SA need to ‘stare Aussies down’

Times Media - February 18, 2014

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

Seldom has one player asked so many questions of an entire team as Australia’s Mitchell Johnson asked of SA in the first test at Centurion.

Johnson’s throat-hunting brand of extreme pace swept SA’s batsmen aside. He claimed match figures of 12/127 and Australia won by 281 runs with a day to spare on Saturday.

SA’s attack, before this match the envy of the game, were pedestrian and ineffective by comparison. Even the home side’s fielding suffered, what with David Warner dropped three times and surviving a runout attempt while scoring 115 in the second innings.

Graeme Smith’s team will have had only four days to answer Johnson’s questions when the second test starts at St George’s Park on Thursday.

An important part of the solution, Barry Richards said yesterday, lay in fixing SA’s attitude problem.

“Their body language has to be a lot better or the Australians will be very quick to pick it up,” Richards said. “You’ve got to stare them down. Our guys seem to think that by not staring them down they are softening them, but that has exactly the opposite effect.”

Richards’ plan for dealing with Johnson was that, “It boils down to 30 balls (the typical length of a Johnson spell), and only seven or eight of them are going to hit the stumps.

“I know he is difficult to face, but focus on getting through those deliveries instead of jumping around the crease all the time.”

As an example of how to do so Richards held up AB de Villiers, whose innings of 91 and 48 represent more than a third of the runs SA scored in the first test.

“AB looked like he was having a net when he faced him,” Richards said. “Anyone else, and it looked like Johnson was bowling at 200 km/h.”

As dire as SA’s performance was in Centurion, Andrew Hudson said South Africans should not expect a new-look team to take the field in Port Elizabeth.

“I don’t think massive selection changes are going to sort the performance out,” Hudson said. “It’s really about application.

“There might be a change but it will be a tweak. It’s about the players rallying together and realising they’re up against it.”

That tweak looks likely to be made at No. 7, and in the cause of getting the mix right.

“It’s back to the dilemma of getting a balance, and in PE conditions that can be low and slow and sometimes it can turn,” Hudson said. “We may need to consider putting in a batsman at seven and then going with the three quicks (Dale Steyn, Vernon Philander and Morne Morkel) and Robbie Peterson.”

SA need to decide, Hudson said, “whether to pick an allrounder at seven, which gives you insurance, or whether you go in like Australia and back your players to do a job with four bowlers”.