“If you have someone who knows the ground like the back of their hand you need to understand that he knows what he’s talking about.” - Ryan Rickelton implores Bangladesh to trust Russell Domingo.
Telford Vice | Gqeberha
WHAT had gone so wrong, Graeme Smith was asked. “It’s just …” He paused to try to think of a less direct way of saying what he was about to say, decided to stay true to his damn straight self instead, and completed his sentence: “… Durban.”
It was December 29, 2011 and Smith was trying to explain to a press conference how and why his team had lost a Test to Sri Lanka at home. The result jolted South African cricket. Being beaten in their backyard by an Asian team was rare but grudgingly accepted if that team were Pakistan or India. Sri Lanka? Don’t joke. Even so, Rangana Herath, who took nine wickets to seal the Lankans’ first win in nine Tests in the country, saw the funny side: “That’s why we are laughing at you.”
That loss followed defeats at Kingsmead by Australia, England and India. South Africa beat India there in December 2013, but then went down to England, drew a rain-ruined match with New Zealand, and were beaten by Australia and Sri Lanka. In the same period, they lost only five of the 41 home Tests they played at other grounds. Even St George’s Park, where surfaces are also slow, had come to the party: played six, won five, drew one.
Maybe it really was just Durban. South Africa’s players had long since decamped from the beachfront hotel where they had usually stayed — less than 2km from Kingsmead — to another 29km away in Umhlanga, a sanitised seaside suburb to the north. Perhaps they were scared away by the rude realities of Durban’s gritty urban environment, which would only have been exacerbated by playing at the country’s only inner-city Test venue.
So South Africans will hope that their team’s emphatic victory over Bangladesh at Kingsmead on Monday will serve to reclaim the ground from foreigners who have felt too welcome there for too long. And open a new avenue of thinking about how to win there. South Africa’s only other success in their last 10 Durban Tests was built on the standard procedure for getting the job done in this country: Dale Steyn and Morné Morkel claimed 15 of India’s 20 wickets in December 2013.
This time, Simon Harmer and Keshav Maharaj took 14. Only once has spin grabbed more wickets for South Africa in their 245 home Tests, and that was more than 112 years ago — Bert Vogler and Aubrey Faulkner snapped up all 20 against England at the Old Wanderers in January 1910.
Much has changed about South African cricket since their Test attack comprised Vogler, Faulkner, Reggie Schwarz and Gordon White; wrist spinners all. Kingsmead has changed, too, particularly in recent years. And for the better. The pitch for the Bangladesh match offered assistance for seamers and spinners alike, and batting on it was challenging but far from unfair. The surface was relaid two-and-half years ago. That play started on time on Sunday after Saturday night’s deluge of 50mm — two-thirds of what falls on average in Durban in the whole of April — was a minor miracle, and no small tribute to the efforts of the groundstaff and the world-class drainage system, which was overhauled four years ago.
Kingsmead has come in from the cold in several senses, including financially, under the direction of a young and innovative chief executive, Heinrich Strydom, who has been on board since August 2017. And thanks to the dedication of his hardworking staff, who buzz with an enthusiasm not often seen among CSA’s also industrious but demoralised managers and executives.
A symbol of that difference was the stuck sightscreen that held up the start of the series for 33 minutes, which was one of the few aspects of what might otherwise have been a flawless occasion. The buck for that problem stopped with CSA and one of their service providers, not with Kingsmead.
Some 900km down South Africa’s east coast in Gqeberha, staff at St George’s Park would have been watching with interest. The second Test starts there on Friday, and in some ways the ground is what Kingsmead was until not long ago: emblematic of a fragile economy worsened by the pandemic and the chronic and intensifying flaws in South African society. It’s also a ground where South Africa have lately struggled to perform — they lost here to Sri Lanka in February 2019 and to England in January 2020.
Dean Elgar played in both those matches, and in South Africa’s last five at Kingsmead. He has one win to show for all that. Small wonder that, even in the afterglow of Monday’s thumping victory, he said: “We still want to play the Highveld kind of cricket, where you’re playing three seamers and a world-class spinner, where fast bowling is our prime source of attack.” He will have to hold that thought until next season, what with St George’s Park and Kingsmead cut similar conditions cloth. But the two grounds are also different.
