During the second Test last week, a peculiar exchange took place between South African commentator Neil Manthorp and one of his unbearably prissy and pedantic New Zealand counterparts. Labouring towards some sort of expression of the lack of bite in South Africa’s bowling attack, the Kiwi suggested that there was a lack of ”nip” about it.

Heretics rarely enjoy the satisfaction of seeing their critics convinced, and maverick sports scientist Professor Tim Noakes is visibly pleased at the overdue attention given his findings on the dangers of over-hydration in long-distance athletic events. ”Science is such a peculiar clique,” he says.

When Graeme Smith was 13, South Africa lost six straight one-day games in Pakistan. Nine years later he is one limited-overs loss away from equalling the longest losing streak in South African history, and his boyhood questions remain largely unanswered.

If there’s any consolation for Graeme Smith, the one-day series now beyond the reach of his outclassed team, it’s that things could be much worse. For starters, he could be captaining Bangladesh. Ordinarily by now Smith would have made it clear that the guys were gutted but they are ready to give 110%.

After South Africa’s first limited overs match against New Zealand last week some Kiwi commentators suggested that Robin Peterson looked like an ordinary club player. No doubt they said it with an Antipodean superciliousness that for many South Africans is like a bamboo-shoot under the fingernail.

All cricket tours have a taste. England tastes like upholstery in a new Volvo. India and Pakistan taste like flat Pepsi and last night’s pyrotechnic leftovers. Australia tastes like tears. But New Zealand, the Land of the Small White Crowd, is strange enough to the South African public to taste only of Aquafresh and coffee.

Cricket sage Hylton Ackerman has the knack of hitting more nails on the head than most, but there was an air of naïve redundancy in his on-air praise of Jacques Kallis this week. In almost subversive tones, as if postulating a notion that was revolutionary and risky,

The reruns of the 1998 one-day series against the West Indies, broadcast as Centurion dripped, were a startling reminder of how South African cricketers used to look. Energetic and eager, the high-fives tinged with none of the blasé hipness of today’s squad, they seemed to be having fun.

The misfiring West Indians, rattling through South Africa with alternating bangs and splutters, beg the question over what constitutes genuine recovery in cricket. At what point do struggling teams stop chasing their tails and set a course in the right direction? And what ingredients need to be present for that to happen?

Scripted endings to careers are rare in sport. Too often great players hobble into retirement on the arm of a physiotherapist, or choose euthanasia, a quick pre-emptive press-conference to avoid the indignity of being dropped. But Stephen Roger Waugh has always written his own script.