Cricket: South Africa in England, 2017

The Game Room
21

It’s not super frequent but it happens more often than you might think. In only the last round of SCC Div 1 matches, Middlesex won by one wicket on the final evening chasing 240 odd (not quite to save the game but still a run chase that went to a late pressured stage) and Surrey conceded 650 against Hampshire and then had to bat for a little over 2 days to save the game (Rory Burns carried his bat in the first innings, went straight back out for the follow on and batted for all but the final half hour pf play to see Surrey safe). Essex have also given some teams some fearful batterings in the opening half of the season, so plenty of opportunities to bat and save the game over long periods against them (the major problem being, no one has done it - Essex have won by an innings a few times this year).

In short, I’m not sure it’s lack of match situations that allow this to come up (though the rain is obviously more of a factor than in Australia or India, where you might suppose that you have to do the batting rather than hope the elements come to your rescue). I think it’s the players can’t do it.

Stanislaus - thanks for your kind words. I quite like coming here to discuss cricket to be honest. Generally more thoughtful and less full of dicks than most other places (even The Guardian’s international cricket comment sections have become infected by it over the last 18 months - the last haven on that site is the County Cricket Live blog, where everyone is a cricket tragic and no one wants to wind anyone else up).

22

Tom Westley of Essex has been named in the squad ahead of the injured Ballance, and have also brought in Dawid Malan, who got some runs for us in a T20 game earlier this year.

Westley is certainly due his go, but I admit to being a puzzled by the selectors ignoring of Stoneman, whose name has been knocking around for a while now and has a good year in the Championship (average 58, high score 197).

My suspicion is that Westley will come in at 3 as a direct replacement for Ballance, and they may well drop Liam Dawson to bring Malan in. As has been said above, though, I think a culture change rather than just a player change is needed to get consistency from the team.

23

This is probably the crux of it. There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the effect that the (re?)emphasis on LOIs and T20 in particular is having on the development of players to play Test match style innings - England aren’t necessarily the only country to worry about this either.

I can see, in the medium to long run, a much more marked split between the LOI team and the Test team. From an England point of view, there will inevitably be some that play both (like Root, Stokes, Moeen) but I think we should be looking for a set of players that don’t have the game for T20, won’t ever go to the IPL and shouldn’t be playing LOIs, to make up the bulk of the Test side. We’re kind of on the way there already to be honest - Anderson and Broad don’t play short form cricket anymore, neither does Cook, Jennings has no chance of playing short form, and the people moaning that Bairstow isn’t playing LOIs should put it away and moan about the fact he’s not playing enough SCC to be the most prepared for Test cricket that he can be (as he isn’t going to usurp Buttler, and possibly Billings, any time soon). It’s a shame Hameed has had a bad year - there’s another player who shouldn’t play much short form cricket, if it can be helped.

The added benefit of such a split is that those players going off to IPL and Big Bash, to get LOI experience in good competitions, can be happily let go, safe in the knowledge that it won’t knacker whatever tour England’s Test side deal with at the same time.

Westley looks pretty decent for my money but there’s any number of players we have pushed up into the Test side recently who looked decent at county level only to fail at Test match level. He deserves his chance and hopefully, for all England fans’ sakes, the weak law of large numbers is going to kick in and he’ll actually be a player of substance. I’d consider Stoneman to be a touch unlucky - but he’s the one I would be looking at for Jennings place, rather than filling the hole at 3 (not that there’s currently much difference in England’s current situation).

24

Took the family to Lords for the WWC final yesterday, oh boy.

We didn’t quite manage to engage the five year old. Which was always a risk, and the pace of the England innings - never really getting going, even and especially at the end - cemented that. The music and flares and the waving of the 4/6 cards for boundaries are a great way of getting attention, and if the boundaries are coming quickly then you can get her watching every (or almost every) ball. But they weren’t. The batting powerplay was a particular disappointment in that regard, and we doubted they’d done enough. Overall, India did a great job of restricting the scoring.

So we said farewell to mum and daughter at about 3.30, and the 8-year-old and I settled in for what looked for a long time like a reasonably straightforward chase. When India needed 64 from 72 I was pretty despondent, and treated son’s suggestions that all we needed was to take the remaining 7 wickets with amused tolerance for the naive optimism of the young. And then…

It was a fantastic atmosphere - the noisiest I’ve ever heard Lord’s - and the final flurry of wickets had us all on our feet roaring. Credit for the atmosphere goes to the Indian fans, because they weren’t shy about chanting and that got the English fans - who might otherwise have restricted themselves to polite clapping - chanting in turn. All of it thoroughly good-natured and family-friendly to boot.

