Small performances by big players hurting South Africa

The damage runs deep, and it will take a lot more of doing the right thing to repair it.  

TELFORD VICE in Johannesburg

ONE of your team’s batters tops the list of run-scorers in a series. Another has been the most successful bowler. Two more are in the top five in each category. You’ve won the rubber, surely. Or have at least done well enough for your supporters to be satisfied that you are on the right track as a team. Not if you’re South Africa, whose 3-1 Test series drubbing by England was completed at the Wanderers on Monday.

No-one scored more runs than Quinton de Kock’s series total of 380, or took more wickets than Anrich Nortjé’s 18. Rassie van der Dussen’s aggregate of 274 and Kagiso Rabada’s 14 strikes — matching Stuart Broad for the series’ second-biggest haul — were also up there. 

But the devil is in other details. Not one of the three centuries scored was for South Africa, who owned only one of the five century stands — despite banking 12 of the 28 partnerships of at least 50. If a score of 30 is accepted as a good start, South Africans made 23 of the 53 that were registered. Only 10 were converted into half-centuries. England turned 12 of their 30s into 50s, and Dom Sibley, Ollie Pope and Ben Stokes made them count still more by going on to centuries.

This kind of disappointment is becoming an unhappy habit for South Africa. Not since the first Test against India in Visakhapatnam in October, when Dean Elgar made 160 and De Kock 111, has any of the 120 trips to the crease their players have begun reached three figures. South Africa have gone 28 innings, stretching back to March 2018, without making a declaration. Only twice in those innings have they not been dismissed. Batting unit, you have a problem.

Hashim Amla’s removal from the Test equation after the home series against Sri Lanka in February last year is an obvious factor in South Africa’s decline, but even this great player’s contribution wasn’t worth a century in his last 27 completed innings. Closer to the truth is that the remaining senior batters — bar De Kock — are faltering.

Famously, the Lankans became the first Asian team to win a series in South Africa — and inflicted the first of the eight defeats Faf du Plessis’ team have suffered in their last nine Tests. In the same period Elgar and Du Plessis have performed significantly below their optimum levels. Elgar has scored 519 runs at 30.52 with one century in his 18 innings. His career average is 38.49. Du Plessis has batted more than 10 points below his overall average — 29.00 versus 39.80 — for his 493 runs, also in 18 trips to the crease, in which he hasn’t made a century. Only the other old hand, De Kock, has pulled his weight, scoring a hundred and averaging 42.11 — better than his career mark of 39.12 — and racking up 758 runs in 18 innings. That’s 239 more runs than Elgar and 265 more than Du Plessis, and from the same number of opportunities.

And while newer members of the batting line-up like Van der Dussen and Pieter Malan have made decent beginnings at this level, and Temba Bavuma has returned after re-affirming his credentials at franchise level, whatever progress they make will be blunted by the struggles of the established players. Nortjé, who bowled his heart out and batted with courage and discipline against England, will not get all of the praise he deserves because the bigger picture is too dark to allow his light to shine fully.

Not that the bowlers are without blame: the next time Rabada fails to control his emotions on the field, Cricket South Africa shouldn’t wait for the ICC to act. They should dock their hotheaded ace his entire match fee and a month’s salary, and tell him that punishment will double the time after that.

It’s one thing for inexperienced players to be able to harden their game in the protective shadow of those who have been around the block, quite another for them to have to carry the side in the absence of responsible performances by their elders and, supposedly, betters.  

But before we disappear down a rabbithole of gloom, let’s show what has been earned: respect. Elgar and Du Plessis have stood rock solid for South Africa, as players and fine examples for others to follow, for years. They are at the heart of a team who, 11 months before the start of their current slide, became the first South Africa side to take a home Test series off Australia in one of the most dramatic rubbers yet played. Generations from now, cricket tragics will still talk of the Sandpapergate series.

