There have been no drawn Tests at the Wanderers since 2000, when three days of the match against New Zealand were washed out. Even before they came here with a 1-0 lead, therefore, England would have known to expect a result pitch, but what they could not predict was the extra bounce of the surface.
Paul Collingwood admitted as much, while refusing to be drawn on what he thought was a par score. Just as against Australia, sides who play South Africa cannot afford to let their opponents know they think they have underperformed, as undoubtedly England did yesterday.
To beat South Africa in South Africa, as the Lions rugby union team know, you must face up to the psychological confrontations that are inevitable. The flimsily based balltampering accusations against England in the third Test in Cape Town are a case in point.
“I don’t know what a par score is,” Collingwood said. “There’s a lot in it — good carry, the ball’s swinging and there’s seam movement. There’s a little bit more bounce than we expected. We wanted to stay positive in our approach and we’re not playing for a draw. Today, we weren’t quite good enough.”
After their initial, and visual, displeasure at the decision by Daryl Harper, the third umpire, not to call a no-ball when Alastair Cook was given out leg-before, Collingwood tried to play down the incident. Andy Flower, the team director, was sufficiently roused to pay a visit to Harper’s bunker shortly after Cook’s dismissal, but Collingwood, the non-striker at the time, revealed the team now had no truck with the Australian’s ruling.
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“We’re not going to make an issue of it,” Collingwood said. “At the time, on a still picture on TV, it looked as if [Morne] Morkel was over, but the guys have looked at further footage and there’s a little bit of his heel behind [the popping crease].”
Third umpires in the decision review system get more camera angles and technical assistance — from stump mikes, for example — than the television viewer is afforded. What appeared a mistake initially by Harper was shown to be the correct decision. Unlike a bat that has to be grounded when a run-out or stumping is being considered, a bowler’s heel can be raised in the air at the point of delivery as long as part of it is behind the popping crease.
Collingwood conceded that England may have been too gung-ho with their stroke selection. “It’s an individual thing how to score runs to win a game,” he said. “You must be committed. Today there were some good balls and some good catches and some guys who were disappointed with their shots. It can be tough to play on these types of wickets.”
What has become increasingly clear is that the early loss of Andrew Strauss, who was out off the opening ball of the first innings, invariably prevents England from building a competitive total. It was the first time that Dale Steyn had dismissed the England captain in eight Test matches against him, as notable a statistic as the fast bowler’s completion yesterday of a full set of five-wicket hauls against every present Test-playing nation.
Steyn felt that he had bowled better in the third Test at Sahara Park. “I bowled nicely in Cape Town but was luckless,” he said. “Strauss’s wicket was off a bit of a loosener — a bit of luck went my way there. It was a great catch.”
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His most satisfying wicket, taken by the inswinger that confounded Ian Bell after a series of outswingers, had been planned in the lunch break with Jeremy Snape, the former England one-day player now working as South Africa’s sports psychologist.
“I’ve been working on the inswinger to the right-hander for the past couple of years,” Steyn said. “It’s not something you can just go out there and do. When you execute these plans you make off the field, it’s the best feeling you can have.”
In Steyn’s view, Graham Onions would have been “a handful” on this surface. “There was a bit of relief he was left out,” Steyn said. “He’s troubled all our batsmen in this series and would have been very dangerous to play against here.”
No ducking the issue as Strauss makes history
? Andrew Strauss was the 28th batsman in Test cricket to be out to the first ball of a match and the fifth Englishman. Nine of those 28 dismissals were in the past ten years.
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? There is some debate over whether the correct term for such a dismissal is a diamond duck, a platinum duck or a royal duck.
? England have never lost when they have had a batsman out to the first ball of a Test. Before Strauss, the most recent Englishman so dismissed was Stan Worthington, a Derbyshire opener, who was out to the first ball of the 1936-37 Ashes series in Brisbane. England won that match — and they also went on to win Tests when Archie MacLaren (1894) and Herbert Sutcliffe (1933) were out first ball. The only other England batsman to be out to the first ball of a match was Tom Hayward, in a drawn Test in 1907.
? Sunil Gavaskar, of India, was out to the first ball of a match on three occasions. So was Hannan Sarkar, the Bangladesh opener, who remarkably was dismissed on each occasion by Pedro Collins, the West Indies fast bowler. Collins bowled Sarkar in Dhaka in 2002 and had him leg-before twice in the Caribbean 18 months later.
Words by Patrick Kidd