Hugh Tayfield – Bulletproof Truth

Slow stuff seals fast finish

“If you want to win games you’ve got to put your ego aside and do what’s best for the side.” – Dean Elgar on demoting himself from the slip cordon.

Telford Vice | Kingsmead

SOMEONE joked on Sunday evening that Bangladesh would struggle to make it to lunch at Kingsmead on Monday. He was met with scoffing and eye rolls. Yes, South Africa had reduced the visitors to 11/3 in search of a mythical target of 274 to win the first Test. But seven wickets in a session? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Turns out the joker was indeed wrong — South Africa needed less than half-a-session to seal victory. The match was over 55 minutes into the fifth day’s play, with Bangladesh losing 7/42 in the 13 overs they faced. Even South Africa’s media manager was wrong-footed by the rampant surge to success, greeting the virtually assembled reporters at the press conference that followed with a cheerful, “Good afternoon!” It was 11.53am.

The Bangladeshis’ total of 53 was their lowest in South Africa and the lowest recorded by any team at Kingsmead. Deservedly so. Their batting was wretched. There was much to admire about the way they took the one-day series by the scruff of the neck, clinching it emphatically in a deciding match. But this was an abjectly poor performance. They looked less like players who had grown up on a steady diet of spin bowling on turning pitches, and more like the South Africa sides who flailed and flapped and floundered in the subcontinent in the 1990s.

Which is not take anything away from the bowlers. Both of them. The match marked the first time in South Africa’s 451 Tests that they have dismissed their opponents using only two bowlers in an innings. And the first time spinners have taken all 10 wickets in an innings for South Africa since Hugh Tayfield claimed 7/23 and Tufty Mann 3/31 against Australia in January 1950, also at Kingsmead.

Now, as then, those bowlers were an off-spinner and a left-armer: Simon Harmer and Keshav Maharaj. Harmer had 4/41 after 19 overs in the first innings, and finished with 4/104. Maharaj toiled for 37 overs in that innings but went wicketless for 65. In the second innings, Maharaj claimed 5/14 with his first 35 deliveries on his way to a haul of 7/32. Harmer took 3/21 to complete match figures of 7/136. It’s tempting to let those startling numbers shimmer on the screen uncluttered by comment, but that wouldn’t do Harmer and Maharaj justice.

Harmer, who played his first Test since November 2015, has returned from the Kolpak wilderness a vastly improved cricketer. His unbeaten 38 in the first innings was a significant contribution and easily his highest score at this level. His bowling was a delightful contradiction in terms: whoever heard of attacking off-spin? And yet there he was, bristling to take the game to all who faced him. Doubtless he will keep in a special place in his memory the delivery that turned and bounced and nailed the top of Najmal Hossain Shanto’s off-stump in the first innings.

Maharaj had only good things to say about his fellow slow poisoner: “He’s good to have in the changeroom, he’s lots of fun, he’s got good ideas, and he’s matured a lot as a cricketer. You can see that in the way that he’s bowling. It’s world class in terms of his shape on the ball, his trajectories, his lines, his lengths. And also the way he thinks about things on the field, which is quite remarkable and an asset to this team.”

How did Maharaj feel about the first innings, when he worked as hard as Harmer but had no success? “I’ve played a lot of cricket at Kingsmead and I know you’re not going to take wickets all the time,” Maharaj said. “I was in a good space in terms of the way the ball was coming out. It does get frustrating not being rewarded, but having a world-class performer at the other end is good.”

His reward was waiting in the second innings. Only Vernon Philander, twice, Jacques Kallis and Tayfield have claimed a Test five-for for South Africa in fewer deliveries. Any thoughts Bangladesh might have entertained about winning, drawing, or even not disappearing in a clatter of wickets vanished in the fifth over of the innings, when Maharaj cleanbowled first-innings centurion Mahmudul Joy Hasan and trapped Mominul Haque in front four balls apart. To remove Yasir Ali, he produced a jewel that cut a curve through the air towards the batter before pitching and then spat away to fell off stump. The shock of that ball was compounded by the facts that it gave Maharaj figures of 5/14 and that, because of it, Bangladesh were suddenly 26/6.