Also, let’s not expect the effect of months of shambolic administration — as things stand, the players are taking the board to court over a plan to restructure the domestic system that would lead to job losses — to be resolved by the appointment of respected figures like Smith. The damage runs deep, and it will take a lot more of doing the right thing to repair it.  

Even so, it is a worry that Du Plessis not only employed tactics during the England series that were at times difficult to credit, but defended them. Elgar, meanwhile, has succumbed to increasingly ragged strokes. At the Wanderers, he unleashed a wild flap to point and, in the second innings, a looping hook back to the bowler that was worthy of a lower order player.

Once were warriors. Indeed, they always will be. But, while they’re playing, they need to perform. As the freshly retired Vernon Philander could tell them, the adulation comes only after you call it a career. For now, all that matters is runs.

First published by Cricbuzz.

South Africa still on the mountain, looking up, sliding down

“It’s quite a few runs to chase down but we’ve got to hold on to some sort of positivity.” – Mark Boucher on chasing 466 to win the Wanderers Test.

TELFORD VICE at The Wanderers

A lot can happen in 44 days. That’s time enough to cross the Sahara by camel three times. Or to traverse the Atlantic in a yacht and arrive with two weeks to spare, even if the wind dies. Or to walk from Sydney to Melbourne, there and back, twice. But it’s not enough to climb Everest. That takes 64 days.

So we shouldn’t expect South Africa to be near the summit of the mountain they started to climb 44 days ago when Graeme Smith and Mark Boucher sat with Enoch Nkwe and Linda Zondi at a press conference at Newlands and convinced many they knew how to get to the summit. That acting director of cricket Smith, head coach Boucher and batting and bowling consultants Kallis and Charl Langeveldt played 436 Tests between them means they are experienced. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are any good at guiding succeeding generations to success. It also doesn’t mean they won’t be: who in South African cricket is better qualified?

But, by the look of things after three difficult days at the Wanderers — which followed five difficult days at St George’s Park, which came after five difficult days at Newlands — they are leading their charges down the mountain, not up.

The game has changed since the new regime played at international level, even in the not quite six years since Smith retired. Boucher admitted exactly that in the wake of Kagiso Rabada being banned for the fourth Test for getting in Joe Root’s face. First Boucher said players of his era spoke more freely on the field. Then he said he “wasn’t aware of the demerit points; that whole system and how it works”. There’s this website, ‘Bouch’: https://icc-static-files.s3.amazonaws.com/ICC/document/2018/09/30/fbdd3c89-79d6-4052-a8e3-a426aa8a1da2/ICC-Code-of-Conduct-for-Players-and-PSP-Effective-30-Sept-2018-.pdf. Smith has, more than once and as recently as Thursday, answered valid questions about his role by pointing out how new he is in the job. You’re seven weeks away from the end of your current contract, ‘Biff’, and even if it is renewed it’s time you got a grip. These criticisms are not meant as cheap shots. Nobody wants to see positively committed people falter. But they have to create for themselves the best opportunities to achieve their goals. If they don’t failure is assured. Smith and Boucher know all about how to do that as players. They aren’t players anymore.

If Cricket South Africa (CSA) assumed all they had to do to fix the game’s problems was appoint people like Smith, Boucher, Kallis and Langeveldt, and then sit back and watch improvement role in like a high tide, they are even more inept than we think. The bigger picture is far brighter since their arrival. But altering the course cricket was forced onto under CSA’s previous set of suits will take far longer than 44 or 64 days, and can only happen after the damage they caused has been repaired to a significant degree. Finding new sponsors, forging a better relationship with broadcaster SuperSport, and re-establishing the broken partnership with the players are at the top of the list, and progress is being made in those areas. But how do we expect South Africa to perform better on the field if those matters have yet to be properly resolved? Not that we expected them to perform as poorly as they have done as the current series has progressed. The way England’s batters shoved the South Africans around in their most emphatic home conditions in the first innings has not been seen in living memory. On Sunday, the same captain and an attack weakened by the removal of their leader, Vernon Philander, with a torn hamstring after he had bowled just nine deliveries dismissed England for 157 fewer runs than in the first innings. Unlike in long stretches of play in the that innings, Faf du Plessis set fields that had men in catching positions — instead of putting eight on the boundary — and the bowling was fuller and straighter than the short, wide drivel dished up then. Du Plessis ended the innings with a flying super hero catch at wide slip to remove Joe Root for 58 and earn Beuran Hendricks a five-for — 5/64 — on debut.

