Grit, concentration and application were vital facets of Kepler Wessels’s approach to the game, and it is these qualities that the South Africans need if they are to compete with the Australians
CRICKET:Jon Swift
THERE is nothing basically dishonourable about losing. It is part of the complex business of life. The real inner examination though comes in the manner of that defeat. In this context, Hansie Cronje and his band of battered South Africans will have no joy in the reliving of the emphatic hiding they were handed by the Australians at the Wanderers this week.
In anyone’s lexicon of failure, this performance must rate as as dismal an offering as the second innings of the first Test this country played coming out of isolation at the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados.
Fired by Andrew Hudson’s superb 163 in the first innings, the South Africans needed to get just 79 runs with eight wickets in hand on the final day to reach the 201 required for victory. South Africa fell 52 runs short, and an expectant nation on the other side of the world shook their heads in utter bewilderment.
The innings and 196-run defeat at the Wanderers is a far more complex and disappointing tale. In Bridgetown, the side was a collection of raw players. Only Kepler Wessels had played Test cricket and the West Indians had seldom surrendered a Test in Barbados. There was also the small matter of batsmen of the class of Des Haynes and Brian Lara, as well as a pace attack spearheaded by Courtney Walsh and Curtley Ambrose to consider as mitigating factors in defeat.
It was the start of the long journey Wessels undertook to instil a fighting spirit in the South Africans and mould a team that, while it may not have glittered with superstars all the way through, played as a cohesive and intractable unit. More importantly, the introvertedly dour and oft-maligned Wessels instilled in his side the twin cricketing virtues of application and concentration.
It was this ethos that Cronje adopted when his turn came as captain. On to this he grafted the lightness, attacking spirit and sheer enjoyment of the world’s most glorious game that seemed to be missing from the Wessels make-up.
It was a joyous mix. But, somewhere along the line, the understanding that playing the game at the top level is about hard graft – to return again to the Wessels philosophy – has been diluted. At the Wanderers, this, more than anything else, showed.
It came strikingly home from the moment Hudson unthinkingly sparred at the fourth ball he faced from Glenn McGrath and made his way back to the pavilion without a run to South Africa’s credit.
McGrath exploited the overcast conditions to the full, setting the platform for the Australians in a devastating opening spell of three wickets for 10 runs in 10 overs. It was seam bowling out of the top drawer, a signal exercise in concentrated professionalism.
In the light of subsequent play his contribution was somewhat diluted, but by gutting a suspect top order and leaving the home side reeling at 15 for three, the lanky McGrath all but won the Test right there and then.
It was also a performance that left an important question to be answered. If the Wanderers pitch was so flat and lifeless – and this factor cannot be disputed in good faith – how was it that McGrath and, in a supporting role, Jason Gillespie, were able to exploit it and the collective might of Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock and Lance Klusener could not, except for isolated patches?
In this context, it is also interesting to note that Aussie skipper Mark Taylor took his seamers on faith and kept an attacking field of eight men in catching positions throughout the early part of a first day that always presaged South African ruin.
Of the batsmen, only Cronje, still way off his best form, and the evergreen Dave Richardson made any real impression. Cronje, the echoes of the Wessels work ethic doubtless ringing in his ears, put his head down and worked at building some sort of batting phoenix from the ashes which lay about him. Richardson, helped by some heartwarming insolence from Paul Adams, gave what he always has for his country … everything he has.
But for the rest, the South African batting faltered to deceive. Daryll Cullinan, suffering the rush of blood that he suffers from so often and offering a poor shot in the middle of real class stroke-making; Jacques Kallis, learning the painful lesson that, against Test-class seam, cricket is indeed a physically hurtful game; and Shaun Pollock looking imperious before letting the wilder part of his nature tempt him into an injudicious swish.
It also led to the cruel observation from one member of the crowd that if 100 runs is called a century, 10 runs should be called a Hudson.
It was not a pretty sight. Neither, from a South African perspective at least, was the third day after the home side had battled back to a position where they just might have climbed back into the match on day two.
With Australia ending their Saturday on 191 for four, the South African first innings total of 302 looked a touch more respectable. But then Sunday dawned and between them, Greg Blewett and Steve Waugh began rewriting the Wanderers record books in a mammoth 385-run partnership that never even vaguely looked like being troubled, let alone broken.
In the comfort of retrospect, it poses another pertinent question for the South Africans. If Blewett and Waugh could bat all day – and then some – on the Wanderers track, why could the last six batsmen in the home side’s second innings not last a full session?
The answer to that is probably threefold. The first part of the equation stems from the psychological battering that interminable days in the field with little if no reward engenders, the second, the resurgence of the Shane Warne genius. But the third leg is by far the most worrying … a lack of application that would never have been allowed to happen under a man such as Wessels.
It cannot have escaped the attention of the present side that Mike Atherton batted his dismal England side to a draw last season in somewhat similar circumstances. His 185 not out in that epic stand with Jack Russell stood as the biggest total at the Wanderers until Blewett’s 214 gave him the honour of being the only double centurion on the country’s premier ground.
It needed some of the grit that Atherton showed for South Africa to make a fight of it. And yes, while the largely unloved England captain did not have to fend off Warne’s genius for producing the unplayable, he went out and did a job of work.
Warne is an exceptional bowler and it is to be celebrated that he has found himself again following surgery which seemed to curtail his wiles of late. For, while the way he and fellow spinner Michael Bevan wrought havoc on the morning of the final day could hardly have been greeted with much enthusiasm in the South African dressing-room, cricket in general needs the beacon of genius to light it now more than ever.
In Adams we have a spinner who bowled well, but hardly as penetratively as Warne or Bevan. But such is the nature of the buzzy youngster from the Cape Flats that he will have learnt some important lessons from the Australians in general, and Warne in particular, about the craft of bowling at this level
Kallis, another of the emergent young brigade, will have also taken home some revision work. He learnt in the first innings that the body is a bigger – and more painful – target than the wickets. In the second, he will have discovered that there is peril in not watching a Warne delivery every last centimetre of its tricky trajectory.
Both examples given are just two of many throughout the course of the match that illustrate the chasm that exists between the application of the Australians and the lack of it from their beaten opponents.
There is much work to do for the South African side before the second Test starts at St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth next weekend. Perhaps even on the local variation of the rain dance, for even the storm Cronje and company must have been praying so fervently for, arrived a day late.