That made Dean Elgar happy: “The style of captaincy I’m trying to expose our players to, and get them familiar with how I want to play, is about positive, ruthless cricket; making bold decisions and taking players out of their comfort zones. That’s my gut feel. It’s not influenced by the coaching staff. They allow me to do me during game time.”

Then he said something, about his decision to stick to spin in the second innings, that jarred with the accepted South African way of cricket: “I could have bowled a seamer, but I wanted the guys to be ruthless.” A South Africa captain preferring spin over seam to get the job done? Against Asian opponents? At home? Woulda thunk it?

There was more of Elgar’s idea of leadership to be gleaned during Bangladesh’s first innings on the third morning, after he dropped a straightforward slip catch that Litton Das had offered off Lizaad Williams. Elgar summarily consigned himself to mid-off and installed Keegan Petersen at slip. “If you want to win games you’ve got to put your ego aside and do what’s best for the side,” Elgar said.

The result was South Africa’s first win in their last five Tests on Kingsmead’s slower, turning pitches, and only their second in their 10 most recent Durban Tests. It is the first time Elgar has celebrated victory in his five Tests here. He was also on the losing side at Kingsmead in March last year, when the Dolphins beat the Titans by an innings in the first-class final. Elgar top scored with 16 in the Titans’ first innings — of 53, exactly the same sorriness Bangladesh capitulated for on Monday. “I’ve caught quite a few hidings at Kingsmead,” Elgar noted with a smile.

Much has been made of the defection of South Africa’s first-choice pace attack to the IPL, but how much would they have been called on to do considering the conditions and the way the match unfolded? “If we were on the Highveld playing one spinner would have been the only option, but you’re playing in Durban,” Elgar said. “How awesome was it to see two spinners bowling in tandem, and have the ball on a string and dominate the opposition? It was something we’ve always wanted to see. It was great to see both of them compete at such a high level. Most batting line-ups would have had a tough task against both of them. Even if the IPL guys were available, Keshav and ‘Harmy’ would have bowled most of our overs. The skill and intensity they brought was amazing to witness.”

That’s not to suggest Elgar isn’t a real South African: “It’s not the style of cricket we’re used to or want to play. But it shows a lot of character with regards to adapting to being put in situations or conditions that you’re not familiar with. We have the resources to adapt. We still want to play the Highveld kind of cricket, where you’re playing three seamers and a world-class spinner, where fast bowling is our prime source of attack.”

Elgar had plenty of praise for Harmer and Maharaj, but the latter — whose home ground is Kingsmead — would be forgiven for feeling a little bleak at his captain’s outright preference for pitches that lean towards the quicks. “I love playing at Kingsmead,” Maharaj said. “Our record here is not great, so I was happy that I could help change that mindset and make everyone want to come and play more cricket at Kingsmead.

“I know it’s not the traditional South African pitch you would play a subcontinental team on, but it’s good to see that we have the adaptability to cross the line in most instances.”

Harmer and Maharaj are likely to get another chance to prove their point in the second Test, which starts on Thursday at St George’s Park, where the pitch is similar to Kingsmead’s. Elgar is unlikely to change his mind even if the spinners take all 20 wickets, but there’s no harm in trying.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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SA spin a titanic tale

“I don’t need to keep harping on about how good a team they are. I think everyone knows.” – Ireland captain Andrew Balbirnie on South Africa.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

WHAT does South African spin bowling have in common with the Titanic? Both sank in 1912. The wreck of the giant ship was found off the coast of Newfoundland in 1985, but spin remained submerged under fast bowling on the sharp tip of Africa. Until, perhaps, now.

Bert Vogler, Aubrey Faulkner, Reggie Schwarz and Gordon White took 50 wickets at an average of 19.06 in the 11 Tests they played together for South Africa from January 1906 to March 1910. All were wrist spinners. By August 1912, when White played his last Test at the Oval, their international careers were over.