“We bowled better in the second innings,” Boucher said after stumps on Sunday. “In stages we bowled well in the first innings. We didn’t bowl well in the first session [on Friday, when Zak Crawley and Dom Sibley became only the fourth opening pair and the first foreigners to share a century stand in the initial innings of a match at this ground]. I don’t think there was enough aggression and we probably bowled a little bit full, which is understandable because everyone always talks about getting the ball a bit fuller at the Wanderers.

“The wicket has quickened up a bit so it was easier to hit those back of a lengths [on Sunday] and see the ball carry through and the nicks carry as well. In the first innings it looked a lot slower than what it has played like in the last two days.

“We did come back and then towards the back end, they took the game away from us [when Mark Wood and Stuart Broad shared 82 for the 10th wicket, a record for Wanderers Tests]. If we had taken a wicket early in that last partnership we would be sitting in a different predicament at the moment.

“But we are still not scoring the runs we need to, especially with regards to the top six, which is putting us under pressure. In order to win a Test match, you need to go out there and score runs and that’s where we are suffering at the moment.”

Translation: since they won the first Test at Centurion, even South Africa’s better days have been tinged with negativity. They will start their second innings on Sunday staring at a mountain 466 runs high. No team have yet scored that many to win a Test, no South Africa batter has made a century in the series, and the target is 156 more than the biggest achieved to win a Wanderers Test. In December 2013 South Africa reached 450/7 before, infuriatingly, refusing to pursue 458 to beat India. But that team included Smith, Amla, Kallis and AB de Villiers.

“If we bat for two days, the runrate is very gettable,” Boucher said. “It’s quite a few runs to chase down but we’ve got to hold on to some sort of positivity. I’d like to see us take it deep into the last day. If that’s the case, the English bowlers would have spent a lot of time on their feet and that’s maybe when we can throw that punch to try and win the game. There are ways and means to go about getting 450 and we need to try and do that.” And 16 more, coach. 

Could the key be Du Plessis, a usually confident, charismatic captain and player who has, from a distance, admittedly, dwindled into a withdrawn, greying figure who looks as if he is trying to take the captain grumpy title from Michael Atherton? Du Plessis cracked his widest smile in weeks when he ended England’s second innings by taking a super hero’s diving catch at wide slip to earn Beuran Hendricks a five-for — 5/64 — on debut. 

“He is under pressure from a weight of runs [perspective] as well; captaincy, all that stuff, but the players back him in the dressingroom,” Boucher said. “It’s nice to see him take that catch towards the end of the day. Hopefully it will lift his spirits. He will go out there and fight. He understands that. He is the leader and he wants to do well and lead from the front. Hopefully there is something big around the corner for Faf. The whole scene is set for him to come under pressure and score big runs and get us close to winning a Test match.”

Famously, Du Plessis scored a century on debut in Adelaide in November 2012 to deny Australia victory, and he made another in that match against India at the Wanderers six years ago. Now near the end of his career, he is running out of hurrahs. He’s also gone 10 innings without reaching 50. The mountain will not come to Faf. Will he go to the mountain?

First published by Cricbuzz.

Batting, bowling and boorishness

“Hit him again!” – a Wanderers spectator as Zak Crawley prepared to face his first delivery after being felled by a bouncer to the head from Anrich Nortjé.

