On Tuesday evening, when Jacques Rudolph stepped out to a flighted leg-break and eased it to the cover fence, justice was done. Those four runs took him to a Test century that will mean a great deal to him for the rest of his life. Rudolph was great, but the rest of the reindeer need put in some work before Boxing Day, writes Tom Eaton.

How familiar it has all become, this elliptical cricketing orbit that every few years drags South African teams through the shrivelling radiation of the Australian game. How hollow the optimistic journalism has come to sound, these dutiful column inches that precede each harrowing, pronouncing that the lessons of the past have been learned, the chinks fortified.

Cricketers are neither linguists nor mathematicians, so perhaps one could forgive the Australians their blabbermouthed foolishness of the past week. First it was Matthew Hayden, scrambling to the summit of sports jargon idiocy by declaring himself to be ”a billion percent” behind Ricky Ponting, perhaps in the hope that some of those tens of millions of percents would rub off on the selectors when they cast their eyes over Hayden’s wretched form this year.

”In one-day cricket, adequate contributions in all disciplines are considered more valuable than high-class specialisations: a utilitarian, faintly Marxist outlook, suited to a game designed for uncritical consumption by the masses. Usually it works well enough,” writes Tom Eaton.

Ding, dong, the witch is dead! Clap your hands, get out of bed! Ding, dong the wicked witch is dead! There might be half a Test match left to play, but celebrations have started early for the Munchkins of the cricketing world, and with good reason: regardless of where the Ashes go on Monday, the Australians have been roundly thrashed.

”Cricket’s sudden assertion of itself on the international sporting scene seems not only out of character, but somehow unnatural, as if a high tide had come instead of a low, or a summer had followed an autumn. Indeed, nothing has jolted and upset the natural order of things than England’s magnificent resurgence against Australia,” writes Tom Eaton.