With 2006 just a week old, we had seen the future and it looked horrible. Graeme Smith had finally completed his devolution from batsman to blabbermouth. Mickey Arthur seemed hell-bent on expressing himself through tactics he was gleaning from Biggles novels (”Drop that gun, Von Schtalhein! You know only one of us can bat at five to the over and walk out of this submarine pen alive and it isn’t you!”).
Jacques Kallis was crocked, Makhaya Ntini had cracked, Johan Botha’s elbow was kinked and Shaun Pollock was knackered. The interminable VB series that lay ahead seemed nothing more than floodlit flagellation.
And so it proved. Sent packing by an inexperienced and struggling Sri Lanka, the Proteas limped home, mercifully shielded from public outrage by the epic ineptitude of the national football team. Almost nothing was said of the imminent arrival of the Australians, pursuing the tattered South Africans across the ocean like so many killer whales flinging themselves up on to the beach after the mauled baby seal that has temporarily slipped from their jaws. The home series was simply too ghastly to comprehend.
But now, three months into the year, something has changed. Perhaps the lessons of Australia have been learned. Certainly, Smith is talking less and cuffing more deliveries through midwicket and Arthur isn’t expressing himself at all. André Nel is back, bringing with him the infectious ebullience of a brawler who doesn’t have enough sense to stay down once he’d been beaten up.
And, of course, Ntini is behaving like a strike bowler, right down to the brooding menace in the outfield, a happy relief from the mindless hollering that usually drills into the eardrums of every spectator in every stadium he plays at.
At the time of writing, there were two one-day matches left to play. The results are irrelevant: a South African series win would simply underline their current psychological dominance, while an Australian escape act — however emphatic — cannot disguise the fact that the tourists are vulnerable. More than that, for the first time in 11 years, they look weak.
This is not an Australian team that will necessarily lose a series by underperforming or by stumbling at the last hurdle and having victory snatched away by alert opponents. This is a much more rare creature. It is an Australian team than can play to its full potential, can meet South Africa head on and lose.
Eleven years is not an arbitrarily chosen time, for it was in 1995 that Shane Warne finally found a foil. Tim May, Merv Hughes and Craig McDermott had all been solid, but it was the coming of age of Glenn McGrath that changed everything for Warne and Australia. Unleashing the fat blond and the scrawny brunette to deal in subtle violence and intense frustration, Mark Taylor staged a coup in the West Indies and took the crown for himself, eventually leaving a healthy empire to Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting.
But McGrath is gone and, for the first time since 1995, Australia won’t walk on to a cricket field certain that it will bowl out the opposition in four sessions. No doubt Warne will be magnificent, feinting and teasing on pitches that are sure to offer only slow bounce and slower turn. (No matter: even his innocuous spells are worth the price of admission alone.) But who jogs in from deep midwicket at the end of his overs is another question entirely.
Over the past four months Brett Lee has, for the most part, looked extremely fast and largely innocuous. This should be a paradox, until one recognises that speed means almost nothing without some lateral movement. Six inches too short to get dangerously unpredictable bounce, Lee has resembled a wonderfully graceful bowling machine, turning up the wick into the mid-150s and, like a bowling machine, has ended up feeding attacking shots rather than getting wickets.
In fact, Warne aside, the Australian Test attack now bears a striking resemblance to a modern West Indian one, with equivalents for the impotent express pace of Fidel Edwards and the bustling awkwardness of Pedro Collins or Reon King. None of these are happy comparisons.
South Africa’s attack is more experienced and less profligate than Australia’s. After the Newlands massacre, the visitors will take guard fractionally more cautiously there, come Thursday and the first Test, and Ntini will be forgiven for inhaling deeply from his armpits before handing his cap to the umpire and asking, ”Who da man?”
Smith has enough batting to match the tourists at every turn, give or take 30 runs either way, and looks in the mood to get personally stuck in. But South Africa are not favourites because they slightly outweigh the tourists mathematically. They have the edge because they didn’t play in the 2005 Ashes and Australia did.
Taking part in a monumental series, one in which every emotion and sensation is amplified and which builds to an impossibly dramatic and taxing climax, must surely be the dream of every cricketer. But what happens after that?
How do you strap on the pads a week after you’ve played in the most emotional and intense game you’ll ever experience? How do you convince yourself to care about a one-day game in Bloemfontein when you’ve gone 12 rounds with the cricketing gods and destiny in front of 50-million Britons?
For the veterans of the Ashes, it was tough enough winning against dull old South Africa back at home. Will they even get out of bed for Newlands? It’s hard to see how.