TELFORD VICE at The Wanderers

DROPS dripped. That’s a sentence, complete and perfect, from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It was just as true about the Wanderers on Friday. Drops started dripping, in their millions, late on Thursday night and continued unabated until the afternoon. Drops also dripped, in singles, from the pressbox ceiling around the time of the scheduled 10am start. A bucket placed beneath caught them apologetically. You might say it was a sorry sight all round. And you might also have made a decent dent in reading War and Peace as the dreary nothingness of the morning wore on towards a lost day.

But, at 1.20pm, Vernon Philander stood at the top of his mark at the Golf Course End on one of cricket’s fastest drying outfields, Zak Crawley awaited him, and away we went. And for the best part of the next three hours not a lot happened. For South Africa, anyway. The closest they came to putting anything like a dent in England’s batting was in the third over before tea, when Crawley missed a pull and Anrich Nortjé dinged him on the helmet with a bouncer timed at 149 kilometres per hour. Play was held up for eight minutes while Crawley was medically assessed and tried several replacement helmets on for size before being allowed to continue. When he did, up went a cry from the country’s most raucous crowd: “Hit him again!” That followed Dom Sibley winning a reprieve after being given out caught behind to a legside delivery from Beuran Hendricks that flicked a pad, and surviving being caught in the gully because Philander had bowled a no-ball.   

Aside from those minor spikes the Richter scale readout of the first half of Friday’s play was a serenely level line. On the meanest junkyard dog of a pitch in the land, and having opted to fling five fast bowlers into the fray, South Africa looked as if they had brought a plastic straw to a lightsabre fight. Hendricks, instead of Nortjé, sharing the new ball with Philander looked too much like the blunder of Dane Paterson, instead of the now banned Kagiso Rabada, doing so at St George’s Park. But there was poignance in the fact that Philander is playing his last Test and Hendricks his first. “I’m always tuning into ‘Vern’, making sure I can get enough info out of him,” Hendricks said after stumps.” Even so, their shortish length and widish line allowed Crawley and Sibley to select balls to hit as if they were picking their favourite bits out of a salad.

Crawley drove straight with aplomb — once almost sawing Sibley in half — and Sibley repeatedly showcased his mastery of one of the most challenging strokes in the game, the on-drive.

The last ball before tea, a legside effort from Nortjé that Sibley smeared to fine leg for four, took England to 100 without loss. That marked the third time in succession in the series that South Africa’s bowlers had failed to strike in the opening session of a match. It also sealed the only occasion in the 16 Wanderers Tests since Graeme Smith and Herschelle Gibbs put on 149 against West Indies in December 2003 that a pair of openers have shared a century in the very first innings of a match here, only the third time it’s happened at all in the 41 Wanderers Tests, and the first time it’s been accomplished by the visiting team.

The Wanderers is an ominous 13th on the list of all 121 Test grounds in terms of the lowest average for the first wicket: 31.51, or marginally outside the top 10 percentile. If that doesn’t get the point across, this should: the Wanderers is a damnably difficult place to bat, and exponentially more so on a fresh pitch against well-rested bowlers armed with a new ball.

Clearly, no-one told Crawley and Sibley, who seemed as at home as if they were having a laugh on the Kent and Surrey featherbeds of their youth. “They left well and didn’t play at anything that was loose,” Hendricks said. “I was surprised at how comfortable they looked.” By now, someone has told them that no England pair had shared a century stand in the first innings of a Test since Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook put up 196 against Australia at Lord’s in July 2009.

They did so with too much help from their friends in the other dressingroom. “We told ourselves [at tea] that we were better than what we bowled,” Hendricks said. He took that seriously, and in the third over after the resumption another of his scrambled seam legside stranglers did for Sibley. Sixteen balls later Crawley played a weird, lazy hybrid between a stroke and a leave and was taken behind. Then came two grassed chances in the space of 23 deliveries by Pieter Malan and Dwaine Pretorius, neither of them straightforward. Drops dripped, you might say. Only for Joe Denly and Ben Stokes to be dismissed 16 balls apart, and a match that had listed heavily in one side’s favour less than two hours previously had been yanked back to something like level with all the rudeness that is visited on pedestrians who dare try cross Johannesburg’s car-centric, pavement-poor streets.

