South Africa step back into the light

“Maybe it’s that extra week of getting used to the conditions and knowing what their bowlers are doing.” – Rassie van der Dussen on South Africa’s stunning comeback.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

THIS time last week South Africa were wondering what had hit them so hard that it was difficult for many to believe they could stagger to their feet in time to be floored again in the same ring. A week on, they’re still wondering what hit them. But now they have a game to win. Yes, to win.   

“We’re not really sure what went wrong,” Rassie van der Dussen told an online press conference on Sunday about New Zealand’s emphatic victory in the first Test. “We prepared well and we knew what conditions we had, in terms of the swing and the grass on the wicket.” Despite that the Kiwis won by an innings and 276 runs in only seven sessions, inflicting South Africa’s second-heaviest defeat. 

The South Africans had five days to try and pull themselves together before they had to return to Hagley Oval for the second Test. And here they are, taking a lead of 211 into the fourth day’s play thanks largely to the bristling Kagiso Rabada’s 5/60 and even after Colin de Grandhomme’s bruising undefeated 120, his highest Test score. The visitors have given themselves a decent chance of denying New Zealand what would be their first Test series success over South Africa. How had the astonishing turnaround been engineered?

“We didn’t change too much in terms of preparation for this Test,” Van der Dussen said. “Maybe it’s that extra week of getting used to the conditions and knowing what their bowlers are doing.”

That the pitch is browner, slower and, Van der Dussen said, drier than the surface used in the first Test is a major factor in the South Africans’ resurrection. But that doesn’t fully explain how a side who were bowled out for 95 and 111 and lost Zubayr Hamza — one of their sturdier batters in that catastrophe of a first innings — to a thumb injury faced the identical attack days later and made 364. Maybe this is less about changing conditions and more about lived experience: they knew they could do this because they had already done it.

“We’ve been under pressure before, in the previous series as well,” Van der Dussen said, an allusion to South Africa’s rousing fightback after losing the first Test of their home rubber against India in December and January to win the last two matches. “The way we came back said a lot about where we are.”

The visitors have also had to come back in this match. They were 302/8 in the first innings before Marco Jansen and Keshav Maharaj shared 62, a record for South Africa’s eighth wicket against New Zealand. In the second innings, they were 38/3 when Van der Dussen and Temba Bavuma started a partnership that swelled to 65. Kyle Verreynne and Wiaan Mulder, who are both 24 and playing their sixth and eighth Tests, took the lead past 200 and will pick up where they left off on Monday.

“We’ve got two young guys at the crease with another young guy coming in,” Van der Dussen said, the latter no doubt a reference to 21-year-old Jansen, who showed no qualms about confronting Neil Wagner verbally and responding to the lusty left-armer’s barrage of bouncers with a bevy of boundaries to score a career-best 37 not out on Saturday. “If they can show some character at the crease, I think it will go a long way.”

How long would that way have to be? “We need to get to the 300 [lead] mark and hope it deteriorates so the spinner can come into the game,” Van der Dussen said. That seems a sensible but routine statement, the kind of thing many players would say when their teams are batting going into the fourth day. Not this time.

Dean Elgar is the first captain to choose to bat first after winning the toss in the 11 Tests played at Hagley Oval. Almost as rare at this ground is the inclusion of someone of Maharaj’s ilk. New Zealand haven’t selected a specialist spinner in seven of those 11 matches, and not for five games now. 

Before last week, South Africa had never played a Test at Hagley Oval. Their last match in the format in Christchurch was at Lancaster Park in March 1999, when Herschelle Gibbs batted for almost 11 hours and faced 468 balls — both career highs — for his undefeated 211. If that suggests the pitch was as slow as a sun-dried slug, there’s proof in the fact that Gibbs’ other double hundred was the 228 he made against Pakistan at Newlands in January 2003, when he spent four-and-a-half hours less at the crease than in his Christchurch vigil and scored 17 more runs off 228 fewer deliveries. No prizes for guessing which of those innings was more in keeping with the way Gibbs played.

Neither for pointing out that Hagley Oval is a faster, more exciting, all-round better pitch in keeping with the modern game. Even so, it was an unknown quantity for the South Africans prior to the first Test, and they would have been forgiven for being fearful of it after that disaster.  

So, whatever happens on the last two days of this match, that the visitors have been able, amid the debris of their performance last week, to find the calm, clarity and confidence to know who they are and what they can do is remarkable. To not only put that knowledge into practice effectively, but in doing so to fly in the face of the orthodoxy of what has gone before at this ground is testament to strong leadership. To be able to find the balance between following their own hearts and minds, and remembering who and what they are up against and where is evidence, surely, of a healthy team culture.

