In the Sydney Morning Herald, Greg Baum recounts Australia's dramatic chase at the Wanderers.

Tahir screamed for lbw. Cummins said he felt it was going to leg. Johnson said to him it had pitched outside off. ''That's just what I thought!'' Cummins said. The appeal failed, and so did the referral, by a splinter. In the dressing room, lounge room and bedroom, there was relief and there wasn't.

Cummins thought to himself: ''There's four to win. If he throws it up there, try and go over the top somewhere.'' As he related this later, Clarke rolled his eyes. Here was youth's blithe innocence. Two balls later, Cummins pulled Tahir for four and the win.

Also in the Sydney Morning Herald, Richard Hinds praises Pat Cummins for how he handled himself in situations that might have broken more experienced men.

Enter Cummins, so callow that the birth date on his player profile would have prompted cynical smirks had he been picked for Pakistan. At 18, some of us lacked the wit to find our way to the lecture room, let alone produce an over of such speed and variation that 40-time Test centurion Jacques Kallis was befuddled, then defeated.

At 18, some of us could barely pluck up the courage to extend an exploratory arm at the drive-in cinema, let alone put our body in the path of a Steyn thunderbolt in the Johannesburg gloaming.

"Where to now for the Proteas?" asks Kepler Wessels on Supercricket. "They have an easy summer ahead. First they take on Sri Lanka and then New Zealand. They should beat both teams at a canter. The question is how will the South African selectors and coach Gary Kirsten view the upcoming two series?"

There is no doubt that the Proteas will be disappointed with the outcome of the Test series. They were without question the stronger outfit. They would have expected to beat an average Australian team on home soil. The South African team were brilliant in Cape Town during the first Test match where they came back from the brink to win in incredible fashion.

On Sport 24, Rob Houwing has tough questions for South Africa: "Why do they struggle to string together even two good performances on the trot? Do they really have the mental and physical hunger to get to the pinnacle and stay there? Do they just not actually appreciate how good they should be as a unit, given the various stellar individual resources at their disposal?"

"It's time - and it has caught up with Ricky Ponting," Malcolm Conn writes in the Herald Sun, a day after Australia were razed by South Africa at Newlands.

Some former teammates of Australia's best batsman after Sir Don Bradman were right to believe that when Ponting retired from the captaincy this year he should have walked away altogether. His downward spiral has become a free fall but Ponting is not tumbling alone among those who were involved in Australia's second-innings debacle yesterday. If Simon Katich was sacked to rebuild for successive Ashes campaigns in 18 months, then the new selection panel under chairman John Inverarity has much to do.

"Madness, chaos, calamity and bizarre were the sorts of words thrown about Newlands as the Australians collapsed to 9/21," writes Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald. "A few others might be added, including inept, irresolute, reckless, feckless and foolish."

A hundred years ago it was not unknown for a new cricket nation to be dismissed for 20 or 30. The pitches were rough and sometimes wet, the players were inexperienced and often out of their depth, the bats were thin and the gloves were spiky. Nowadays the players are professionals, fit, seasoned, trained, protected and surrounded by advisors. And the pitches are the same. It is just about conceivable that they might fall for 80 or 90, as did the hosts in their first innings. But 9/21?"

Also in the Sydney Morning Herald, Greg Baum writes: "At practice, Australia, conscious of a habit of losing wickets in a rush, had put a premium on the first 20 balls. In the middle, they lost their heads. Only two Australian batsman made it to 20 balls. One, Phil Hughes, was dropped en route. The other was No.11 Nathan Lyon. But no South African after the opening pair lasted 20 balls either. The bowling was good but no better than that. The batting was atrocious."

There's more from Greg Baum, and he says the mindset of Australia's batsmen was an acute problem. "Too many Australian batsmen played like dunces. Brad Haddin waltzed down the wicket as if this was beach cricket. It was the most spectacularly ill-considered, ill-conceived and embarrassing shot played by an Australian batsman since, well, Steve Smith at the fag end of the Ashes series in Sydney in January. Even the estimable Mike Hussey threw his bat at a wide ball, his first and the first after a break."

"Australia put off the post-mortems until after the match but there's no avoiding it. We need to talk about the 11. Or, at the very least, the top seven," writes Peter Lalor in the Australian.

If Australia is serious about the future in the wake of the first Test debacle against South Africa then Patrick Cummins must replace Mitchell Johnson, writes Malcolm Conn in the Courier Mail.

Malcolm Conn, writing in Australia's Daily Telegraph says the Cape Town debacle shows that batsmen brought up on a glut of short-form cricket and easy Twenty20 money are unwilling or unable to deal with the moving ball.

... this is not an aberration but increasingly Australia’s norm as soon as the ball starts to move consistently. The last two Ashes series highlight that. It is the third time in little more than a year that Australia has been bowled out for under 100 once the ball started to deviate. Australia was dismissed for 88 against Pakistan at Headingley and 98 against England in Melbourne ... This South Africa-Australia Test series is a beacon to the marginalisation of the once sacred game.