With that any serious consideration that spin could win matches for South Africa, particularly at home, disappeared without trace. Hugh Tayfield, who took 170 wickets in 37 Tests from December 1949 to August 1960, was an exception. That likely wouldn’t have been the case had South Africa not chosen solely white Test teams until 1992.

In the 1970s and 80s Lefty Adams claimed 122 wickets at 15.47 in 27 first-class matches for the brown version of Western Province. By then the international fight against apartheid had led to South Africa’s expulsion from the international arena — which might not have happened had the then Springboks picked players of Adams’ hue. So Alan Kourie, who took 421 wickets in 127 first-class games for the white Transvaal team in much the same era as Adams, also never got a look in. Adams and Kourie were left-arm masters of flight, guile and mind games, rather than turn. Not so Denys Hobson, a leg-break and googly wizard for the white Western Province side who took 374 wickets in 175 first-class matches, also in the 1970s and 80s.

But there were exponentially more fine fast bowlers where that handful of superb slow poisoners came from, and they were central to the idea of winning cricket matches in South Africa. Eras have changed but the lineage is unbroken: since readmission the baton has been passed from Allan Donald to Makhaya Ntini to Dale Steyn to Kagiso Rabada, and many others. Krom Hendricks, Dik Abed, Ben Malamba and Vincent Barnes would have been among more who would have been given their places in the parade were it not for an establishment that refused to accept their blackness and brownness.

And here we are, 109 years after the Titanic and South African spin bowling vanished, and Temba Bavuma’s squad for their ODI series in Ireland includes four frontline slow bowlers: Tabraiz Shamsi, Keshav Maharaj, George Linde and Bjorn Fortuin. That’s still fewer than the number of quicks in the ranks, but only by one if we don’t count the seaming allrounders, which we shouldn’t do.

Maybe it’s not what it looks like. In these Covid times, squads are bigger — South Africa’s numbers 20 — and the visitors have come directly from the slow surfaces of the Caribbean. And they may be unsure of Irish conditions having last played there in July 2007. But it’s surely worth wondering whether South African attitudes towards the value of spin have changed.

Shamsi said in an audio file released on Friday that conditions for the three-match series in Malahide, which starts on Sunday, might make the question moot for now: “It definitely has a lot more in it for the fast bowlers compared to the Caribbean. We had a good training session [on Thursday], and the boys spoke about the good seam movement the pitch is offering.”

Consequently, Shamsi, who went to West Indies as the top ranked spinner in T20Is and lived up to that billing by taking seven wickets at an average of 11.42 and an economy rate of 4.00 in the five games, expected to shoulder different responsibilities against Ireland: “My role might be more minimal than it was in the West Indies. But I’m comfortable with that. I’ve realised there’s two ways of winning matches for the team. It’s not just about ‘Shammo’ taking wickets all the time. I have to adjust my game — maybe try and hold the game.”

Did the Irish think South Africa and spin were on better terms, or was their slew of slow bowlers a matter of circumstance? “They’ve got quite a big squad and they’ve just come from the Caribbean, where historically it’s been quite spin friendly,” Andrew Balbirnie, the home side’s captain, told an online press conference on Friday. “But they have plenty of options. They’ve got a really impressive squad and they’re just on the back of a two-series [Test and T20I] win in the Caribbean, so they’re full of confidence and they’ve got an abundance of bowlers to pick from. I don’t think they’ve played in Malahide before and they haven’t been to Ireland since 2007, so there may be a bit of uncertainty about what they’re going to get.”

Would coming from West Indian pitches be a help or a hindrance for the South Africans? “It can work both ways,” Balbirnie said. “They’ve had a long time there, and they’ve found form. They’ll be confident no matter what conditions you put in front of them. They’re a team who play all around the world quite regularly, so they adapt pretty well and pretty quickly.”