Already, New Zealand will have to score more runs than any side have done to win a Test here. But South Africa’s supporters shouldn’t be overly excited by that. The current highest successful fourth innings at Hagley Oval is the 201/3 Australia made in February 2016. That the Australians scored 131 runs in 34 overs on the last day to seal victory four overs after lunch says the pitch stayed sound for batting to the last: they didn’t need to be scored, but many more runs were left in that surface. 

Teams who have had a fourth innings here have won five times, and lost just once. The solitary instance of a team being dismissed in the fourth innings was in December 2018, when Sri Lanka were bowled out for 236 chasing 660. That, mind, after New Zealand had been rattled out for 178 in the first innings. It is also true that sides who have batted first at Hagley Oval have won just three times — exactly half the number of wins achieved batting second.

With little chance of rain predicted for Monday and a marginal 40% chance of scattered showers forecast for Tuesday, victory seems inevitable. For which team remains deliciously uncertain, but, after last week, even that will feel like success for the South Africans. Despite everything, they have a game to win.

First published by Cricbuzz.  

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Cricket has seen its greatest game. Now what?

Stokes has lost his bat along with, apparently, his senses. He’s on his knees, his hands held up in what looks like surrender, eyes wide, wild and white with bewilderment. Don’t shoot.

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TELFORD VICE in London

IT was the ricochet that did it, that tipped Sunday’s men’s World Cup final over the edge of reason and into Tarantino territory.

Until then, this had been a cricket match. A tight, tense cricket match with a lot on the line but a cricket match nonetheless. No more, no less.

Three balls left in the game. Nine to get. Two wickets in hand. Trent Boult hares towards Ben Stokes.

A full toss starts on the line of the left-hander’s off stump and veers towards middle. Stokes smears it, meatily, like a punch to the gut, towards midwicket. Martin Guptill is on the case — charges in, gathers the ball with surgical slickness, uncoils into a throw aimed at the stumps Stokes is hoofing towards to complete a second run.

Stokes knows it’s going to be close. He dives. The ball is whistling towards a direct hit. If it somehow doesn’t find its target, Tom Latham is poised over the wicket, primed to do the needful.

But the ball never arrives. Instead it collides with Stokes’ outstretched bat as he crashes to earth. And away it scoots at an angle of about 160 degrees compared to where Guptill unlocked and unloaded.

Colin de Grandhomme is after the ball, but he is running like a man under water chasing a stone skipping on the surface. It takes the ball six seconds from the point of its contact with Stokes’ bat to the moment it bumps, apologetically, into the boundary cushion at third. It feels like six hours. De Grandhomme arrives a moment later, spent with effort and sick with the realisation of what this means.

Stokes has lost his bat along with, apparently, his senses. He’s on his knees, his hands held up in what looks like surrender, eyes wide, wild and white with bewilderment. Don’t shoot.

Kumar Dharmasena and Marais Erasmus confer, and Dharmasena turns his back on the pitch to signal the scorers. He holds up all five fingers of his right hand and the thumb of his left: six runs added. Three needed off two balls. 

Nevermind the rest. The fogginess in what cricket calls its laws about whether the run being completed should count if overthrows result, the two runouts off the last two balls — both without the batters having faced a ball, a first in a World Cup innings — to tie the scores, the super overs that failed to untie the scores, the boundary count that finally made England the champions — and was surely the revenge of some sport-hating ultra-nerd of a bean counter who sits stooped, openmouthed, sticky-eyed, unshowered for days, over a screen, captured by the numbers flitting this way and that, who wouldn’t know humanity if it opened a vein and bled all over him.

None of that is as weird as the ricochet. It’s the kind of miracle performed by accident at a pool table in a bar at 4am by the most hopeless player, who is drunk enough to forget how hopeless he is. Except that Stokes, like everybody else involved, is stone cold sober.

Perched high above all that, the 237 accredited journalists don’t know whether the pressbox is imploding or exploding. But they do know, when the fireworks finally rent the evening sky, that none of them has seen anything like this, much less reported on it. How do you write the final scoreline? England won by what? New Zealand lost by what?

Hours later one of the reporters, a former international player, rises from a laptop still steaming with the last of the thousands of words he has written this sacred and profane day. He offers a few more words, gently, quietly, with something like apprehension in his tired eyes, into the still sparking air.

“Jesus.

“Dunno.

“Super overs.

“Boundary counts.

“Sponge boundaries.

“LED stumps.

“Dunno.

“Christ.”

He is trying to reconcile the game he used to play and thought he would know forever with what he has seen, and he is failing. There is poignance here that must be protected and cherished. The gods bless and keep this man.

Remember when the 1999 World Cup final at Edgbaston was the greatest one-day international yet played (yes, my beloved wounded fellow South Africans, it really was)? Remember when the 438 game took that title on a crash-boom-bang crazy day at the Wanderers seven years later? Remember the suit-ruined, tear-stained 2015 World Cup semi-final at Eden Park?

