As the Johannesburg Test slalomed in a spectacular way towards its baggy-green denouement, the TV cameras pick out a placard in the crowd which posed the question: Is Test cricket dead? Perhaps on the reverse side, there was a range of multiple-choice answers, ranging from: (a) yes, it died the moment Australia won at The Oval in 1882; through (d) no, but it has been taken hostage by some angry-looking goons wearing IPL replica shirts and they do not seem especially keen on negotiating a civilised resolution to the stand-off; to (g) who cares, Mozart is dead too and his tunes are still damned catchy.

The cameras then resumed their more important regular task of zooming in annoyingly close as the ball is bowled to ensure that the viewer cannot fully see what happened until replays are shown, several of which have also been zoomed in to the point of perspective-obliterating meaninglessness, all the while prompting the watching cricket fan to ponder from the comfort of his or her sofa: Why is that, as televisions become bigger and bigger and better and better, TV cricket seems intent on showing a smaller and smaller part of the action?

I digress. Anyway, the evidence of the contest being played out in front of the placard suggests that the correct response was: “Is Test cricket dead? Is the Pope an aubergine?”

This was close to the perfect Test match, a game of constantly shifting momentum which contained more twists and turns than an ice-skating snake’s high-risk Olympic final routine.
Innings of 30 or 40 were valuable, partnerships of 50 felt match-changing, every session saw the balance of the game wobbling from one side to the other like a drunken tightrope walker on a windy day.

On the evidence of the game, if not the crowd at the ground, Test cricket clearly is not dead. It might be in a nursing home, but, frequently, its faculties seem as sharp as ever. Admittedly, it does wish more people would come to visit it. And it is not entirely sure that it can trust all of its family members, some of whom seem to be scrabbling over its inheritance before it has even made its will.

Nevertheless, it was a little sad to see the final day this all-time classic match played to a stadium so sparsely populated that you wanted to give it a cuddle and tell it to keep its chin up. What can cricket do to attract fans to Test matches, without using military threats, or paying people twice their daily wage to attend?

I have met almost no cricket fans who do not claim Test cricket is their favourite form of the game (although I don’t get out of my house very much, so that is not the most scientific of opinion polls). There is clearly a healthy passive following for Test cricket, but in a world swamped by infinite competing distractions, coercing people to physically place themselves in a stadium for some or all of a five-day contest is a Herculean task. Given that cricket has still not worked out how to adequately police bad light and somnolent over-rates, I think even Hercules himself, the celebrity former 12-time Greek Labourer Of The Year, might balk at taking on the task of refilling its empty stadiums.

Australia showed remarkable skill and resolve, amidst outbreaks of their now trademark carelessness, to recover from their Newlands Nightmare, aided by Patrick Cummins making one of the most striking Test debuts of recent years (more of which in the next Multistat blog, later in the week). I cannot remember exactly what I was doing when I was his age, but I am fairly confident that it was not taking 6 for 79 on my Test debut and calmly slapping the winning runs in one of the most tense finishes in cricket history.

However, just as Australia tossed away a winning position in Cape Town, so at the Wanderers South Africa flung their superiority out of the window like an unwanted motorway banana skin.

The Proteas’ World Cup bid was fatally undermined by a middle-order megabloop that exposed a tail longer that the one Kate Middleton was so desperately trying to hide under the train of her wedding dress. They lost in Johannesburg for the same reason, flunking in the first innings from 241 for 4 to 266 all out, and then in the second from 237 for 3 to 339 all out. This followed their first-innings Cape Town calamity when they alchemised 49 for 1 into 96 all out, before being decisively out-calamatised by Australia’s brilliant counter-calamity.

In this series, the South Africans’ sixth to 10th wickets totalled a startlingly useless 138 runs in 15 partnerships ‒ 9.2 runs per wicket, the Proteas’ rubbishest lower-order series performance since 1907, and their fourth cruddiest of all time.

Since readmission, the lower middle-order had been one of South Africa’s great advantages over their rivals. Not anymore. Since 2006, South Africa’s Nos. 8 to 11 have collectively averaged 15.8, placing them sixth of the 10 Test nations, with no hundreds (all other teams have at least one, except Zimbabwe, who have only played three Tests), and just seven fifties in 55 Tests ‒ and three of those were by Boucher after a nightwatchman had bumped him down to No. 7.

From 2000 to 2005, South Africa’s lower order averaged a world-leading 20.3, with three hundreds and 16 fifties in 67 Tests. From 1992 to 1999, their 8 to 11 were way ahead of the field, averaging 19.8, with four centuries (as many as the rest of the world put together) and 19 half-centuries in 66 matches.

