At the end of the Headingley Test match last week, England captain Michael Vaughan had a grumble about the state of English cricket, making the point that the county game isn’t sufficiently competitive to prepare players for international competition, and that England cricketers were too often gripped by a fear of failure.
This is not a new argument, nor is it exclusive to the English game. Vaughan, though, was searching for reasons why England had lost. There were a number of moments, especially during the first two days, when England took a firm grip on the fourth Test, only to see South Africa wriggle loose.
On the first day South Africa were 21/4 and 142/7, only to break away as Monde Zondeki and Gary Kirsten mounted an extraordinary eighth-wicket partnership. On the second evening, Marcus Trescothick and Mark Butcher accepted an offer of bad light only to come back on to the field and lose both their wickets before the close of play.
And on the fourth morning, with the game in the balance, Andrew Hall built on the momentum created by Neil McKenzie and Mark Boucher to wrest the Test conclusively away from England.
In other words, every time England faltered, South Africa swarmed all over them. That’s the mark, not necessarily of a great team — although great teams always possess this quality — but of a good team that believes in itself.
South Africa made mistakes during the match. They batted poorly for much of the first day and bowled badly on the second day. But they kept on regrouping and coming back.
If the first two Tests in the series belonged very much to Graeme Smith and his twin double-centuries, the fourth Test was won by a complete team effort.
Even those who made little impact with bat or ball took catches or dived around in the outfield. It was a wonderfully heartening effort at a stage of the tour when previous South African teams simply ran out of steam.
Smith, obviously, has been the key figure this season. His double hundreds in the first two Test matches lifted the pressure on him, but captaincy is a good deal harder when the runs dry up for the captain, as they have for Smith in the past two Tests. South Africa, though, have not flagged, and this is the great achievement of the current team.
It is true that the series is not yet won, but England are in disarray. The middle order has been exposed and if, as seems likely, Nasser Hussain will not play at the Oval with a broken toe, two places may have to be filled now that the South Africans seem to have worked out Ed Smith.
More problematic for the home team is finding an attack capable of bowling out South Africa twice at the Oval, and there is already talk of as many as three new bowlers being brought in for the last match of the series.
But no matter how England permutate their options, the English summer seems to be South Africa’s. At worst, an England win would give South Africa a drawn series, thereby emulating Kepler Wessels’s 1994 team. At best, a draw or a win for Smith’s team would provide the first South African success in a series since 1965.
It is almost impossible to believe the South Africans will suffer from complacency at the Oval, but nerves and stage fright could be a factor as they stand on the brink of a considerable achievement. In which case the tourists will need to look to their senior players for guidance.
Gary Kirsten has already hinted that he is considering extending his Test career while Shaun Pollock’s enjoyment of his cricket has been obvious throughout much of the tour.
More significantly, though, Smith seems to have rekindled the fire and the competitive edge in Boucher and Jacques Kallis, who seemed distant and uninterested during the World Cup earlier in the year.
It is worth noting that South Africa have played their best Test cricket of the series with one or the other of their two leading all-rounders missing.
This is not to deprecate the efforts of Pollock and Kallis when they have been present, but the point is that the South Africans were able to fill the gaps left by their absences.
Pollock and Paul Adams are likely to come back for Zondeki and Dewald Pretorius for the fifth Test, to give the South Africans their best-balanced attack and an extra batsman.
If the Oval pitch, as expected, offers a truer surface than was the case at either Trent Bridge or Headingley, England will have to play out of their socks to level the series.
It has been a terrific few weeks for South African cricket and, while the series is not yet won and it might be premature to uncork the champagne, the pall that hung over the game in this country six months ago has lifted.
Whatever happens at the Oval, Smith and the team have offered South Africa a reason to believe.