And the Wanderers, like Stokes discovered as he stalked off, is this city congealed into one wet spot; the kind of place were boorishness comes standard. Even the umpires, Rod Tucker and Joel Wilson, weren’t spared when they called time for bad light. They were booed all the way off the ground and assailed by a loud and clear, “Fuck you!” Welcome, gentlemen, neither to war nor peace, but to Joburg.

First published by Cricbuzz.

South Africa’s bunless, meatless, bloodless bowling

“What we wanted to achieve we achieved today.” – Charl Langeveldt is a satisfied bowling consultant.

TELFORD VICE at St George’s Park

AT the Dukes fast food stand in the parking lot at St George’s Park, R60 buys “The Big Vern”. If it lives up to the chalkboard menu’s promise, it’s a monster: “flame grilled double beef patty, triple bacon, double cheese burger with sweet red onion, gerkins [sic] and lettuce on a toasted sesame seed bun”. In only the seventh over of the third Test, Quinton de Kock stood as close to the stumps as the first Dukes customer in the queue was to the counter. De Kock was keeping to Vernon Philander.

That the pitch would be slow was no surprise. Should someone profess knowledge of a fast surface at St George’s Park, they’re in politics. That the pitch would be as slow as has transpired wasn’t expected, but neither was two solid weeks of humidity layered onto an already sizzling summer. These things happen, and there was one of the most successful new-ball bowlers of his generation in his fourth over of the match, running in from the Park Drive End brandishing the still-new ball towards a wicketkeeper stationed snugly just 22 yards away.

Still, that was more explicable than the choice of who barrelled in from the Duckpond End once Philander had got through those first six deliveries for a single. Dane Paterson is a beefy medium pacer who has collected 21 wickets at an average of 21.80 and an economy rate of 2.82 in five first-class matches for the Cobras this season, and he has done a decent job in some of his four one-day internationals and eight T20s for South Africa. But using him to open the bowling on debut on a pitch as flat as the nearby beaches and in an attack that harboured Kagiso Rabada and Anrich Nortjé seemed to make little sense, even if England’s openers, Zak Crawley and Dom Sibley, had managed an hour or more at the crease together just once in their previous four partnerships in the series and would need all their discipline to stay attuned to the conditions. Charl Langeveldt, South Africa’s bowling consultant, saw the matter differently: “We stuck to our gameplan; trying to keep them under two-and-a-half for long periods. We tried to bowl straighter lines. What we wanted to achieve we achieved today.” So it wasn’t pretty, Langeveldt appeared to want to say. So what? 

Philander reeled off a first spell of four overs for five runs. He bowled only seven more overs in the day. Surely that was too light a workload for a strike specialist of his calibre? “The surface doesn’t suit ‘Vern’ that much,” Langeveldt said. “It’s quite slow, and batsmen can adjust [to how the ball moves] off the wicket. ‘Vern’ is great with the new ball but, as we’ve found out in these conditions, we’ll use him sparingly.” In that case, shouldn’t Philander have been spared the bother entirely? “He’s doing a job for us. It’s a holding job. If he takes wickets with the new ball it’s effective. If there’s any reverse swing he can be effective as well. I wasn’t thinking of not playing him.”

As for Paterson: “On this surface we needed to make the new ball count. ‘KG’s [Rabada] a wonderful bowler with the new ball, but Paterson does bowl a fuller length — he makes the batsman play more.” There’s logic in Langeveldt’s argument, but could he appreciate that others might see South Africa’s approach as resignation to the view that the pitch mitigated against attacking bowling? “Everyone has an opinion. You always look to strike. We looked to strike with the new ball. We just thought with a bit of moisture in the air this morning we needed to bowl a fuller length. In the second innings ‘KG’ will take the new ball again.”

