You can't out-Aussie the Aussies, so don't try

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TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

SO, Virat Kohli wants his team to play “the brand of cricket that Australia plays”. He needs to know that South Africa have tried to do exactly that since the 1950s - always to their detriment.

The only times South Africa have won Test series in Australia, in 2008-09 and 2012-13, they played a brand of cricket that was resolutely South African. That meant doggedness that verged on the obsessive.

JP Duminy reached a higher plane of batsmanship by gutsing it out for umpteen hours. Graeme Smith evaded the team doctor on his way down the dressingroom stairs to bat with a broken hand - even though the series was already won, but just to prove a point. Faf du Plessis went zen for more than a day.

None of those players thought out of the box of their South Africaness to accomplish what they did. Instead, they made the box bigger.

But success has not come easily for South Africa when their opponents have been Australia. They have won only 21 of the 91 Tests they have played against them, and lost more than twice as many - 50. And those two series victories Down Under are South Africa’s only happy endings against the Aussies since re-admission in 1991.

Most galling for South Africans is that, of the seven series Australia have played in South Africa since 1991, the closest the home side have come to winning have been in the drawn rubbers of 1993-94 and 2011-12.

The five defeats can be pinned not only on the Australians playing better cricket, but on the South Africans trying to out-Aussie the Aussies - or their idea of who and what Aussies are. The overt aggression has seeped into the stands, where we have been treated to banners questioning the paternity of one of Adam Gilchrist’s children and ongoing hours of the puerile nonsense of “Siddle is a wanker.”

Too often teams think, as Kohli appears to think, that channelling their inner Australian is how to find the path to enlightenment and with it victory. The Australians themselves would disabuse the innocents of that notion. Their advice to keep winning would be to do what you do well better than before.

It is the broadest of broad strokes, but it encapsulates the Australian approach and with it what every team should do all the time - not only when they want to impersonate another and not only when they take on Australia.

The most unusual aspect of the way the Aussies do things is their refusal to entertain sentimentality. If Sachin Tendulkar was an Australian, his career would not have been kept artificially alive as it was by India.

No major batsman should keep his place after going 38 completed test innings without scoring a century, much less one of the greatest yet seen. That was the sorry end to Tendulkar’s career, a shame indeed.

Similarly, Australia would never have put up with Jacques Kallis not only picking and choosing which one-day internationals he would play, but failing to reach three figures in his last 29 completed trips to the crease.

India and South Africa are not alone in their unhealthy obsession with treating their great players with undue and unfair deference. The Australians are, however, alone in treating theirs as they do all the others. That is an important part of the reason why they are not often down for long - no-one overstays his welcome; renewal is a necessary aspect of growth and continued wellbeing.

When Ricky Ponting retired before the third Test of South Africa’s tour to Australia in 2012-13, there was applause and more than a few damp eyes among the journalists assembled in the bowels of the WACA for the press conference.

That he was Ponting counted for something, but not as much as the freshness of the memories of the 134 and 221 he had scored against India in Sydney and Adelaide in the space of his previous dozen Test innings. His greatness was current, and therefore more real than imagined.

Which means that Kohli should not want the Indians to play like Australians or indeed like the Indians or yore. He should want them to play better than Indians have ever played, times two. He should also understand that cows - sacred or not - are never welcome in the dressingroom.