This new-fangled lower-order brittleness is one of the reasons that Smith’s team have let slip a one-Test lead in three series out of their last five, and, having seemingly scaled the peak of world cricket by winning in Australia late in 2008, have won just one rubber (in West Indies) since the start of 2009. Their team is still speckled with world-class players, but it has an Achilles heel visible from space (with a powerful telescope and access to Statsguru).

All in all, Cape Town and Johannesburg have provided the cricket-watching world with two unforgettable Tests, albeit that the memories most people will be not forgetting will be of a TV screen rather than a cricket ground. It has been a compelling start to the series, which is now perfectly set up for the remaining zero Tests.

EXTRAS

● This was the 13th successive Test between Australia and South Africa to end in a positive result. There has been one draw between them in 20 Tests over seven series this millennium, and the lowest overall scoring rate in any of those series has been 3.40. Cricket is showbiz nowadays. And there is a saying in showbiz: “Always leave them wanting more.” Cricket has done that. A third Test would be greedy. A fourth ‒ the height of indulgence. A fifth, and you might as well wake up Lenin and tell him he won the Cold War.

● Perhaps the 21st-century cricket lover should simply be thankful that at least these series happen twice every three or four years nowadays. In 91 years from their first meeting in 1902 to the resumption of southern-hemisphere hostilities after Apartheid, the Australians set their baggy-green feet on the veldt in just seven Test tours, with the South Africans heading over to Baggy Greenland just four times (they also made up a wet and one-sided corner of the 1912 triangular series in England). If there are legitimate complaints these days about cricketing overkill, it could equally be said that our cricketing forefathers were guilty of underkill.

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In the 2015 previous Test matches that have adorned the history of the universe, few, if any, passages of play can have matched the barking-mad cricketing melodrama that unfolded in the 2016th in Cape Town on Wednesday. On a lively but scarcely fire-breathing wicket, mayhem reigned as the moving ball and the DRS ran amok like a porcelain-loving bull in a well-stocked china shop.

Australia, from a position of total dominance, lost, in quick succession: a few early wickets; their marbles; and control of the game. Haddin, in particular, seemed to be spooked by the scoreboard (which read an admittedly alarming 18 for 5), and forget the match situation, which was, effectively, 206 for 5. Philander and Morkel took full advantage, and the game was not so much turned on its head as flipped into an impromptu quadruple somersault, before staggering groggily to its feet, muttering: “Who am I and what am I doing here?”

Australia had history and an immortal entry in the annals of sporting ineptitude within their grasp – at 21 for 9 after 11.4 overs, they were within one more inept waft of registering the lowest-ever completed Test innings (New Zealand’s 26 against England in 1954-55), and the shortest-ever completed Test innings (South Africa’s 12.3 overs at Edgbaston in 1924). Siddle and Lyon stapled a small fig leaf of dignity to Australia’s obvious embarrassment with a last-wicket stand of 26, and History mopped its brow and toddled off. But it did not leave empty-handed. Here then, is a multiple-choice quiz about the unforgettable day two of the Newlands Test. Each question has multiple answers. Do not attempt if you are (a) an Australian batsman, or (b) an Australian of nervous disposition.

1. What did Nathan Lyon do on Thursday that no other human being has ever done?

(a) He walked out to bat in a Test match with his team at 21 for 9. The previous worst score facing a No. 11 was 25 for 9, when Lyon’s baggy green predecessor Tom McKibbin marched to the wicket at The Oval in 1896 thinking, “Oh dear. This is a disappointing score. I bet no other Australian will ever come to the wicket with a worse score than this on the board.” He smote a defiant 16 before being caught, taking Australia’s score up to 44 all out, leaving Hugh Trumble chuntering into his moustache at the non-striker’s end that he had taken 12 for 89 in the match and still been on the wrong end of a shoeing.

(b) He broke the 300-mph barrier on a unicycle. Unicycling has been introduced to the Australian training regime by their new coaches, as a means of improving balance and self-confidence. Lyon took a morning pedal up to the top of Table Mountain, lost his balance whilst looking for a yeti, and careered down to Newlands at breakneck speed.

(c) He became the eighth No. 11 to top-score in a Test innings.

(d) He walked on the moon.

ANSWERS: (a) and (c). (b) has not been ratified by the World Unicycling Federation, as it took place outside of official competition.

2. What do WG Grace and Philip Hughes have in common?

(a) Both men are no longer as effective as Test Match batsmen as they once were.

(b) Both have been played by Hollywood actor Val Kilmer in films.

(c) They have each taken part in one of the only two Tests ever played in which 23 batsmen have been dismissed in single figures in the first three innings of the match – Hughes at Newlands this week, Grace in the Lord’s Test of 1888.

(d) Both have featured prominently in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s dreams in the past week.

ANSWERS: (a), (c) and (d).

