A narrow loss in the second Test went some way to redeeming the Proteas’ reputation, writes Tom Eaton
In his wrap of the extraordinary second Test at Colombo this week, an online correspondent was inspired to declare that the match could not have been ”more tense, dramatic and gripping if it was scripted by Stephen King”.
It’s an understandable sentiment; but it is also a comparison that is flawed in one crucial respect.
Certainly, the nerve-jangling swings in fortunes seemed worthy of any great Hollywood splatter-fest. With almost every session the pretty teenaged blonde trotted down into the basement to check the fuse box, calling playfully into the darkness and tossing her ponytail.
But in this Test match there was no chainsaw in the darkness, no leather-faced shredder waiting to indulge itself. There was no sensational cricketing gore on view at Colombo this week; only the admirable struggles of a group of young men under extraordinary, but not supernatural, pressure.
If this was a Stephen King script, then it was Stand By Me.
Of course, Muttiah Muralitharan tried magnificently to play the bogeyman, and under normal circumstances his fourth consecutive 10-wicket haul in Tests would have qualified as graphic and disturbing. But the circumstances of this game were anything but normal.
Last week I wrote that South African cricket is going down the tubes because of its abandonment of scientific coaching methods and, by implication, its lack of adult leadership.
Nothing has changed since then. The stirring fight-back by Ashwell Prince and his team has done nothing to reverse the tide that is slowly withdrawing and will, in the next five years, leave the local game thoroughly beached on the sandbank of failure. But what a fight-back it was.
The larger disciplines may be fraying at the edges, but national set-ups have never had much to do with self-discipline; and the application shown by Prince, Mark Boucher and Herschelle Gibbs (yes, Herschelle Gibbs) was a heartening reminder of what South African teams used to look like.
The captain is no stylist, and will perhaps always look as if he is battling his way out of a slump in form; but his determination is palpable, and the team is better off for it.
Indeed, the team that sprinted and crept, bullied and appeased its way into that gripping, penultimate session of the Test was unrecognisable from the one that surrendered en masse to Mahela Jayewardene and Kumar Sangakkara two weeks ago.
The Sri Lankan skipper once again wrenched the game away from the tourists with his beautiful and self-contained batting, but this was no Achilles dragging a bloodied Hector around the walls of Troy, or around the boundary rope of the Sinhalese Sports Club, as the case may be. He sweated, and he was worried. South Africa fought, and fought bravely.
Other echoes of Proteas teams past were less happy. Shaun Pollock is now redundant as a Test bowler. This reality had been dawning slowly over the past 18 months, but the sight of the great fast-bowling thoroughbred resorting to off-spin was extremely unpleasant to those of us who remember that, 10 years ago, Pollock had the nastiest bouncer in domestic cricket.
He, his captain and his coach would no doubt have defended the embarrassing change of pace as ”trying something different” or ”using the conditions”, but there is a profound difference between developing into a thinking bowler, operating within one’s physical limitations, and becoming a passenger.
Pollock’s career as a bowler who bats is now effectively over. His career as a batsman who bowls may be about to begin. Indeed, the Proteas could do a lot worse than having, at number six, a vastly experienced surgical striker with the nerve to dominate bowlers from any game situation.
Just 33, Pollock has at least three more years of top-level cricket in him, and it would be a terrible pity to discard those batting genes just because his bowling ones are used up. But, of course, South Africans don’t think like this, and Pollock will no doubt retire after the World Cup next year, declining the 2 000 Test runs that would have come his way had he played on. Children and golf beckon. C’est la vie.
The difference between the teams, in the end, was not Pollock, or Muralitharan, or Jayawardene, or Hashim Amla’s three dropped catches and miserable batting: team efforts good and bad subsumed and smoothed over those. The difference was Makhaya Ntini.
Dangerous and incisive in the first innings, miserly in the second (while he lasted), the South African spearhead was the only class bowling act on the field for the Proteas.
Playing a retrospective game of ifs and buts is tantalising and ultimately futile, but in this case it’s not unreasonable to suggest that an uninjured Ntini might have made a decisive difference in those last throat-clutching overs.
Roll credits. And there are plenty.