Did he fancy a bit of Shamsi? “He’s a good bowler, but they’re all good bowlers. I don’t need to keep harping on about how good a team they are. I think everyone knows.”

Just like everyone knows when the Titanic sank, and that its last port of call was in Ireland: at what was then Queenstown and is now Cobh, on the south coast of County Cork. Like Shamsi said, there’s more than one way to spin … a tale, as well as a ball.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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The band plays on at the home of cricket

St George’s Park houses South Africa’s slowest pitch, but that doesn’t mean captains should load their XIs with spinners.

TELFORD VICE in Port Elizabeth

WELCOME, Faf du Plessis and AN Others, to the home of cricket. In South Africa, at least. It was at St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth on two crazy days in March 1889 that a team who, despite their unbearable whiteness of being, had the gall to call themselves South Africa lost to a rag-tag side who, they later learnt to their bemusement, were billed as England in what has become acknowledged as the first Test played on the sharp tip of what was, for too long, shamefully caricatured as “the dark continent”.

So when Du Plessis talked up Newlands as “the home of cricket” before the second Test the other week, eyebrows yanked upward; particularly on the faces of those blessed with the flat vowels and rough attitude that come with hailing from the Eastern Cape. You could hear them thinking: “What? Newlands is ‘the home of cricket’? Is the poor bastard lost?”

When Du Plessis’ team were beaten in the shadow of the most referenced mountain in cricket, no-one had the gumption to ask whether he wanted the game to move house. Just as no-one thought to ask Joe Root, fresh from leading England to their first victory in a Newlands Test in 63 years, if he would prefer that cricket relocates to Cape Town. From Dubai: it hasn’t lived at Lord’s since 2005.

Doubtless Du Plessis and Root will have done their homework on St George’s Park before the third Test on Thursday. This is the country’s slowest pitch, but that doesn’t mean captains should load their XIs with spinners. You have to go a dozen entries down the list of the best performances in an innings in Port Elizabeth to find the first slow bowler, and nine quicks have taken more wickets in their careers here than the most successful spinner. On both counts that spinner is Hugh Tayfield, who racked up 154 wickets all told in the 1950s. Only four bowlers of whatever style had more victims overall in that decade. The next best South African was fast bowler Neil Adcock with 69: less than half Tayfield’s tally. Just five bowlers have snared 20 or more wickets in the 30 Tests played in Port Elizabeth — Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Kagiso Rabada, Dale Steyn and Makhaya Ntini. The same group plus Morné Morkel, Jacques Kallis and Vernon Philander have taken at least 20 on the faster, bouncier, seamier, swingier surface at Centurion, which has hosted five fewer Tests. From a South African perspective, St George’s Park is a spinner’s surface. In more objective terms, it’s a recognisably South African pitch. Except that it’s slower than the rest.

Of the grounds being used in this series, South Africa have their worst win/loss ratio here. It’s also where England have fared the best in this country on that score. South Africa haven’t won any of their four Port Elizabeth Tests against England since 1957. There’s that year again.

Old hands at St George’s Park will tell captains to look up as much as down before they make their decision at the toss. Whatever the pitch looks like — even if it’s green it’s unlikely to be fast, or offer significant seam movement — they should note the wind. If it’s blowing from over the north-west corner of the ground it’s bringing dry air from inland: bat. If it’s gusting over the scoreboard, or 180 degrees in the other direction, it’s carrying moisture from the nearby Indian Ocean: field. Or at least consider that as a serious option.

To the north is the vast red-brick, green-roofed curving expanse of the Duckpond Pavilion. Its construction in the 1990s was fodder for allegations of poor building practices fuelled by dodgy money. Almost 30 years on, the award-winning edifice stands as solid as ever. The short spiral staircases either side of the sightscreen were uncovered until December 1995, when England played a Test at St George’s Park for the first time since the end of South Africa’s isolation in 1991. Can’t have that, England’s management said, and demanded that an already excessively wide white space be made wider and whiter still by the addition of opaque shields around the stairs.

