Future looms tall, dark and ugly for South Africa

You know you’re in trouble when the opposition captain wins the toss and, on a pitch clearly full of runs, puts you in to bat nevertheless. It’s an insult to your batters as well as your bowlers, and the last thing you need when your confidence is bruised. But that’s the kind of thing that happens when you hit rock bottom.

South Africa dwindled to that point at the MCG on Monday (December 26). They were inserted and bowled out for 189 on a blameless surface. Then their bowlers, perhaps weary of being tasked for the umpteenth time with cleaning up the mess the batters had made, allowed Australia to advance to within 144 runs of parity for the loss only of Usman Khawaja’s wicket. Tuesday looms tall, dark and not at all handsome for the visitors.

Monday’s mournful batting brought to seven the number of consecutive innings in which the South Africans have been dismissed for fewer than 200. It’s not a record: the South Africans’ first dozen Test innings, from March 1889 to March 1896, were snuffed out for between 151 and 30.

They were bowled out for fewer than 200 five straight times between 182 and 93 from August 1912 and December 1913. They’ve had three streaks of four in a row – most recently in November and December 2015 – and six of three on the bounce, the last of them between June and December 2021. Seven is in its own league.

Who can say it won’t be eight by the end of the second Test? Or if South Africa won’t rub that 19th century record from the books before the sun sets on the summer? It’s a pessimistic thought, but in the wake of Monday’s mayhem how else are we to see the glass except as more than half-empty and cracked?

The first half-dozen of the sub-200 efforts in the current crisis – and it is unarguably a crisis – were all recorded in conditions designed to inhibit the scoring of runs and make early dismissal probable. That wasn’t the case this time, as Kyle Verreynne acknowledged during a press conference when he compared the pitch to the Gabba’s, which was duly deemed below average after the first Test: “It looks a lot barer, there’s not much grass. It didn’t seem as if there was as much seam movement today. It’s a better wicket to bat on.”

So the visitors had no-one and nothing to blame but themselves. “Today’s [performance is] harder to accept than the previous six innings,” Verreynne said. “If we look back at those games there was a lot of good bowling and we stuck to our gameplans. Today was the first time we had more soft dismissals than not. That’s disappointing.”

Two of them stuck out. Theunis de Bruyn, playing his first Test since October 2019, looked like he meant business in scoring a solid 12 off the first 29 balls he faced. The 30th, from Cameron Green, was short and rose above De Bruyn’s upper-cutting bat. Would he learn that lesson? No. The 31st was also short, and De Bruyn lurched into a reckless pull and sent a top edge skewing behind the cordon, where Alex Carey took the catch.

Seventeen deliveries later, and eight minutes before lunch, Dean Elgar did something he hadn’t in his previous 141 Test innings. He nudged Mitchell Starc into the covers, called Temba Bavuma for a single that was never there and set off. Marcus Labuschagne slid, gathered, and fired off his throw from one knee. The ball hit the stumps at the non-striker’s end with Elgar short of safety by an embarrassingly large margin to mark the only instance of him being run out.

Bavuma edged Starc’s next delivery, a sniping away swinger, to Carey. South Africa – who had been 54/1 – were 58/4, and neither of their batters at the crease, Khaya Zondo and Verreynne, had faced a ball. In the fifth over after lunch, Labuschagne dived to catch Zondo’s cracking cover drive off Starc to reduce South Africa 67/5 and to set the stage for their only partnership of 30 or more.

It lasted for 219 deliveries and yielded 112 runs, and asked more important questions than it answered. How could a wicketkeeper and a fast bowler – both among the most junior members of the team – score more runs than their more experienced elders and, allegedly, betters? Verreynne is playing his 13th Test, Marco Jansen his ninth. Without their contribution, which endured for almost three hours, South Africa might have been on course for another humiliation in two days, like they suffered in Brisbane.

Verreynne and Jansen’s dismissals were part of a shocking clatter of five wickets for 10 runs that ended the innings in an inglorious blaze of 24 deliveries. The Australians bowled well, none more so than Green, who stepped into the breach after Starc had left the field with a finger injury to take 5/27. But not well enough for Green, a batting allrounder, mind, to claim his last four for as many runs in a dozen of his deliveries.

South Africa’s malaise goes beyond technique, which shouldn’t be part of the discussion at this level. Instead it is what happens when the gap between first-class and Test level yawns into a chasm, not least because the top batters and bowlers don’t often play domestic cricket. Invariably they’re being rested or they’re somewhere else earning the kind of money CSA can’t afford to pay them. That means the statistics produced in the first-class game cannot be trusted to identify players who have the quality to make the step up. Therefore there are no ready answers to South Africa’s problems beyond the current crop of beleaguered batters battling their way to better days, however long that may take.

That seems unfair on them, given that for almost 24 years the South Africans could count one or more of their top four all-time runscorers keeping them out of trouble. Jacques Kallis made his debut in December 1995 and Hashim Amla retired in February 2019. Their careers bookended those of Graeme Smith and AB de Villiers. South Africa played 235 Tests during that time, and at least one of the fab four was involved in all but nine of those matches. South Africa won 116 and lost 62 of them: a winning percentage of 49.36 and a losing mark of 26.38%.

They have played 24 Tests since the end of the Kallis-Smith-De Villiers-Amla era. The 11 they have won translates into a comparable success rate of 45.83%. But they lose significantly more often: 54.17% of the time. They are, by this measure, 27.79% weaker than they were when Kallis, Smith, De Villiers or Amla, or a combination, were in their XI.

When South Africa returned to Test cricket in April 1992 under Kepler Wessels, the philosophy was to make sure they couldn’t lose before they tried to win. More than 30 years on, they have lost even that ability: it’s difficult to imagine any of their players batting for almost eight hours to save a Test, like Faf du Plessis did in Adelaide in November 2012. But how do you think about trying to win when you’re focused on not losing?

England have answered that question in emphatic fashion under Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes by playing with what some would consider outrageous freedom to win nine of their 10 Tests. As Stokes told the BBC on Monday, “If the ambition of winning is always bigger than the fear of losing, you’re always going to be OK.” South Africa are not OK. They have neither the mindset nor, it appears, the skill to play like they used to, nevermind how England do currently.

Part of the reason is that one of the few connections between South Africans of any race, religion, culture or creed is a suffocating conservatism; a desperation to hang onto outdated ideas and ways of doing things for fear of confronting change and new realities. That’s why, more than 28 years after it was peacefully defeated at the ballot box, apartheid is violently alive outside of the ivory towers in which we keep our constitution and laws.

But here’s a nugget of reality that seems worth clinging to, a reason to be if not cheerful then at least not despairing: South Africa are the only team to have beaten England under McCullum and Stokes. That was in August. You know you’re in trouble when it seems like many Augusts ago.