“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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