The players, the parasites — who are sometimes called administrators — and the press are accommodated at the southern end of the ground. The teams’ balconies are uncomfortably close to the reporters watching their every off-field move. So Michael Atherton smashing the leg off a chair in reaction to his dismissal in that 1995 match didn’t go unnoticed. Neither did the disturbance caused by Shoaib Akhtar taking a bat to Mohammad Asif’s shins in the dressingroom in January 2007. Sitting in the pressbox, you would be forgiven for imagining you are close enough to the middle to reach out and tap a slip fielder on the shoulder to offer advice.

Grass banks stretch away to the east. It was here in March 2018 that poltroons wearing Sonny Bill Williams masks gathered in a malevolently misguided attempt to taunt David Warner by slut-shaming his wife, Candice Warner — who had a brief relationship with the rugby star before she met her husband. Two Cricket South Africa officials posed for photographs with the disguised dolts, and were suspended from their jobs as a consequence.

The ground’s heart beats most rhythmically in its north-western quarter. The brassy blare of the St George’s Park Band, an amalgamation of musicians drawn from several churches, is central to the grand pageant of Test cricket on the south-eastern edge of Africa. Some can’t stand the noise — admittedly it can dominate television audio — and umpires have been known to tell the band to pipe down. But the signature scene of a St George’s Park Test is the band riffing on the introductory bars of Ben E King’s “Stand By Me” for much of a session; usually after lunch or tea, and usually when South Africa are in the field. If you’ve watched enough cricket here it’s impossible not to remember Jonty Rhodes, at backward point, dancing to that unbreakable tune between deliveries. The band is behind him, the sun hangs low in the sky beyond, the planets are aligned, the universe is in sync, and the moment never ends.

If you’re a South African of a particular geography, that’s a picture of the truth — memory is nowhere near a rich enough descriptor — that confirms what you know already every time this circus rolls into town: Cricket’s coming home.

First published by Cricbuzz.

Another day another struggle for SA

“We haven’t covered ourselves in glory.” – Ottis Gibson

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

HANG on. Are we watching the highlights of last week’s game? We aren’t: again Sri Lanka’s tail wagged like a spaniel’s. Again South Africa’s batting was a tale of failure to come to terms with the conditions.

Again your Saturday morning would have been better spent shopping for tile grouting than watching a fine team crumble.

And again Sri Lanka will win, weather and miracle permitting, this time to take the series 2-0.

In Galle last Saturday, South Africa were beaten by 278 runs before tea on the third day.

In Colombo this Saturday, after two days of the second test, they look on course for a similar fate.

Sri Lanka were 155/3 in their second innings at stumps, a lead of 365: already, on current form, way too many for South Africa to seriously contemplate chasing.

Seventy-four runs of the Lankans’ runs came in a last-wicket stand between Akila Dananjaya and Rangana Herath, who stopped a slide of five wickets for 41 runs to hold up South Africa’s progress for more than an hour.

Perhaps they should have batted for longer: the visitors were dismissed for 124 in 34.5 overs, or less than two-and-a-half hours in which they didn’t look anything like the team who have the best record of all non-Asian sides in the subcontinent.

As far below themselves as the South Africans played, they were slung a couple of inadvertent insults by their hosts.

Herath, the masterful left-arm spinner who has been his side’s key bowler since Muttiah Muralitharan retired eight years ago, was needed for just nine overs.

Sri Lanka’s captain, Suranga Lakmal, the only seamer in their XI, didn’t get a bowl. Nice work if you can get it: batting at No. 10, he made a four-ball duck.

Saturday’s shambolic batting means South Africa, as a team, have scored six fewer runs in the series than Dimuth Karunaratne, the Sri Lankan opener.

So, exactly who put the skids under a line-up that, apparently, harbours three of the game’s top 20 ranked batsmen?

Off-spinner Dilruwan Perera, who added a haul of 4/40 to the match figures of 10/78 he claimed in Galle, and Dananjaya — another off-spinner, who also bowls leg breaks and googlies — who took 5/52 in only his third test.