Forget that. All of it. And all the other contenders. ODI cricket as we thought we knew it no longer exists.

All that does exist is a question too terrifying to answer, but which was asked by every beat of every racing heart in Sunday’s golden afterglow.

Where does this damn fool game go now that its greatest match has been played?

Stokes wins closest ever World Cup final for England

Good luck to the keepers of cricket’s annals, who will struggle to smuggle this scoreline neatly into their records.

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TELFORD VICE at Lord’s

BEN Stokes played a charmed innings to mastermind England’s triumph in the most closely fought final in men’s World Cup history.

England, who played in their fourth final, claimed the trophy for the first time by beating New Zealand, who had reached in the decider for the second consecutive time.

But it needed a super over to separate the sides after the match was tied — New Zealand totalled 241/8 and England were dismissed for 241.

Even that wasn’t enough to decide the issue: both teams scored 15 runs in the super over, so the equation was further distilled to which side had hit the most boundaries.

All told, super over and everything, New Zealand hit 14 fours and three sixes.

England? Twenty-four fours and two sixes.

Arise, World Cup champions. And good luck to the keepers of the annals, who will struggle to smuggle that scoreline neatly into their records.

New Zealand have batted first only three other times in their 11 games in the tournament, and twice in those matches they have made smaller totals than Sunday’s 241/8. They won one of those games and lost the other.

Their most dependable batters, Kane Williamson and Ross Taylor, who between them had scored both of the centuries and five of the 11 half-centuries the Kiwis have made during the World Cup going into the final, were dismissed for 30 and 15.

It was left to opener Henry Nicholls, playing only his third match of a tournament in which his 28 against India in the semi-final at Old Trafford, to provide stability with his 77-ball 55.

Williamson helped Nicholls add 74 for the second wicket, the only half-century stand of the innings, and No. 5 Tom Latham’s 47 was New Zealand’s next best effort.

Chris Woakes and Jofra Archer used the new ball effectively for England, and Woakes took 3/37.

Liam Plunkett claimed 3/42, taking all of his wickets with cross-seam deliveries.

Of England’s six bowlers, only Stokes, who went wicketless for 20 off three overs, conceded five or more runs a ball.

New Zealand defended a lower total as recently as Wednesday, when they made 239/8 in their semi-final against India at Old Trafford and won by 18 runs.

But they reduced the Indians to 5/3 in the first 19 balls of the innings — the like of which they couldn’t repeat on Sunday.

Instead Jonny Bairstow stood firm through stands of 28 with Jason Roy and 31 with Joe Root.

Roy was fortunate to survive, by the slimmest of “umpire’s call” margins, which was handed down after South Africa’s Marius Erasmus decided the Englishman was not out, when the New Zealanders reviewed Trent Boult’s shout for lbw off the first ball of the innings.

Then Colin de Grandhomme dropped a return catch Bairstow offered in the 11th, when he was 18 and England were 39/1.

Root gave De Grandhomme some solace six overs later when he flashed at a wide delivery and was caught behind.

Bairstow went for 36 three overs after that, dragging Lockie Ferguson onto his stumps.

And when Ferguson roared in from the cover boundary to catch, centimetres from the turf, Jimmy Neesham’s first ball of the match — which had been hammered there by Eoin Morgan — England were 86/4 and reduced to their last pair of proper batters.

But they were Stokes and Jos Buttler, and they clipped 110 runs off 133 balls in a largely controlled partnership that endured into the 45th over and took England to within 46 runs of victory.

It ended when Buttler hammered Ferguson to deep cover, where substitute Tim Southee held a fine sliding catch. Buttler’s 60 came off 60 balls and included six fours.

That started a slide of six wickets for 45 runs, but Stokes survived for an undefeated 84 off 98 balls with five fours and two sixes.

England were 220/7 with Stokes 63 not out and in the 49th over when he smashed Neesham to the midwicket boundary — where Boult fell over the boundary and turned a catch into a six.

England needed 15 off the 50th over, and Stokes lofted Boult for six over midwicket.

That narrowed the equation to nine off three — clearly in the Kiwis’ favour.

Stokes smacked Boult to midwicket along the ground, and Martin Guptill’s throw hit Stokes as he dived to make his ground.

From there, it scooted over the boundary to earn six runs off one delivery.

That meant England needed three runs off two balls, but only two were added as Adil Rashid and Mark Wood were run out in the process.

That tied the scores, prompting the super over.

Stokes and Buttler returned to club 15 runs off Boult, each of them hitting a four.

Neesham and Guptill came out to face Archer, and Neesham lifted a massive six over midwicket off the second ball.

Two were required off the last ball, but Guptill was run out by Roy’s throw to wicketkeeper Buttler scrambling back for the second.

That tied the scores again, but for only as long as it took to tally up the boundaries.