“Get ready for a fucking brass band in your ears for five days,” one of the television camera operators working on the series said to another at Durban’s airport on Tuesday as they waited to board a flight to Gqeberha, a reference to the providers of St George’s Park’s perennial soundtrack — which is beloved by some and detested by others.
“We know the wind howls here, which makes it difficult in all areas; those are the challenges you have to deal with,” Ryan Rickelton said in media material CSA released on Wednesday. The wind is an important element of the conditions. The easterly comes off the Indian Ocean just more than 3km away, and brings with it moisture that makes seam bowling more threatening. The westerly blows in from the hinterland, which has been stricken by drought since 2015, and dries the surface — making it better for batting. On Wednesday, a blustery westerly pumped at between 50km and 74km an hour. If you’re at the ground, the “bowling wind” comes over the main scoreboard. The “batting wind” flies from beyond the grandstand to the west.
But the Bangladeshis won’t have to do all this homework. Russell Domingo was born and raised in the city, and no-one knows St George’s Park better than the former Warriors coach. But that can only help the visitors’ players if they take Domingo’s advice. On the evidence of what happened at the toss in Durban, that seems unlikely.
“I was very surprised that they bowled first, because at Kingsmead you generally bat first,” Rickelton said. On Wednesday, Cricbuzz confirmed with BCB president Nazmul Hasan that Domingo had indeed wanted Bangladesh to bat first should Mominul Haque have won the toss at Kingsmead. But Mominul chose to field, and will thus have to bear a large portion of the responsibility for his team being dismissed for 53 — their record low in South Africa — in the second innings.
Rickelton all but implored South Africa’s opponents to do better next time by listening to the expertise they have at hand: “With Russell being from here and Allan [Donald, the bowling coach] having played a hell of a lot of cricket here, there’s valuable insight they need to exploit. It will be an unknown ground for a majority of their players, so if you have someone who lives here and knows the ground like the back of their hand you really need to invest in what they have to say and understand that he knows what he’s talking about.”
But the Bangladeshis seem determined to self-destruct and are blaming everyone except themselves for the mess they made of the first Test, including the umpires and, bizarrely, the malfunctioning sightscreen.
BCB cricket operations chair Jalal Yunus has been quoted as saying: “There hasn’t been impartial umpiring in this Test match. It started on the first day. We were held up for half-an-hour at the start of the game due to the sightscreen. We were deprived of the initial advantage. To make up this half-an-hour, they extended the lunch session, instead of starting early, which we usually see. It is definitely at the umpire’s discretion, but generally we see them making up for lost time by starting early.”
If Yunus has been quoted accurately, his comments are at best farcical and at worst dishonest. To try to besmirch the impartiality of Marais Erasmus and Adrian Holdstock — who are both South African — because of a sightscreen glitch is scandalously wrong. Nobody on a cricket ground is more intent on getting play going at the earliest opportunity than umpires. And Yunus would surely have been party to the memorandum of understanding agreed by CSA and the BCB — which clearly states that lost time will not be made up on subsequent mornings.
Other Bangladeshis have implied the umpires made biased decisions, including Shakib al Hasan — despite him being thousands of kilometres away in the US. None of the complainants has yet interrogated the unimpeachable fact that, of the eight calls that were overturned on review in the match, four favoured South Africa and four favoured Bangladesh.
The Bangladeshis have also alleged that their players were unfairly sledged by the South Africans at Kingsmead, despite Ebadot Hossain having been central to the only obviously unsavoury on-field episode. Seemingly annoyed by a fielder not being where he wanted him, Ebadot took out his frustration on Elgar, who was safely in his ground when the fast bowler hurled the ball in the South African’s direction. Still not satisfied, Ebadot launched an emotional verbal tirade at Elgar that required Holdstock’s intervention to restore calm.
Aggression is part of the game. Impotent rage for no apparent reason is not. The Bangladeshis would do well to remember that, and this, too: when they look for reasons why matters went so badly wrong for them, they can’t blame Durban.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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