South Africa’s nine-wicket win in the first Test was not a flawless performance
Peter Robinson
The guys, said Shaun Pollock after South Africa’s nine-wicket victory over India on Tuesday, came back to bowl really well. As laudable as it may be for a captain to praise his team-mates, this sentiment is not entirely true. Pollock came back to bowl really well, but as a whole the South African attack never quite managed to look irresistible.
The match figures pretty much reflect the performances: Pollock took 10/147, Nantie Hayward 5/144, Jacques Kallis 3/143 and Makhaya Ntini 2/110. Lance Klusener and Nicky Boje did not take a wicket between them and neither was required to bowl in the Indian second innings.
You don’t really want to find fault with an efficient, thoroughly deserved nine-wicket victory, but there was a sense that the South African bowlers, Pollock apart, never quite hit their straps on a pitch that gave back whatever was put into it.
Herschelle Gibbs probably put it best when he said, after the Indian first innings, that he couldn’t understand how bowlers could go into a Test match and not know what line and length to bowl.
Then again, Gibbs also confessed that he wasn’t quite out of one-day mode himself and that he found the urge to try to hit half-volleys over the top well-nigh irresistible.
Hayward, on his comeback to Test cricket, bowled with some pace and did as much as might have been expected of him. Kallis, however, never quite seemed to put it all together, while Ntini, to be frank, bowled poorly a good deal of the time.
This is not to suggest that there should be wholesale changes ahead of the second Test in Port Elizabeth next weekend. Everyone is entitled to an off-game or two and the upbeat way of looking at South Africa in Bloemfontein is that even if the attack wasn’t firing on all cylinders, South Africa still managed to win by nine wickets.
That’s hardly a bad result for a team that looked as if it could still improve.
Still, the selectors would be failing in their duties if they have failed to take note of what has been happening in the first-class game. Charl Langeveldt is clearly somewhere in the picture, although why he was chosen in the original squad and then suddenly dumped remains an unexplained mystery.
The two bowlers who have put up their hands have been the veteran Steve Elworthy and Western Province’s Charl Willoughby. They ended the preliminary round of SuperSport games as the leading wicket-takers and both ought to come into selection debates as a matter of course.
Elworthy has been treated disgracefully by the selectors since he gave yeoman service during the 1999 World Cup. He’s 36 now, but still as sharp as most in international cricket and he does swing the ball away from the right-hander. He would not let South Africa down.
Willoughby, meanwhile, bowls left arm. He’s not that quick, but he’s taken any number of first-class wickets over the past few years. He might just offer a little variety.
There’s not a great deal to be said about the South African batting. Two of the top six made centuries, three of them scored fifties. Only Boeta Dippenaar failed and he will be feeling the pressure.
The crucial innings, though, was played by Lance Klusener whose hundred, as Sourav Ganguly acknowledged, took the game away from India. After a horrible year, Klusener finally came good at an important time for South Africa and he deserves immense credit for fighting his way back.
He deserves rather less credit, however, for his subsequent behaviour. For a player to snub the media (and whatever spin is put on to it, this is, in fact, what happened) might not seem cause for any great fuss, but the point is that neither the team management nor the United Cricket Board appear capable or willing to exert any authority.
Whatever the explanations, the fact is that Test cricket is struggling for survival. It needs all the heroes and all the good publicity it can get. Even Klusener, surely, must have noticed that not a great many went along to Goodyear Park to watch him score his hundred, and by declining an opportunity to promote himself and his team, he’s letting his team-mates, his sport and himself down.
The problem, though, doesn’t end there. To whom, we now have to ask, is Klusener answerable? And why has someone whose behaviour when he broke into the South African team was perfectly normal withdrawn so far into himself?
He has had little but good press throughout his career but now, through sheer bloody-mindedness, he seems determined to draw attention to himself for all the wrong reasons.
If this stubbornness was confined to refusing to talk to the press then, perhaps, he might just have ticked off a few cricket writers. Sadly, however, he seems hell-bent on antagonising even those who are trying to help him. There are a growing number of people who can’t remember when Klusener last bade them a good morning.
Someone needs to talk to Klusener and tell him to grow up.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa