In one of those small coincidences that cricket tragics savour, the second day of the First Test between South Africa and Australia at The Gabba will mark exactly a year since day two of the Cape Town test in which both sides were bundled out for less than 100 in an afternoon of madness.
Australia's test performances since then have allowed the memory of that day to fade quicker than it might otherwise have done. Last summer, Australia demolished a star-studded India so emphatically it was hard to believe that India had held the number one test ranking seven months earlier and that Australia had not occupied top spot for more than two years.
In the 4-0 clean sweep, Michael Clarke became the first Australian batsman since Bradman to score a double and triple century in the same series. (Bradman actually accomplished the feat twice, in England in 1930 and 1934). Ricky Ponting also launched his own resurgence, scoring a century in Sydney and a double century in Adelaide. By that time, day two at Newlands, Cape Town seemed an era away.
Only the most insane of soothsayers would have predicted anything like what happened that afternoon. An astonishing 23 wickets fell as both sides were bundled out in successive sessions. After taking nine South African wickets for 47 runs after lunch, Australia was all out for 47 after tea. The word 'collapse' was barely adequate. Australian cricketers are famously superstitious about the number 87. For a moment it seemed the number 47 might come to be held in similar awe.
The Cape Town test was rightly described as extraordinary. In truth, though, South Africa's collapse would have been staggering on its own. At 3 for 73, they were 12 runs behind the follow on target. A few overs later, they were still behind, but nine wickets down. They were eventually dismissed for just 96.
And then Australia batted. At three for 13, the situation was dire but not yet hopeless. Sides have staged fightbacks from similar positions. At nine for 21, however, it was no longer hopeless but gobsmacking.
The ABC's commentary team was clearly bewildered, caught between the urge to laugh and lament, but remained as insightful as ever. Jim Maxwell called the game a "statistician's banquet" because of all the strange facts it yielded: Australia's third lowest total, its lowest in more than 100 years. One of the few occasions in which a number 11 has top scored, the last pair has made more than the rest of the team combined and parts of all four innings have been played on the same day. The decision review system was used nine times. The third umpire can rarely have been called upon so often in a day's play.
It was as if everyone on the field had been gripped by a temporary but terrible insanity. Perhaps strange forces were at work. Geoff Lawson wondered out loud: "Is it high tide at the moment?" 47 seemed almost respectable when you consider Australia's fall of wickets. To be four for 13, five for 16, six for 18, seven for 21, eight for 21, nine for 21 is, in the modern era, unheard of.
Michael Clarke missed out on the opportunity to enforce the follow on by 12 runs, but if he'd had the chance he should have taken it. While captains have in recent times hesitated from putting their opponents back in (the lingering effect of Eden Gardens, Calcutta, 2001?) making South Africa bat again would not have merely allowed Australia's players to press their advantage and perhaps precipitate a second collapse. It would have protected them from themselves, from their own nihilistic thoughts. Batting again after bundling South Africa out so brilliantly and unexpectedly, Australia was not so much afflicted by a crisis of confidence than a case of losing the plot. After scoring 284 in their first innings, Australia's batsmen suddenly felt a dangerous lack of purpose. They were so far in front they didn't know how to move forward. 188 ahead with three and a half days to play and a kind of numb complacency set in.
Brad Haddin was singled out for criticism because of the reckless shot that cost him his wicket. But is it irresponsible to charge a fast bowler with the score on 5 for 18, just as Haddin did? You could argue both sides. "Grossly irresponsible," you might say, "because he was the team's last hope." Alternatively, you might answer "No, because at 5 for 18, there's probably not a lot to lose." On replay, Haddin's dance down the pitch seemed an attempt to restore sanity by doing something mad. It was as if he was trying to break the spell that had descended on the ground by acting rashly. "If I can hit this for four," he was probably thinking, "I'll show them who's in control. We'll reassert ourselves and be back on top." But he too fell victim.
At the time, some pundits tried to portray Australia's abysmal collapse as proof of the nation's further descent into cricket's doldrums, coming as it did after the humiliating Ashes defeat earlier that year. Others blamed the corrosive effect of Twenty20 cricket on batting techniques. The most cavalier and careless form of the game is, after all, about throwing your wicket away in the service of slogging. But maybe it's safer to say that the Cape Town test was just so extraordinary that it wasn't indicative of anything at all. Perhaps the most sensible stance is that the twin disintegrations, first South Africa's and then Australia's, are proof not of declining standards but of the old truism that cricket is a 'funny game,' with its strange momentum shifts and psychological subtleties. Odd things can happen when you're in the middle. Batsmen become trapped by self-defeating thoughts.
The Russian orchestral conductor Valery Gergiev once chided musicologists who heard in the symphonies of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich evidence of a politically tortured soul. Shostakovich's life overlapped the era of Stalin, and the former's neurotic music is often thought to reflect the madness of the latter's reign of terror. Gergiev rejects this interpretation. "It is time to find more music in this music," he drily remarked. The reasons for this judgment are worth reflecting on. Despite the overwhelming secularism of our age, a metaphysic abides. Everything has to mean something. Nothing can be 'just so.' Every event, occurrence, utterance is a mine of hidden meaning. Words and situations are sifted obsessively in order to get to concealed truth. But, as with Gergiev and the music of Shostakovich, maybe we shouldn't read too much into the Newlands test. Maybe we should just shrug our shoulders and nonchalantly mutter that "cricket is just... cricket." The anniversary of day two at Cape Town is similarly meaningless - it is certainly no omen of what to expect this summer. But in a game that seems to encourage the statistician's attention to details, it is a date certainly worth marking.
And the Cape Town test has not entirely lost its relevance. It showed that while cricket is a team game, from a batsman's point of view it's still a very lonely one. It's sometimes said that cricket is an 'individual's team game' - a clumsy remark, but one that happens to be true. As Matthew Engel wrote in Wisden:
"The guiding myth of cricket is that it is a team game. The ethos is always that the individual must subordinate himself to the collective: celebrate a victory even if he has contributed nothing and faces the chop, or pretend that his own century is meaningless if it failed to secure the team's objective. That applies on the village green just as it does in a Test match. But this misrepresents cricket's appeal, both to the player and the spectator. It's a game of character and personality - individuals operating within the team framework, like wheels within wheels."
Cricket is a team game, but when you're in the middle it's still you against the bowler. That doesn't mean a collective mindset cannot take hold of a batting line-up. On that afternoon in Cape Town, Australia's players were perhaps surprised to have dismissed South Africa so cheaply and quickly that they lost sight of the bigger picture. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Maybe Australia's batsmen laughed nervously to themselves at the absurd prospect of repeating South Africa's collapse. Maybe they thought: "Surely, we can't go the same way," and by thinking it, made it happen.
Tags: cricket First posted November 08, 2012 19:17:31
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