So a great day out, a breathtaking finale, and if my daughter didn’t get her head utterly turned, there’s time yet. I have to say they’ve really committed to using this event to attract families - every under 16 at the match was offered a starter bat/ball/stumps set, for example - and it paid off brilliantly.

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That’s great to hear. I attend live matches extremely rarely, but I genuinely enjoyed a day at Cardiff in June (just with a friend rather than family - I don’t think bringing my 3-year-old would be a rewarding experience for anyone). Despite England being soundly thrashed by Pakistan, it was a good day out, and I agree the Pakistan supporters in the crowd (I would guess in a slight majority by numbers, and a vast majority by noise level) really made it. The atmosphere was so much nicer than football or even rugby.

26

Cook gets 50 (still going). More to the point, an England second-wicket partnership of 52 runs, which shouldn’t be particularly notable but feels like it is.

However, Malan has just gone for 1 from 17 balls, Jennings went for 0 from 9 and Root started well but got tied up and was out for just 29. SA are bowling really well - between Morkel, Philander and Rabada, Englan -d don’t really have the option of waiting for the weaker bowler -
and now we’re into the middle-order I’m expecting/dreading a series of quick-scoring cameos rather than a defiant grind towards 200-4 at close of play. 250-7 seems more likely, if less desirable.

There has been rain, and it looks like early lunch and the subsequent break in concentration helped do for Westley, but otherwise it seems that Root, Jennings and especially Malan were just outplayed by the bowlers. Philander is 9-5-8-2, which is special.

27

I have some bad news about the nature of reality.

In his first Test, Toby Roland Jones has scored 25 from 25 balls at No 9, including a 6. He has now taken 4 for 47 from 6 overs against a very useful SA top order. There is a very real possibility that we are living in a ten-year-old’s daydream.

28

As Anderson takes du Plessis’s wicket for 1, I am torn between thinking this is going rather well and wondering if the Day 4 tickets I splurged on this morning are going to see the light of day.

29

You’re being unfair to TRJ - his figures (as I write) are 4/22. 47 was SA’s entire total at the time of your post (I believe)!

Do tickets for unused days get refunded, or does it depend on the type of ticket? I would indeed be looking at alternative plans for Monday if I were you! SA are now 61/7. Rain over the weekend may help your cause.

ETA: effectively 61/8, as Philander won’t bat today and it seems unlikely he will be able to offer much resistance even if SA manage to survive until tomorrow.

30

Jennings and Westley putting together a partnership, at 74/1. Good to see. Hopefully there will be enough play in the next two days for England to force a win.

There was a comment on the cricinfo commentary earlier today about how rare close finishes have been in English test matches recently, win or lose. You can get statsguru to give you a list, and you can see that there was a 22 run win in Chittagong last year, but other than that you have to go back to a 14 run victory over Australia in 2013 for anything less than a 70 run win. The last time tail-end batsman carried England home was Giles and Hoggard in 2005.

31

Well.

Moeen finishes the match off with a hat trick (albeit with an over from Stokes between wicket 2 and 3). This following both Stokes and Roland Jones taking 2 in 2 balls earlier in the innings. Elgar’s 136 remains a hugely impressive innings, even if in a losing cause.

I was at the match yesterday. A pretty good day’s cricket - SA did well to keep the scoring slow in the morning session, before Bairstow and Stokes cut loose after lunch. From the luxury of my metaphorical armchair, I thought the declaration could have come a bit sooner (400 would surely have been enough) but 4 wickets after tea made Root’s decision look pretty sensible.

Westley made a 50 (and Jennings made 48, to be fair) which has been taken by most reports I’ve seen as a positive sign. I’m not so convinced. He looked very hesitant and scratchy, playing and missing at way too many balls and struggling to get behind the line. He got badly bogged down in the 30s and responded by trying to hit big at balls that weren’t there to hit. Root came down to have word with him several times. The reports say he was “gritty”, “patient” and “determined” but that wasn’t the innings I saw.

Individual highlights would be Bairstow’s ramp for a one-bounce four, Stokes pair in successive balls and Bavuma’s rocket of a throw from right angles of the wicket that ran out Moeen. (Not quite as spectacular as this, but still)

32

I have spent the last 5 days at The Oval watching the entirety of this Test match, dropping probably somewhere in the region of £500 all told for (minimal) travel, tickets, food and drink. It was all worth it to see something I’ve never seen in the flesh before - a hat-trick - and doubly so, for it to be a) done by my favourite current player and b) to see the look on Mo’s face when the three lights went red; just pure delight.

