Waters muddied in what SA cricket actually stands for

The Australians celebrate the running out of South Africa’s Khaya Zondo. Picture: AFP.

In his book Simpson’s Safari, chronicling Australia’s 1966-67 tour of South Africa, R.S. Whitington described an incident in the opening over of the Test at Port Elizabeth, where Bill Lawry was run out without facing a ball.

Two fielders had given chase to the fine-leg fence, Jackie du Preez and Eddie Barlow. The former flicked the ball back, the latter threw it in: marvelling at such invention, Whitington described Barlow’s return as achieving the trajectory of one of “those cash carriers that used to zoom overhead in retail stores’’.

Reading this many years ago rather fixed in my mind a kind of South African cricket ethic: shrewd, athletic, resourceful, efficient. They might not gather a constellation of stars, but they performed the ordinary splendidly, in a way that made teams from the veldt greater than the sum of their parts.

Nowadays, of course, such excellences are commonplace. Australia performs them ritually.

After an hour at the MCG yesterday, Temba Bavuma’s thick outside edge off Scott Boland eluded the cordon, sending Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne in hot pursuit to the third-man boundary.

Smith rolled and retrieved; Labuschagne collected and conveyed; Carey accepted over the bails; by an act both brilliant and standard, four was reduced to three.

Such interventions can have consequences, and yesterday was no exception. To Boland’s next ball, Theunis de Bruyn, for the second time in the match, played a lax and inattentive shot. The same fielders dived again, third slip Labuschagne across second slip Smith. The latter rose with a fine, low catch tightening Australia’s grip on the Test.

For South Africa, by contrast, the excellent is not routine.

And while it is one thing to be a modest cricket team, it is another to be ragged and sloppy, depending on the pace and perseverance of their bowling attack to make up for shortcomings too embarrassing to ignore.

To wit: not long before getting out, de Bruyn had been involved in a bizarre passage of cricket, where he was warned, repeatedly, by Mitchell Starc for backing up too far – and by too far, we were closer to a metre than a micron.

De Bruyn looked impenitent when he should have been mortified. Starc’s admonishment was heard: “Stay in your crease. It’s not that hard.” And it’s not.

Soon enough, South Africa had the opposite problem.

As Bavuma called a single into the off side, Khaya Zondo was motionless at the non-striker’s end, just outside the crease in which his bat was grounded.

It was an optimistic call, to be sure. But Zondo, having failed to say no, was then on his heels, and never got going. Travis Head’s underarm hit the stumps direct, with the runner barely in the frame.

It was South Africa’s second self-inflicted wound of the match, their captain Dean Elgar having run himself out on the first day, with Bavuma succumbing to the next delivery: the Australians have a knack of not only punishing error but of compounding it.

But for all the megapascals of Australian pressure, the South Africans are depressingly prone to unassisted error – short and misdirected throws, balls bowled down leg side and wide outside off, additional runs donated by misfields and forfeited by poor calling.

Bavuma drove Boland through the covers yesterday and was almost halfway back for a third when Kyle Verreynne sent him back.

Later he turned blind, swivelled, then turned his back on Maharaj, so that the pair resembled two people stuck in a revolving door, with the result a third risible run out.

Their skipper has fallen twice to leg-side strangles, and is struggling in the field.

Their No.1 pace bowler is leaking 4.7 runs an over, and appearing strangely unengaged.

The solitary spinner in their ranks has failed to take a wicket.

The solitary run out they have executed involved an overthrow.

This is simply not cricket of international quality.

It is, moreover, difficult to see the scope for improvement given the succession of rinky-dink two-Test series the Proteas have scheduled for the next World Test Championship cycle.

It’s arguable that the issues are systemic: the wave of retirements (De Villiers, du Plessis, Amla, Steyn, Philander, de Kock); the lure of Kolpak opportunities, enticements of the T20 circuit and discouragements of maladministration; the sway of South African politics and the travails of its economy (4.3 per cent inflation, 37 per cent unemployment).

But waiting for systemic remedies is hardly an option.

The one flicker of hope that has emerged out of this series has been, notwithstanding his misadventures between wickets, is Bavuma, who has looked composed, sound in defence, crisp in attack: a better player certainly than the record of one century in 52 Tests, and perhaps ready at last to set that to rights.

Poor fit that he is with the role he has of South Africa’s T20 captain, he looks like Elgar’s logical successor, and probably sooner rather than later.

But the Proteas have a veritable Table Mountain to climb.

It’s no longer clear what their cricket stands for, if anything: with a Test to go, Elgar’s team seem to have a foot on the airliner already, hasty exit made necessary by their new domestic T20 competition, SA20.

The past is an awkward subject where South African cricket is concerned, but it contained certain values that would not now go amiss.

One prospective future is simply as part of the Indian economic imperium.