More often than not the Australian batsmen have managed to blunt South Africa’s pace attack, but our leading batsmen have proved more brittle
CRICKET:Pat McDermott
THE St George’s Park wicket is not one that the South African team will look back on with anything other than suspicion. The uncompromising strip has not treated them well in the last two outings.
In analysing the Test and one-day international defeats it must be noted that on both occasions the Australians have for the most part batted better and bowled better on a track that has been vilified by the critics.
It rests on the premise that the St George’s Park wicket was specially prepared for the South Africans. This may well be true and as valid as the Indians adding an extra something for their particular brand of cricket at home when we toured there.
But if this is so when Port Elizabeth comes under the microscope, there must be a number of questions asked.
First and foremost, if the strip was left green for the Test to give the South African pacemen an extra yard and that added bounce to unsettle an Australian batting line-up that had savaged them unmercifally in the opening Test at the Wanderers, what happened?
Again, the Australian seam attack, limited as it was to just two men in Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie, bowled far better.
The Australians rely on a wicket-to-wicket approach that is the basic vehicle for a fast bowler as the founding factor of his craft. It makes the opposing batsmen play shots, it keeps him under pressure and – perhaps psychologically more than physically – gives the bowler the feeling that he is a predator.
It is a philosophy which can perhaps be monitored by long-term students of the game back to the days of the Vale of Hambledon and cricket’s very beginnings.
But certainly, the leg-side theory employed by England’s Douglas Jardine to shackle the magnificence of Don Bradman in the days before his deserved knighthood, was a lesson that the Australians have never forgotten. Attack is burnt into the very soul of every Aussie schoolkid who picks up a ball and decides to fling it at another youngster in short pants.
Men like Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson, Merv Hughes, Craig McDermott, McGrath and Gillespie might well be great guys to share a Fosters with after the action is over, but on the field the milk of human kindness is stowed for the duration.
This is not to say that Allan Donald, Brett Schultz, Shaun Pollock or Lance Klusener are shrinking violets. But examine the amount of catches Dave Richardson has taken in his career at top flight and weigh that against the number of times our bowlers knock over the stumps, and the thought expands somewhat.
But, despite what poacher-turned-gamekeeper Kepler Wessels would have you believe now he has become a critic, all was not doom and despondency.
Donald delivered spells of quite staggering aggressive bowling in the final Test at Centurion Park and the opening one-day match at East London. Finally, you thought, the greatness of our top bowler. Sadly it did not last through to Port Elizabeth.
And yet the telling factor there was the bowling of 28-year-old Adam Dale in only his second appearance for Australia. Clearly, he has been schooled in a different way.
Our inability to consistently break through the Australian batting – with the exception of the sadly out of form captain Mark Taylor – is a worrying factor. It emphasised the importance of those three superb run-outs at Buffalo Park in the context of what really won that game. It also raised the question of why Rudi Bryson, who honed his talents in Port Elizabeth, was not given a run on the track where he must know every blade of grass – mowed or unmowed.
Equally, if our brittle batting started to come good in the opening one-day encounter at East London, where the six-wicket victory gave us the head-start we so patently lacked in the five-dayers, why did it fall apart so badly on the grass of St George’s?
To analyse this is almost impossible. There are no easy answers to this country’s batting problems. There are no quick fixes. Had Louis Koen not fallen to a tragic first-baller, perhaps the basis of a more defendable target than 220 would have been possible. Koen will be back. He is too good a player for that blemish to mar his career.
But once again that top-end failure factors out superb innings of 82 from Jacques Kallis, an exciting and extremely valuable 57 off the bat of Jonty Rhodes, a gritty 31-run display from skipper Hansie Cronje, and the 27 from Klusener at the tail.
Kallis is a comer, a batsman who will do great things in the seasons to come. Rhodes, depite the reluctance of the selectors to risk him at Test level, remains a batsman who breaks the rhythm of a fielding side so often and so successfully that he is worth far more in real terms then the runs he posts for his country.
Cronje also deserves better from the critics than he is currently getting for he shoulders not only his own batting burden, but that of all who fall around him. Of Klusener, it must be said that he is still learning his trade and doing not a bad job of it. What he needs now is some consistency in his performances.
But it remains true that at the top end, we just do not have the potential partnerships that any combination of the Waugh twins Mark and Steve, Greg Blewett ad Stuart Law always threaten to produce.
Again, on the available surface, they simply batted better. It is something worth remembering as the series continues its way to conclusion.
ENDS