Not that Rabada didn’t have his moments, putting the first chink in England’s armour four overs after lunch when he had Sibley caught at leg gully to end the opening stand at 70. Then, in the seventh over after tea, he nailed the top of a leaving Joe Root’s off-stump with a delivery that stayed low. That triggered a raw and raucous celebration by Rabada that was reminiscent of how he sent Steve Smith on his way at this ground in March 2018 — when the two players collided and Rabada had to fight off a ban on appeal. This time, although shoulders came close to connecting, there was no physical contact. Fast bowlers like Rabada, Langeveldt explained, walked a tightrope: “KG’s that type of person, he’s always looking for a scrap to get him motivated. It gets him fired up. I always say to him him, ‘Just control your aggression’. You need fast bowlers to be aggressive. It’s hard work on this wicket and the plan worked. We spoke about it: a fuller length to Joe Root to try and get him lbw or bowled, and it worked. Fair play to him; he celebrated.”

Rabada’s reaction might also have owed something to the challenge of trying to bowl fast on a pitch that is all about about the ooze, rather than the flow, of runs and wickets. It’s a surface that doesn’t give a damn about what anyone wants or even needs. You get what you get, now get on with it.

De Kock’s burger bar boogaloo up to the stumps was the first suggestion that Faf du Plessis was re-assessing his tactics. Confirmation was surely Keshav Maharaj wheeling away as early as the sixth over before lunch. And on and on he bowled until his wheels must have felt like falling off — all the way through the second session and until the 10th over before the close, when the new ball was due and immediately taken, this time by Nortjé and Philander. Maharaj’s spell of 30 overs, the equivalent of bowling an entire session from both ends, cost less than two runs an over: still another indication that, on this pitch, patience will be an even more valuable virtue than usual. Maharaj was back for two more overs to end the day’s play. And for all that his sole reward was the wicket of Joe Denly, who might still have been batting had De Kock not yelled a lone appeal after spotting that the ball had struck the pad flap before Denly middled it. In his next over Maharaj might also have removed the ICC’s newly minted “player of the year” for the third time in five innings in the rubber, but Ben Stokes escaped by the skin of an umpire’s call because the delivery had hit him outside the line. “He created a lot of chances, he kept the runrate down, and he looked the most threatening of all the bowlers on that wicket,” Langeveldt said of Maharaj’s endeavour.

He bowled a smidgen less than three times the number of overs Philander sent down on Thursday, and is surely set for many more as the match unfolds. Perhaps ‘Big Vern’ should do the decent thing and buy the man a burger.

First published by Cricbuzz.

How to drive the fans to drink

“The game was on the edge. Who was going to crack first? We cracked first.” – Mark Boucher

TELFORD VICE at Newlands

LIFELONG teetotallers might be interested to know what a hangover feels like. If they’re cricket fans, watching Sunday’s play at Newlands is their answer. Except that the headache, the rough voice, the body ache, the unsteady hands and the dodgy balance didn’t disappear somewhere around lunchtime.

England batted grittily all day, none more than Dom Sibley. South Africa bowled grimly all day, although a fired up Anrich Nortjé might want to debate the point over a beer. But there’s no doubting that, for the most part, the cricket was as grey as the skies above.

Not that you could blame the English for making it so. On Saturday the South Africans batted under the influence of poorly executed bad ideas — and some fine bowling — and handed their opponents the advantage. As Mark Boucher said after stumps on Sunday, “The game was on the edge. Who was going to crack first? We cracked first.” Then England put a stopper in the bottle to trap their prey, grinding their lead to 264 while losing only four wickets. Sometime on Monday their bowlers will uncork a vintage that should prove good enough to level the series.