“Another tough day,” Ottis Gibson said in a television interview. “We haven’t covered ourselves in glory.”

Happily Gibson wasn’t talking about everyone. Keshav Maharaj’s 9/129 is second only to the 9/113 Hugh Tayfield took against England at the Wanderers in February 1957 as the best performance by a South Africa bowler in a test innings.

Thing is, the left-arm orthodox Maharaj the magnificent is the only specialist spinner in a South Africa side who are struggling to compete in conditions that are overtly, but not unfairly, tuned for turn.

With left-arm wrist spinner Tabraiz Shamsi and leg spinner Shaun von Berg wearing non-players’ bibs and looking on impotently from the dugout, was Gibson ready to admit the South Africans got that wrong?

“Looking at where we are now you would probably say yes,” he said. “It’s not the best decision we’ve made.”

Damn straight.

It doesn’t happen for Steyn, but it does for Maharaj

In all South Africa’s 427 Tests only six bowlers have had a better day at the office than the left-arm spinner.

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

IT didn’t happen for Dale Steyn in Colombo on Friday. He huffed and he puffed and he bowled 15 overs with a lot of heart and soul but without taking the one wicket he needed to become South Africa’s champion Test bowler.

It did happen, in spades, for Keshav Maharaj, who took 8/116: not only his career-best performance but the best by any bowler — seam, spin, whatever — in the 14 Tests South Africa have played in Sri Lanka as well as the best by a spinner from any foreign country on the Asian island.

In all South Africa’s 427 Tests only six bowlers have had a better day at the office than the left-arm spinner. Since re-admission, one — Allan Donald claimed 8/71 against Zimbabwe in Harare in October 1995.

Maharaj had plenty to do with the home side being curbed to 277/9 at stumps on the first day of the second Test, which South Africa must win to level the series.

As brilliantly as he bowled, taking his trademark discipline and tenacity to new levels, Maharaj had help from four dodgy sweep shots, wonderful catches by Quinton de Kock, Kagiso Rabada and Aiden Markram, and a pitch that made even Markram’s occasional off-spin look like it had been fired from the arm Muttiah Muralitharan.

That Markram bowled at all, nevermind as many as seven overs, and that Dean Elgar sent down three overs of left-arm ordinary, tells its own story.

South Africa bolstered their batting by including Theunis de Bruyn at the expense of Vernon Philander, who was always going to be the bowler to make way after being entrusted with only 11 overs in the first Test in Galle.

That made sense, not least because the visitors were shot out for 126 and 73 in that match.

What didn’t add up was South Africa’s other change — Lungi Ngidi for Tabraiz Shamsi.

The left-arm wrist spinner took 3/91 and 1/37 in Galle, and then returned home following the death of his father.

He was back in Sri Lanka in time to play in Colombo and was listed as available, but somehow he was left out in favour of a fast bowler in conditions the South Africans must have known would be tailored for slow poison.

It would be understandable if Shamsi was too unsettled by the tragedy in his family to be able to give of his best.

But if that was the case leg spinner Shaun von Berg should have cracked the nod to become, at 31, the 100th player to make his Test debut for South Africa since re-admission.

Instead the visitors will have to make do with Maharaj, who took the second new ball ahead of Steyn in the last two overs of the day, and odds and sods like Markram and Elgar.

What price Maharaj becoming the second bowler to take nine wickets in an innings for South Africa, which is currently the sole preserve of off-spinner Hugh Tayfield and his 9/113 against England at the Wanderers in February 1957?

“I haven’t thought that far yet; I could do with a massive meal and putting my feet up,” Maharaj told Shaun Pollock — who still holds half the wicket-taking record with Steyn — in a post-play television interview.

Maharaj bowled 32 overs, or more than a third of the total. Tayfield, who sent down 37 eight-ball overs for his haul against England all those 61 years ago, would have known how Maharaj felt.

And he would have ended that massive meal with a stiff drink and a smoke.