As for the match, the players and the performance overall: I think England got a bit of a break when Philander fell ill, as he was making the ball talk on Thursday morning - if he’d be able to play all day Thursday and Friday, England’s total might have been somewhat lower and this game a lot closer; especially as he would have taken overs off Morris who was poor, particularly on the opening two days. Jennings looked a bit better in the second innings - still scratchy as anything mind, as he looks like he’s trying to find some form - but in the first innings, he faced 9 balls from Philander, every one of which looked like getting him out, until one did. Not ideal when you’re looking for form.

England pressed home the advantage well in the end, I thought. Thursday was a difficult day to bat; Cook, Westley and Root did well given the conditions. Friday was tremendous fun, as Stokes played his most mature knock to date, then cut free to get his ton. The match was then largely over bar the shouting at the end of the day. TRJ plays more innings like that he could be a cut price Glenn McGrath, just putting the ball in a difficult area over and over, over after over, and letting natural variation play out. Obviously early days though and, away from England, he would need to be very accurate I suspect.

Agree with Stanislaus that Westley in the 2nd innings had a much more difficult time of it. He scored a lot off his pads, taking up an off stump guard to allow him to work shots into the leg side but once SA worked him out, his scoring dried up noticeably. He’s going to need a couple more scoring shots to prosper at this level I suspect but, for the time being, he’ll do. He played, at least in his first innings, an innings Ballance is not capable of at Test match level. Still, both he and Jennings, if they are the men in possession for The Ashes, are going to have to play quite a bit better than this, I think.

SA are a decent side when everyone is fit. They need another opener - I’m really not convinced by Heino Kuhn. Bavuma always plays well against us, but his record otherwise is nothing to write home about. Hopefully he can kick on. Arguably, he should be coming in where De Kock is, with De Kock in at 6, where he is less likely to be exposed to a new ball and could do some serious damage. The bowling unit, Morris aside, is better than decent - Rabada is going to be awesome and the ball he detonated onto Malan’s stumps was a highlight of the match for me - and will pose further problems in the final Test. Finding the runs can be an issue though, particularly when their captain pads up like a muppet twice in two innings; those guys need to help their bowling unit out and give them something to target. Nasser Hussain was saying on the TV, if England stick up first innings runs, they’re difficult to beat. I’d say the same about SA too though (and possibly every side in Test cricket - I’m not convinced it’s a piece of searing insight).

I take it we’ve all seen the TMS wind up of Geoff Boycott? Worth seeking out on YouTube/Facebook if you haven’t.

33

The Boycott wind up was masterful. Brilliantly planned and executed. (Particularly in the critical part of a wind-up, which is telling the victim before they get *too *wound up.)

Watching a full Test is definitely on the bucket-list. And you definitely picked a good one, even if much of Saturday was washed out. And what a finish!

I agree with all your points, especially about the impact of Philander’s illness. On Westley, I did notice that they had two men on the cover drive for him, which is his only off-side scoring shot. By contrast, when Root was on strike one of those men went to deep point, which is where he scores a huge chunk of his runs. (I think 22 of his 50 came from the singles he knocked out there, all of which were basically saved fours.) Compared to TV, being at the match does give you a better perspective on fielding strategies, I think.

34

Missed this - yes, I did TRJ a disservice there.

For short days, you get a full or partial refund depending on how much play. They only need to show you a ridiculously small number of overs to avoid the refund though - c.15 IIRC, which is half a session.

But I did go (on the Sunday) and it was fine!

35

Yes indeed - pleased/jealous for both of you!

Also, thanks for the insights (again, from both) - always a good read.

I think the Ashes this winter will be an intriguing contest as both sides are sort of in transition, neither able to find much consistency, so with any luck that will translate into some competitive matches. Australia have to have the edge as the home side, if it were in England I’d give them the benefit.

36

The cricinfo headline after day 1 is “honours even”, but with England at 260/6, I’m not sure that SA aren’t a little ahead. Bairstow and Ali are going to have to add a few (at least a hundred to get any sort of edge), and SA will be thinking they could be batting an hour before lunch.

At least they got 90 overs in.

37

Will, they got a few more runs, and then South Africa collapsed again and are looking down the barrel. The pitch looks as bad too bat on as any I’ve seen since that one in the West Indies where they abandoned the test,and England have 3 50 lead with power to add and 2 days to finish. I don’t think England will last until lunch, and it will probably take rain interruptions to take the game into tomorrow.