score on their way to 27/4 inside the first hour. As the visitors had done, the Australians leaned heavily on one partnership: the 117 shared by Steve Smith and Travis Head.

“For the next 10 overs [after Warner’s dismissal] we carried that energy and adrenaline,” Verreynne said. “That set us up nicely, but we fell away for the next 10 overs.” Nortjé and Jansen bowled scoreless overs in the 5.4 after Khawaja went, a time of rasping aggression by the bowlers that yielded five scoring shots and 19 runs. The next five overs went for exactly twice as many runs.

Nortjé steered a sniping scrambled-seam inswinger into Smith’s stumps five balls before stumps, and Rabada ended the day by having Scott Boland, chasing widely, caught behind. “We’re still behind the game, but those two wickets have opened a window for us,” Verreynne said.

Australia will resume seven runs behind and banking on Head, who has the manner of an especially enterprising street-fighter, to add significantly to his 78. Most importantly, they will want to avoid the kind of crash that claimed South Africa’s last six wickets for 27. On a pitch that is expected to gain pace overnight, and given the quality of South Africa’s attack, a collapse seems more probable than possible. As Verreynne said: “Any score we get there’s a bit of belief that our bowlers can do a job.”

Belief? That’s too much for Verreynne to expect from his compatriots as they shuffle on sleepy legs, careful not to stub their toes, through the dawny dregs of Saturday night and turn on televisions to see what Sunday has brought for breakfast. Instead of belief try hope — that South Africa are batting again, that at least one of their top three is still there, that the lead is decent, and that most of Saturday’s play was nothing more than a bad dream. But first, coffee.

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