New era, new confidence as changes reap rewards
TELFORD VICE in Centurion
KESHAV Maharaj to Ben Stokes … bang: too full, and dismissed to the boundary with a meaty sweep and not a little disdain. Maharaj to Stokes again … bang: down the pitch, and artfully muscled over cover for another four. Maharaj to Joe Root … bang: dragged down short, and hammered to the cover point fence to bring up England’s 200.
There was little about Maharaj’s 12th over, the fifth after lunch at Centurion on Sunday, that hinted that in his next over he would dismiss the only threat of domination the South Africans faced. Root could have tilted the game his team’s way with grace and good manners, but the profanity in pads who is Stokes bristled with the potential to wrench the heart and the hope out of South Africa’s challenge, and at the speed of snot. He had done so to Australia at Headingley in August, when he walked out with three wickets down and 218 needed and won the match with a peerless undefeated 135. And, wouldn’t you know it, when he walked out at the fall of the third wicket on Sunday the number of runs required was again 218.
So when Faf du Plessis didn’t stop Maharaj from bowling the seventh over after lunch, concerns rolled over the ground like the clouds above. What had given the captain the confidence to stick with his spinner? “We kept saying that in the second innings Kesh would get Stokes out,” Du Plessis said. “He has got him out a few times. We just had a gut feeling. He was a massive wicket for us at that stage — Stokes has proved that if he is around he can win the game on his own.”
Maharaj’s third delivery was wide enough to fool Stokes into yanking the cut shot out of his quiver, but a touch of turn took the ball onto the bottom edge of the bat — and from there into the stumps. With that Maharaj, a gentle soul given to offering prayers with beautiful dignity on the field, burst away on a wild Tahiresque tear as far as his joy and his yawp and his burst of rude energy would carry him.
Contrary to what Du Plessis said, Maharaj has dismissed Stokes only once before in Tests — caught behind for a 12-ball duck at Trent Bridge in July 2017 — and once in a one-day international — at Southampton two months previously, caught in the deep after launching 101 off 79. But who cares about the small stuff when the big picture is suddenly so compelling?
More than an hour after that shuddering blow, Jofra Archer chinked a short delivery outside off to first slip. The bowler was Anrich Nortjé, who had been startled by consecutive knuckleball beamers from Archer as the close loomed on Friday. The edginess of that moment coloured their confrontation on Sunday, and Nortjé made even Dale Steyn’s apocalyptic antics look demure as he roared his triumph with the beaten and bowed Archer still dangerously close to the scene. The slip fielder was Rassie van der Dussen, who had dropped two, more difficult, chances in the same position — and who screamed with delight at latching on. South Africans who know Nortjé and Van der Dussen as two of the more taciturn characters around might well wonder who those giddy imposters were.
Eight balls after that, when Kagiso Rabada splattered Stuart Broad’s stumps to take his second wicket of the over — after Jos Buttler’s hoik had disappeared down midwicket’s throat — and end the match, he didn’t celebrate. Instead he bent over, hands on knees, and took a personal moment. He looked a tired man, which is how he has performed for a year and more. But that wasn’t how he bowled in this match: beware, all ye batters — KG the cage rattler is back.
These are scenes from a cricket match, to be sure. But they are also what relief writ large looks, sounds, and feels like. South Africa had shambled to defeat in their previous five men’s Tests, a run of ruin that started with their first ever home series loss to Asian opposition — Sri Lanka, who won 2-0 in February — and was mirrored by shocking events in the game off the field. Those have been addressed in large part, but that wouldn’t have counted for much had South Africa not won. And won as well as they did.
England were firmly in the equation even after Stokes’ dismissal. Only when the increasingly impressive Nortjé — who bowled well enough in the morning session to be promoted to share the post-lunch resumption honours with Vernon Philander, who was afforded only three overs with the new ball before Nortjé returned — went wide to tempt Root into a prod and blew him away with express pace and a catch behind was the sting drawn from the contest. That left England to score 144, and with only Jos Buttler, Sam Curran, Broad and James Anderson to score them.
It’s been awhile, but South Africa are back. They are also different: less emphatic players like debutant Dwaine Pretorius, who might not have been entrusted with too heavy a burden previously, batted grittily for almost an hour-and-a-half in a listing first innings and dismissed England’s No. 3, Joe Denly, in both innings in the course of 24 niggardly overs that cost only 49 runs.
Might we be at the start of a time in this team’s chequered history in which people are valued more than percentages? Where winning is understood and accepted as the end of a journey that has to be experienced at its own pace? Where how things feel matters as much as how they are?
It took Root, dejected in his defeat but not without his grace and good manners, to hit this nail on the head: “It’s a game played by humans, not computers.”
First published by Cricbuzz.
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