South Africa’s last chance saloon would be a sudden glug of wickets on Monday morning. On Sunday’s evidence, that is unlikely. And that without considering when the pitch will call final rounds on reliable bounce for batters in the fourth innings.

It’s difficult to blame the bowlers for the mess the batters made, but South Africa’s attack took to their task with more determination than delight on a pitch that had lost much of its original fizz.

“After the first two days I would have said we wouldn’t want to chase any more than 250, but it has flattened out,” Boucher said. “We believe we can get quick wickets, and if we’re chasing 330 or 340 …”

Nortjé, who did everyone a favour by ending Joe Denly’s unlovely 111-ball 31 before tea and ended the day’s play by dismissing nightwatch Dom Bess with a brush of his glove, would seem South Africa’s best chance of staying in the game.

“You’ve got to have a guy who’s keen to do it with the ball in his hand,” Boucher said of Nortjé, who proved his willingness on Friday, when a rearing delivery crashed into a glove at shoulder height on its way into Quinton de Kock’s gloves. A rattled Root didn’t wait for the umpire to confirm his fate.

In the unlikelihood of Root having forgotten how he had been removed, Nortjé was only too ready to remind him on Sunday. Immediately after England’s captain took guard again, Nortjé produced a short, sharp delivery. Root was forced to yank himself out of its path. But his composure was not for the taking this time, and he fast forwarded the game with a half-century worthy of his talent and skill.

Keshav Maharaj endured a day of near misses, his deliveries often squirting off the edge and in the air — and just out of reach of despairing hands. Dwaine Pretorius give it everything, and earned the prize scalp of Root nine balls before the close. But South Africa didn’t get the best out of Kagiso Rabada and Vernon Philander. Rabada toiled listlessly, and was reduced to roaring in frustration rather than happiness when he had Zak Crawley taken behind. Philander struggled to beat the bat anything like as frequently as in the first innings.  

And all the while Sibley laboured on, like a lone, hard-grafting bartender late at night in a crowded drinking den. Not all centuries are works of art, but that shouldn’t diminish them. Sibley has already earned his respect from the South Africans, which will only increase should he add the 15 runs he needs to score his first hundred.

How many in the crowd would have appreciated his effort is open to question. Before lunch one spectator was flopped in his seat, head lolling back in a deep sleep. Later, another fan was significantly more deeply engrossed in a book than the cricket. Before the close, the Barmy Army took to entertaining themselves with the help of their very own Charlie Chaplin impersonator.

It was that kind of day for many of the 14,659 in the ground on Sunday, not counting assorted extras like the press. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we could use a drink.

First published by Cricbuzz.

How South Africa stepped back into their big shoes

“I’m sure his coaches were happy not to have to deal with 11 Mark Bouchers.” – right back at ya, coach, jokes Quinton de Kock.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

THE soles of the trainers Rassie van der Dussen wore at Newlands on Wednesday were studded with purple and turquoise rubber pebbles that made it seem as if he was walking on two flavours of bubblegum. Keshav Maharaj favoured a similar colour scheme, even on his uppers. But minus the pebbles; he is a smoother operator. Orange flames and blue smudges on a white background was Vernon Philander’s footwear preference. Quinton de Kock is unarguably the most outrageously talented in this company, but he wore the most understated shoes among them: blue-grey marl knit with off-white soles.

Mere weeks ago South African cricket was divided along as many lines as a stretch of crazy paving. The biggest cracks are still there — hello? Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) board? When are you going to resign? — and none of the major faultlines were in the team. Even so, to have all those contrastingly clad feet happily pointed in the same direction in the afterglow of victory in the first men’s Test against England at Centurion on Sunday seems miraculous.

It’s just one win, and the team is far from the only aspect of the game in this country that desperately needs fixing. But that success, and the manner of its achieving, hints at what awaits if more of the remaining problems are resolved.

