“We want to be successful all around the world. We don’t want to be a team that only wins at home.” – Malibongwe Maketa
Telford Vice / Cape Town
THIS time last year cricketminded South Africans were as buoyant as a balloon in a sunny park. It was two days after their Test team had beaten top ranked India in a gnarly contest at the Wanderers and three days before the series decider at Newlands. There was admiration, respect and hope.
Maybe Keegan Petersen could and would fill the immense void left by Hashim Amla. Maybe Marco Jansen was more than just outrageously tall and left-arm. Maybe Dean Elgar was the answer to the questions that had been asked since Graeme Smith retired. Maybe people should get off Mark Boucher’s case and let him coach.
A year on and that balloon seems to have been made of lead and the sunny park has become a swamp in a hurricane. South Africa won at Newlands, reducing no less than Virat Kohli into an impotent caricature shrieking into the stump microphone. But they have lost five of the 10 Tests they have played since, including four consecutively before Sunday’s rain-forced draw in Sydney. In the process they lost a rubber in Australia for the first time in the four they’ve played there from 2008/09.
The cumulative effect of South Africa’s recent failures is that their performance on the last day at the SCG, where they resumed on 149/6, then followed on after being dismissed 220 behind, and reached 106/2 before hands were shaken, has been held up as a turning point towards better days.
“We actually had a conversation last night: we can either go lie down and let Aussie roll us here and create a little bit more embarrassment or we can go and fight out on day five,” Dean Elgar told a press conference. It’s great to see how the guys responded around that.
“There are a lot of learnings to be taken out of today. The flip side could have been that we could have been done here by lunch time and that would have not sat very well in the camp. It’s great to see how the guys responded in terms of how we conducted our conversation into some very good practice today.”
Malibongwe Maketa, the interim coach, concurred: “Today, to come out and fight the way we did, was encouraging. We knew we had to bat way above our average to compete.”
South Africa lost six wickets and scored 212 runs on Sunday. Seen objectively that’s hardly cause for the sighs of relief emitted by Elgar and Maketa. But when you’ve been bowled out for fewer than 200 — once for 99 — in seven of your previous eight innings, 255 in the first innings in Sydney and three of your four batters in the second dig spending at least an hour at the crease looks like a skyscraper of achievement, not the modest two-storey block it is. That’s perspective, and the South Africans could be forgiven for theirs being skew currently.
But they’ve brought that on themselves. They’re in this mess because, after beating England by an innings inside three days at Lord’s in August, they took their foot off their opponents’ throat by changing their XI. Thus the South Africans, in one disastrous decision, disrespected what they had done at Lord’s and paid England respect that, based on that performance, they did not deserve. Grateful for the gasp of air they were granted, Ben Stokes’ ambitious, fearless team smacked the visitors upside the head at Old Trafford and at the Oval. Elgar’s team haven’t been the same since, particularly at the crease.
Yet the difference between the teams in runs scored off the bat in England was a marginal 67. In Australia it was 277. Steve Smith, Travis Head, David Warner and Usman Khawaja each made more than 200 runs in the series, and Alex Carey and Marnus Labuschagne passed 100. Temba Bavuma’s 185 was the highest South African aggregate. Kyle Verreynne and Sarel Erwee were their only other players to reach three figures in the rubber. Verreynne and Erwee are also South Africa’s most recent centurions — they made 126 not out and 108 in Christchurch in February last year. Australia banked four hundreds, among them Warner’s 200 at the MCG, in this series alone.
Conditions have been an important factor in South Africa’s struggles. Of the six Tests they have played from the start of the England series, only in their last two matches in Australia, in Melbourne and Sydney, were the pitches decent for batting. Having been rattled and rolled in the first four of those games — and come out on the right side of the equation only once — South Africa’s batters couldn’t regroup even on a good surface. Too much tentativeness and doubt had crept in by the time they took guard at the MCG.
“From a confidence point of view, naturally the batters would have been hit,” Justin Sammons, the batting consultant, told a press conference on Friday. “In the [MCG] Test, an area we had been improving on as a batting group — the mental errors we were making — we slipped up. We strayed out of our gameplan.”
Then there’s experience. Australia’s XI at the SCG have 568 Test caps between them, South Africa’s 310. South Africa’s top seven have 307 innings, Australia’s almost twice as many: 591. The disparity persists at domestic level, where Australia’s six state sides play a double round of Sheffield Shield matches and a final. In South Africa this season, first-class teams will play only seven matches each — not least because the inaugural edition of the SA20, which starts on Tuesday, has been wedged into what would normally be time to play the longer format.
