South Africa – Slaying their demons

On their own, they are indistinguishable, the Aussie and the South African cricket teams. It doesn’t help that both teams have green and gold on their team crests or that they both have one person on the team who’s not Caucasian. Both have their share of Hercules-sized batsmen who twirl the bat like it was a baton. Ok, no self-respecting cricketer’s twirling anything, but you get the idea. Both tend to whittle down the opposition’s score before even getting in to bat by charging after, sliding and stopping what are four-shots for other teams. Maybe the Aussies used to be better at holding onto blinders coming off edges while the Springboks were merely very good. Even that wouldn’t show up on a split-screen showing the teams playing other opponents. When they played each other however, the world champions, yes, they are still that, would brush aside their seemingly evenly-matched opponents. There were two big reasons

1 S.K. Warne: 24 matches – 130 wickets at 24.16. Sure, he’s famous for having made English middle-order batsman start a motion, pun intended, to get the test cricket whites replaced with varying shades of yellow but his hold over South Africa was even more creditable because unlike the poms, South African openers didn’t always give the slips batting practice against Glenn Mcgrath and Co.
 
2 Asphyxiation (aka Choking): If cricket matches were B-grade horror movies, Australia was the psycho-killer that kept coming back after you’d run him over with your car, pushed him over a cliff, dropped a ton of rubble on him and set him on fire. It seemed gut-wrenching even to me, as an unpartisan observer, when Gilchrist took off the bails in that last over the world cup semi-final with Allan Donald and Lance Klusener looking at each other five yards apart. And yet, you couldn’t but assign the tag that’s followed them around the world for so many years. Australia are (were?) simply way better at making the last-gasp play that decided games.

They switched places this series. While Australia routinely failed to ram home advantages, the South Africans kept coming back from the brink to win, not just sessions, but days. It became almost expected to watch an Aussie wicket fall when the end of a session was nigh. Paul Harris was streets ahead in looking dangerous compared to Nathan Hauritz.

Experts now reckon Australia had it all wrong, right from the team selection (Malcolm Conn believes Shane Watson was the answer, wonder what he’d say if he’d pulled up in the middle of his first spell), poor form (Hayden, Lee, Hussey) to maybe even their brand of cereal at breakfast. After winning three ODI world cups and dominating every other team in test cricket, suddenly Ricky Ponting can’t seem to anything right, with everything from his tactics to his selection procedures being questioned. Of course, had he replaced any of those struggling for form earlier in the season, he’d be accused of destabilizing a team that had already lost key personnel to retirement. There’s not much percentage in being Punter right now.

The bottom-line however is that South Africa played sensational cricket over the first two test matches, the kind of cricket that they were always capable of playing, but never seemed to. But I’m certainly not writing the Aussies off just yet. Freddie isn’t that easy to kill.