In the wake of a failed World Cup and five consecutive Test defeats, the only way was up. But that doesn’t take away from the shining truth that the appointments of Jacques Faul as CSA’s acting chief executive, Graeme Smith as acting director of cricket, Mark Boucher as coach, and — for the summer — Jacques Kallis and Charl Langeveldt as batting and bowling consultants have had the desired effect. 

For Rassie van der Dussen, who was among South Africa’s more reliable batters at the World Cup and became the first man to score a half-century on debut in all three formats when he made 51 in the second innings at Centurion, the change for the better was striking.

“The work ethic was something that I’ve never seen before, and the intensity at training,” he said of preparations for the first Test. “It’s a new dawn for South African cricket. We were desperate to regain the public’s [good] opinion of us and of [CSA]. You have that responsibility to the fans — to put in a good performance and to win matches. Last year wasn’t the best for CSA and the Proteas, but the fight the guys showed — Anrich Nortjé’s innings showed what we’re about as a team — means we’re committed to giving our all.”

South Africa were 62/4 when Nortjé, playing his third Test, joined Van der Dussen as a nightwatch on the second evening. He survived 16 balls before stumps and another 21 the next day, in all batting for more than two hours for his career-best 40 and sharing a stand of 91 — South Africa’s biggest of the match and just one run shy of matching the partnership England openers Rory Burns and Dom Sibley put on in the second innings as the biggest overall. What South Africans saw on the field, Van der Dussen said, was an expression of what was happening beyond the balcony.

“There’s a different atmosphere in the changeroom. Boucher and Kallis have brought the really hard mentality that you need in Test cricket. It’s a high pressure environment; it’s strenuous out there on the field. You need that hardness and toughness. That’s why Graeme Smith brought in a guy like Mark Boucher — to be a fighter and feisty character. We have those characteristics, but Boucher really brought it out in us.”

Maharaj was adamant that, even through the bad times, “the passion has always been there”. But his own giddily raucous reaction to bowling Ben Stokes off the bottom edge on Sunday said plenty, especially as he isn’t the most demonstrative player on the field. “We’ve come off a difficult Test season, so to get the win meant a lot to the guys,” Maharaj said. “From where we were, in a disruptive period, to where we are now, we were always going to celebrate each others’ successes and the victory that came with that.”

Philander made his Test debut at Newlands in November 2011 in a team that included Smith, Kallis and Boucher. So he knew who he was dealing with: “When you have guys who have played at the highest level it makes it easier. You can really feed off them. Having the credibility of the guys in the changeroom now, who have been there and understand what it takes to get back up again, has made a big difference.”

Langeveldt’s influence was apparent at Centurion, where South Africa’s pace attack relied on more than the muscle and aggression that has been their plan A. Suddenly, they had skills and a willingness to bowl a fuller length.

“‘Langes’ has also been around,” Philander said. “Between him and myself and a couple of the bowlers, we try and get to the answer quicker, [rather] than feeling our way into a spell and then starting to realise [what to do] halfway through.”  

For De Kock, the proof of the pudding was in the reinvention: “The guys are very focused at the moment. I’m not saying they weren’t focused before, but the confidence was down. Now, with this win, the confidence is very high. We’ve got a great team environment, and we’re bringing that onto the field.”

There was even room for a joke in this brave new dressingroom. The first half of it was told at Centurion by Boucher, who said he was happy he didn’t have to get 11 De Kocks to straighten up and fly right. To De Kock fell the pleasure of delivering the punchline: “I’m sure his coaches were happy not to have to deal with 11 Mark Bouchers. I guess sometimes I can be a handful, but we get on well. He’s probably just giving me some lip anyway. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. Yet.”

Having won by 107 runs with four sessions to spare at Centurion, South Africa will hope to take their rekindled self-belief, and more, onto the field with them when the second Test starts at Newlands on Friday. They could do worse than look at their firmly grounded feet, realise that the shoe fits, and wear it. 

First published by Cricbuzz.