3. What has Australia as a nation experienced three times in the last 16 months?

(a) An infestation of pterodactyls.

(b) It has watched in gaping-mouthed astonishment as its once-mighty cricket team has been bowled out for under 100, on three separate occasions – 88 all out against Pakistan in Leeds in July 2010, the Boxing Day MCG abomination against England (98 all out), and now 47 at Newlands. Three times in 12 Tests. They had posted a two-figure score just once in their previous 277 Tests over 25 years. They had not been skittled for under 100 three times in two years since 1887 and 1888 – when they had to regroup and take the positives after eight different sub-100 totals. In six matches. It is fair to say that Australian batsmanship improved thereafter.

(c) A creeping sensation that Silvio Berlusconi’s behaviour might not be entirely prime ministerial.

(d) It has seen its cricket team win a Test match – in their previous four series, they won three, drew three and lost six. The previous time they won three or fewer games in a run of 12 Tests was between December 1987 and June 1989. At which point, they ground England into a fine pulp, kick-starting a decade and a half of unremitting Ashes dominance. Is this all part of Cricket Australia’s masterplan?

ANSWERS: (b) and (d).

4. Why might Vernon Philander and Shane Watson have spent Thursday night discussing plans for a massive 30-foot-high commemorative bronze statue of themselves to be erected on the concourse at Newlands?

(a) Because they had just overheard Peter Siddle and Morne Morkel discussing erecting a 29-foot-high commemorative bronze statue of themselves on the concourse in Centurion.

(b) Because they had just become the first pair of bowlers from opposite sides to take five-wicket hauls for fewer than 20 runs in the same Test.

(c) Because 18 wickets had fallen in 23 overs of Test cricket, and they had been the principal agents of batting doom – both took five wickets in 20 balls. Eighteen wickets tumbled for 68 in 138 balls. Think about that. Have you thought about that? What do you think about that? This included 16 for 44 in 115, as South Africa lost their last seven wickets for 23 (their lowest such total since their first Test after readmission in 1991-92), and Australia lost their first nine for 21 (unprecedented at least since before the dinosaurs were still at the crease). Holy smokes. The apocalypse is coming. No doubt. Look at the Eurozone. Then look at the scorecard from Newlands. Then look at Alastair Cook’s Test average over the last 12 months. There is no other conclusion to draw.

(d) Because, during the tea interval, they discovered a method of converting the noise of lbw appeals into electricity, thus solving all the world’s energy problems, and rightly believe that their breakthrough should be recognised in artistic form.

ANSWERS: (b) and (c)

5. Before the Newlands Test, what had happened only twice since the First World War?

(a) Another World War.

(b) Both teams had been dismissed for under 100 in the same Test. It happened when India and New Zealand went head-to-head in a loser-loses-all collapse-off in Hamilton in 2002-03, and when South Africa and Australia span each other silly in Durban in 1949-50, and it has happened in Cape Town this week.

(c) A member of the Bush family had won a US Presidential election.

(d) Australia had lost a Test Match after taking a first-innings lead of 188 – their Newlands lead after skittling South Africa for 96. Those two occasions are quite highly regarded matches – Headingley 1981 and Kolkata 2000-01. If Australia lose this match, it will be the eighth highest first-innings lead to have resulted in defeat (excluding the Hansie Cronje’s Magic Jacket match in 1999-2000, when the middle two innings were forfeited and England technically won after conceding a 248-run lead).

(e) A Test team had lost eight wickets for 10 runs or fewer. Australia collapsed like a narcoleptic house of cards on a bobsled going down the Spanish Steps in Rome as they subsided from 11 for 1 to 21 for 9. Only twice before had eight wickets fallen for as few runs in a Test, and both times New Zealand were the untriumphant team involved – when Saqlain and Sami carved them up in Auckland in 2000-01 (121 for 2 became 131 all out); and when, on the first day of post-war Test cricket, in Wellington in 1945-46, the Kiwis celebrated the return of peace by slumping from 37 for 2 to 42 all out. They followed this up by losing 6 for 6 during their second innings, and Australia, so appalled that such ineptitude should be allowed on a cricket pitch, did not play another Test against New Zealand for almost three decades. Will they be hoist by their own petard?

ANSWERS: (b), (d) and (e). And (c). And (a). If you count the international dispute over the UDRS as a World War. Which you should not.

Here endeth the quiz.

What a day. I think cricket needs a cup of tea and a sit-down. For mercifully different reasons than it needed a cup of tea and a sit-down last week after the spot-fixing trial. The third day may provide yet more twists, and after the excellent Test matches in Zimbabwe and India, these crazy Cape Town capers have been a further reminder that cricket is generally far more enjoyable when it is being played and watched on the pitch rather than in a courtroom.

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