< 1 minute read Very slowly. He’s not yet at a point where he’ll accept that his final Test was in January last year. Earlier this week, de Villiers made himself unavailable for selection for the upcoming Test series in New Zealand in March. Today he ruled himself out of the Test series against
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Vernon Philander is there if you need some seasoning
2 minute read We’ve spent much of the morning trying to work out what kind of a vehicle Vernon Philander is. After much thought, we’ve concluded that he’s not a vehicle at all – he’s a pepper grinder. South Africa have a lot of whizzy, fancy kitchen gadgets. Dale Steyn is the luxury
Continue readingMop-up of the last couple of days – Angelo Mathews still has work to do
< 1 minute read For a good long while you could accurately gauge Sri Lanka’s score by whether or not Angelo Mathews was walking out to bat or not. If he was, they were 22-3. If he wasn’t, it was some other score. A couple of recent batting finds had encouraged the notion that
Continue readingVehement letter-C denier AB de Villiers also renounces (c)
< 1 minute read AB de Villiers has stood down as South Africa Test captain. Faf du Plessis has filled the void, much as he has been doing for quite a while now. This decision makes sense to us for two reasons. Firstly, de Villiers hardly ever plays cricket for South Africa at the
Continue readingHow to dismiss Faf du Plessis – make friends with him
< 1 minute read Faf du Plessis is a competitor. That’s the kind of thing people say. It’s a shorthand way of saying that he only seems capable of playing to his full potential when there’s a stronger taste of conflict to proceedings. Performing in what is never called the crucible of county cricket,
Continue readingMop-up of the day – guilt, great promise and grey trivialities
2 minute read ‘Du Plessis found guilty’ reads the Cricinfo headline. We don’t really feel it necessary to add much to your likely response to reading that. The effect of imposing black and white morality on the sport’s grey trivialities could barely be clearer. Here’s something we wrote last time Du Plessis buggered
Continue readingAustralia should probably stop doctoring their own pitches
< 1 minute read Playing Australia is like playing Jenga with a house of cards when each of the cards is drunk. Before they played Sri Lanka, David Warner spoke of batting “well into the next day” but the team repeatedly folded as if prepared by Miura. Against South Africa at the Waca, they
Continue readingAustralia fold like junk mail
2 minute read Any batting side can fold like a Bargain Booze leaflet pushed through the door, but it takes a certain amount of preparation to do this when it’s really expected of you. Confronted with a robust hard-to-open letterbox, Australia crumpled impressively. We watched the first six overs of their 85 all
Continue readingMop-up of the day – Batting collapses don’t just come against spin, apparently
2 minute read A true collapse comes after a start. Throwing a load of Lego bricks over the floor is just a mess; putting them together to build some sort of tower before watching it keel over – that’s a collapse. Like England last week, Australia took the time to set the scene.
Continue readingAn Australia team versus a South Africa team – this time it’s international cricket
2 minute read The main thing we take from day one of the first Test between Australia and South Africa is that the five one-dayers they played in South Africa recently weren’t proper international matches and so they probably shouldn’t have bothered. Australia’s bowling attack for those matches was a recurring theme in
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