Rudi Koertzen can’t talk right now. The golf course, he confesses, by way of explanation. A later time is quickly arranged, and he returns to his round. It was a brief first contact, but a telling one. The man widely credited as the best umpire in world cricket had left his cellphone on, presumably as a courtesy to all those who wanted to reach him.

An official silence blanketed Cricket South Africa on Wednesday afternoon as media liaison Gordon Templeton politely played bouncer: no statements would be made until the International Cricket Council had finished its disciplinary machinations over Herschelle Gibbs.

In a sport in which even, chivalrous, contests are considered the ideal, it might seem incendiary to suggest that the series now winding up at Newlands has been a splendid one. South Africa’s wretched plunge to 84 all out at the Wanderers was hardly the stuff of narrow squeaks, writes Tom Eaton.

Under normal circumstances, a review of a nation’s sporting progress would be inclined to be critical of failures. Losses would be analysed, disasters decried. But normal circumstances in modern South African sport imply failure, and thus hardened to sporting infamy, the armchair critic must refrain from launching unfairly pointed or excessively accurate barbs.

Reading through the heap of post-mortems performed on their cricket team by English journalists this week, the overwhelming impression was that the shock and palpitations being expressed were almost totally contrived. The analyses, though tending towards hyperbole, were fair and eloquent, and the outrage and frustrations well directed.

Before the start of the series won on Wednesday night by the resurgent South Africans your correspondent forecast that India would be lucky to win two out of the five matches. In retrospect that prediction has been proved hopelessly off target: a whitewash is what they deserve, and if they scramble together a win at Centurion on Sunday, Graeme Smith’s team will feel justifiably robbed.

As a fortnight of limited-overs spectacle dawns this weekend, one can’t help watching the newly arrived Indians with the grim, respectful pity usually displayed by onlookers in that part of the film where the dapper young engineer has drawn the short straw and must now leave his fiancée to fly into space where a comet and nuclear bomb have his name on them.

Three weeks ago, both the Champions Trophy and the Proteas were in the dock, accused of promoting listless, bloated, second-rate cricket; of privileging corporate waffle over pragmatic common sense. This week, both were cleared of all charges and carried shoulder-high from the court, writes Tom Eaton.