“There’s no substitute for experience and you can only gain experience by playing,” Sammons said. “The more games you play the better you’re going to get and the more lessons you’re going to take. It’s an important focus area in terms of how we manage to still look after the first-class system. It’s going to be a tricky balancing act now with the way the world is going. But we do need a way to balance it. We need our guys playing as much cricket as possible. That’s the way you get better.”
It’s telling that a bid to increase the number of first-class matches has been launched by the players, in the form of a resolution taken at the South African Cricketers’ Association annual meeting in November, and not by CSA. The underlying reality is that first-class cricket leaks money, which a T20 tournament can make. Essentially, the SA20 will pay the salaries of Elgar, Maketa, Sammons and everyone else who might see their primary focus as Test cricket. So finding methods to live with T20 is essential.
“We’ve got to think out of the box, as a board or the director of cricket, to find ways,” Sammons said. “There have to be ways. We can’t just resign ourselves to the fact and say, ‘That’s it, we’re not going to play enough first-class cricket. T20 is going to dominate.’ We can’t have that mindset. We’ve got to have the mindset of saying we’ve got to find a way. How we go about that is up to the decision-makers. It’s key for us. We have to play more first-class cricket.”
Sammons sees in Verreynne, who played 50 first-class matches in almost seven years before making his Test debut, and who scored two of South Africa’s four half-centuries in Australia, what the country’s system, albeit flawed, is capable of producing: “His growth has been tremendous, from a technical point of view and mentally. His success lies in being able to play at his tempo and his rhythm. He’s also clear in terms of his identity as a cricketer. He understands who he is and how he’s going to go about making runs. That’s a big part of batting. If you see Dean bat, you know what you’re getting. You see the same thing day in, day out. You would say the same about [Jacques] Kallis or Graeme Smith. I think [Verreynne] has that.”
Sammons also had good things to say about Khawaja, who made an undefeated 195 at the SCG: “You can easily go into the mindset of just trying to survive, in comparison to still being positive. That doesn’t mean you need to be reckless. What Khawaja’s done so well is stay in his gameplan. That’s going to be the key for us — to still have that positive mindset and not make it about survival.”
Khawaja’s reckless hack at a Kyle Abbott away swinger in Hobart in November 2016 precipitated a collapse of 8/32 that sealed South Africa’s innings victory, and with it series honours. Khawaja has since rebuilt his game, anchoring it on disciplined aggression, and was rewarded with three centuries, two innings in the 90s and three half-centuries in 2022. He was dismissed for fewer than 50 only four times in his dozen trips to the crease.
Elgar has walked that walk, but in something like reverse. He has made eight of his 13 centuries in 102 innings since the 2016 Hobart Test, but none in his most recent 31 completed innings; an unbeaten 96 against India at the Wanderers in January an honourable exception. Elgar has gone two years without a hundred, which is unacceptable for a player who leads by example more than by other measures of captaincy. It doesn’t help that, in his six innings in Australia, he made some of his trouble himself by being strangled down the legside three times and falling victim to a runout.
“I accept that maybe once, maybe twice but the third time is something that highly irritates me,”Elgar said. “You have a way of getting out and bowlers target that. Ten years into a Test career, it’s foreign territory for me. It’s something to reflect on and you can either say it’s shit luck or not. I’m going to have an open mind around it and have a look. It’s frustrating that I could never get going and when I did get going I managed to run myself out [for 26 at the MCG].”
As a red-ball specialist in a system short on red-ball cricket Elgar will be able to get away from it all for the next few weeks: “I’m taking as much time off as I want; that’s what I need at the moment. I just want to get on a plane, and go home and chill out and have a braai and maybe go to the bush and play some golf.”
Maketa, who is reportedly on a shortlist of candidates CSA have interviewed for the permanent version of his position, spoke with a refreshing frankness: “It’s important for us to be honest with ourselves. We had a tough series in England and we had a tough series here. We want to compete against the big teams but we don’t have the Test caps they have at the moment. We’ve done well against them in the past and now they are better than us. We brought the best team we had [to Australia] and we didn’t compete.
“Conditions were better than what we’ve played in in the last 12 months. I was quite encouraged that we’d be able to get that 350 par score for us to be able to put them under pressure and we weren’t able to do that.
“The stats say South Africa is the most difficult place to bat when it comes to Test cricket [with batters averaging 29.63, lower than in any other country that has hosted more than one Test]. We’ve found a way. With the younger batters, do we expose them to better wickets to get enough runs to perform at this level or do we say we are the team that’s going to win at home and we make it difficult for visiting teams? That’s the way we need to look at things.
“If we are comfortable to win at home, we can leave it the way it is. We want to be successful all around the world. Because to win the WTC you have to come here and win, you have to go to India and win. We don’t want to be a team that only wins at home.”
A year ago, South Africans wouldn’t have dreamt they would have to have this conversation. The balloon has burst.
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