You can defeat a South African team – Australia may very well themselves before Friday is over – but you don’t ever seem to be able to make them realise they’re beaten. They are a side who seem to just keep coming, long after just about anyone else would have given in. They had good as lost this match once, on Wednesday evening, when four quick wickets fell for spit in the first 20 overs of their innings, and then lost it all over again when five more went for sawdust on Thursday afternoon. They were 102 runs behind, with 10 wickets left to take, when they came storming back into this match all over again.
You could feel something coming in the morning; there were heavy grey clouds over St John’s Wood, and the atmosphere around the ground felt prickly, but you couldn’t be sure what. It turned out to be a counterattack.
Temba Bavuma threw a drive at Mitchell Starc’s very first ball of the day, and was beaten on the outside. He threw a drive at the second, too, and was beaten all over again. He threw a third at the sixth, and this time he cuffed a couple of runs out through cover. Like Mike Tyson said: “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth”. The problem South Africa’s batsmen had was that in two hours of batting the previous evening they hadn’t actually managed to land one on Australia’s bowlers. But now Bavuma was swinging like he was going after the bully who had just kicked over his sandcastle.
In Starc’s second over, the third of the day, Bavuma finally connected with one of his shots. It was a glorious four, thumped on the up through cover, and then he did it again later in the same over.
For a moment, it felt like the World Test Championship final was blowing back South Africa’s way. Bavuma thumped a full ball from Josh Hazlewood through cover for four and lumped a short one from Pat Cummins into the Grand Stand for six. At the other end David Bedingham, playing late and straight, picked off singles and patted the odd on-drive down the ground for four. The partnership passed 40, 50, 60, and just when you were beginning to think “maybe, just maybe”, Bavuma tried to drive another through cover off Cummins, but decided to check the shot in the split-second before he hit it.
If he had only hit it with the same sort of conviction he had shown when he set after Starc’s bowling an hour earlier, he might have got away with it. But the ball flew low, slow and within leaping reach of Marnus Labuschagne, who dived to his right to catch it. Bedingham, drawing on every last minute of the many hours of experience he’s acquired in more than a decade of batting in English club and county cricket, did his best to hold one end while the wickets fell in a rush at the other. When it was all over, they were 74 runs behind, which is two more than any one batsman has managed to score in an innings in the match yet.
Maybe they can’t bat worth a damn, but they bowl about as well as anyone, and within an hour Kagiso Rabada and Lungi Ngidi had turned the match right around again. Rabada took two wickets in three balls, Ngidi three in four overs, and all of a sudden the best of Australia’s batting lineup was splattered across the away dressing room, in a mess of bats and pads and helmets.
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Truth is, South Africa aren’t really supposed to be here. Their board has all but given up on Test cricket so they can devote themselves, and everyone else, to their own-brand Indian Premier League, the SA20; they sent a shadow team to play a Test series in New Zealand last year, and they qualified for this final after winning most of the bare minimum of matches they had arranged to play in the months since. Ngidi has played exactly two first class matches, never mind Tests, in the past 18 months and, given that they have not got a home Test match scheduled until October 2026, isn’t likely to be playing many more in the next 18 months either.
They are one of the great cricket nations, and were the world’s No 1 side just over a decade ago, but their champion Test batsman, Dean Elgar, was turning out for Essex in the Blast on Thursday evening having quit South African cricket because there was so little to keep him busy. Small wonder they are playing this game in such a rage.
