The ball has swung in this match. There has been seam movement, some bounce and good turn. On top of that, South Africa need to win this game. Mark Boucher and Graeme Smith have been the standout batsmen. This is not surprising.

Most players play worse in these situations. A very small number play better. Boucher and Smith almost always play better when their team need them to and with every Test cap they’ve earned, this has become more and more the case.

How would we fare in the same position? Well, we sometimes freak out watching the highlights of matches we know England have won, put it that way.

Loots Bosman and Graeme Smith today batted in international cricket as if they were playing an overfamiliar cricket computer game on easy setting. Simply aim at cow corner and press the six-hit button.

It was astonishingly clean hitting. Almost robotic. Alastair Cook erred hugely in not positioning a fielder on the grass banks on the other side of the rope.

Graeme Smith’s things are hitting the bulk of the runs in a fourth innings chase and winning Test series.

There were no miracles from Australia’s bowlers, because the bowlers who could perform them are gone. South Africa chased down 183 for the loss of one wicket, won the match, won the series and perhaps even won the right to be considered the best side in the world.

Graeme Smith is a hard man. Our hero, Neil Manthorp, describes a captain who takes fitness tests when injured and if he fails, tears up the results and plays anyway. Smith seems to play the majority of his cricket with a broken finger or rib. His team are made in his image.

They play to win and they do what’s necessary. They’ve got stroke players like AB de Villiers and fast bowlers like Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel. They’ve also got Paul Harris who everyone says is shite, but who doesn’t give a toss and just gets on with the business of going for hardly any runs and letting the fast bowlers storm in.

They’ve also got Neil McKenzie, whose batting is so hypnotically unspectacular, it doesn’t just sedate the crowd, it impairs their motor skills as well. Graeme Smith wants these players in his side because he wants his side to win and he doesn’t much care how that happens.

The proof is in the texture and succulence of the biltong.

What’s really impressed us about this South African win is not that they chased down such a huge total on the final day, or that they did it against what is nominally the best side in the world. (Interesting appearance of the word ‘nominally’ there, eh?).

What’s most impressive is that they managed to fight back so comprehensively after Mitchell Johnson’s spell of five wickets for five runs earlier in the match. A team should be pretty damn dispirited after that happens to them. To overcome it betrays a genuine confidence that is quite, quite sickening. It also makes Ricky Ponting’s traditional pre-match words about South African mental scars seem a bit meaningless.

It’s being said everywhere, but if Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne had been playing, South Africa never would have made it. We’ll go one further and say that if they had been playing, South Africa wouldn’t have won, even if the wisened greats had bowled a load of toss. Sometimes you earn wickets through more than just your performance on the day and that’s a quality that’s extremely hard to replace.

AB de Villiers is in the process of building a reputation that he’s hard to bowl at. He also has another reputation, it seems. It might have been removed by now, but at the time of writing, his Wikipedia page featured the following sentence:

“De Villiers enjoys late nights while on tour with some of the local talent.”

There’s no preamble to that. It’s just one of a series of urelated ‘facts’ about his personal life, in between some quotes about Jesus and the name of his high school.

But before half of you try and apply this colourful philosophy to your everyday lives, Graeme Smith also had a warning. He said the approach wasn’t sustainable. Big silent boo to Graeme Smith, everybody.

Wherever their balls were, it was nice to see England’s bowlers having a bit of fun.

England v South Africa, fourth Test at the Oval, day one
South Africa 194 all out (James Anderson 3-42)
England 49-1

South Africa are probably the least popular Test team other than England (sorry people, but we have a richly questionable history as a nation, largely at the expense of other cricketing countries). Graeme Smith is arguably South Africa’s least popular player. We quite like him.

We like that he was made South Africa captain at just 22 having not been part of the first team, yet felt that he could immediately slag Lance Klusener off upon taking the job. We’ve nothing against Lance Klusener, but he was a major part of the team and Smith’s approach was the equivalent of punching out the huge guy on your first day in prison.

Then he came to England and made 277, 85 and 259 in his first three Test innings over here. Some cricketers can’t attain that level of merciless thuggery after a lifetime in the game. We hated it of course, but we didn’t hate Smith for doing it.

We also like the unbelievable stupidity of the man when he tried to put himself forward as a kind of lightning rod for Antipodean ridicule when South Africa toured Australia. The Australians were only too happy to oblige, but at least he was trying to be noble.

This week he did for another England captain with the most sublimely cussed fourth innings batting imaginable. It was elevated yet further by several of his batting partners virtually bursting into tears at several points. Graeme Smith didn’t concern himself with any of that rubbish. He just carried on hitting runs until South Africa had won the series.

We admire it in for its cold remorselessness. We like players who don’t let the opposition have a sniff. But as records go, it’s not one of our favourites.

Must be a bit of a confidence booster though. Next innings, Smith and McKenzie can look at each other as they go out to bat and they can think to themselves: ‘We can bat for bloody ages together.’

Then McKenzie can think: ‘Smithy’s so strong’. And Smith can think: ‘McKenzie’s cover-driving’s dreamy.’ Then the pair of them will just drop their bats, discard their batting helmets and kiss.

Graeme Smith’s leg will bend at the knee and come up behind him.

People seem to think it looked like a ‘bowl first’ pitch, but we don’t know about that. The West Indies topped 400 after all and just how often do you bowl first? To us it was the kind of move that said South Africa were already certain that they were going to win and all they were concerned about was how they were going to do it. This is never the way to beat a team. Your attitude’s wrong for one, but there’s also the chance that you might rile your opponents into overachievement.

If it really was just a case of misreading the pitch, fine, but if the sensible move would have been to bat, Smith should have done that. Be cold and calculating about it, be clinical. Make your grand statements of intent from a position of strength.

Or just play better. You can overcome quite a lot, if you just do that.