How Kingsmead went from sky blue to deep blue
South Africa were drifting toward a draw in Durban until Australia reminded them they don’t beat themselves
All was well for South Africa for almost the first two hours of the last day of the Kingsmead Test against Australia. Aiden Markram and Wiaan Mulder kept the runs trickling and stayed out of trouble, and for a while thoughts drifted upward to whatever shade of blue the then cloudless sky might be …
Was it celeste? Cadet? Pale turquoise? Soft cyan? Maybe just plain sky blue …?
That’s the kind of thing that happens when a match seems to be softening. “Seems to be” is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. Because Aussies don’t often soften. They don’t beat themselves; they need to be beaten. Like South Africa did, by five wickets, in the WTC final at Lord’s last June.
There wasn’t much chance of that happening at Kingsmead on Tuesday. Set 421 to win, South Africa were 319 away at the resumption. But winning was never on their table. Saving the match was the goal, and they started the last day with six wickets standing.
They kept standing for almost two hours. Then, just after Nathan Lyon had switched the bails, Josh Hazlewood aimed a delivery at Mulder’s pads. He deployed the leg glance, and probably thought he had got enough of his bat on the ball to evade hands waiting for catches. Alex Carey thought otherwise, swooping into a dive and plucking a one-hander well down the leg side. With that the mood around a ground sparsely sprinkled with spectators was plunged into another kind of blue: deep.
Mulder trudged off with eyes closed and head thrown back in frustration. He had been there for more than two hours and faced 110 balls. It was a cruel way to go after all that solid work.
That was probably that as far as a fighting draw was concerned, but the manner of Kyle Verreynne’s dismissal three balls later rammed home South Africa’s impending fate.
Matt Renshaw had sent down only 30 deliveries of off-spin — and taken no wickets — in his 15 Tests before this match. He changed that narrative on Monday when Temba Bavuma stretched forward defensively and nudged a catch to short leg.
But the ball that got Verreynne didn’t seem about to double Renshaw’s number of Test wickets. It pitched wide and was there to be cut hard. Instead Verreynne stepped outside off and drove off the back foot. The ball made it past Carey but not Steven Smith at slip, who not for the first time made a complicated catch look simple.
The new ball, taken by Mitchell Starc eight deliveries after it was due, accounted for Marco Jansen — who left the gate open more than enough to be bowled by an inswinger from Hazlewood, who produced the most emphatic dismissal of the match three balls after that.
It looked like a length ball when it pitched. But it reared like a black mamba and straightened. Simon Harmer pushed forward. He was hit on the glove, then the shoulder. From there the missile screamed at Carey, who had to leap high to take the catch.
At least Markram was spared that type of rude removal. He edged Starc onto his thigh and into Carey’s gloves. So ended a yeoman shift of almost six hours. The Australians wouldn’t have forgotten the cashmere quality 136 Markram scored against them to win the WTC final at Lord’s in June. Doubtless they knew Markram was South Africa’s only serious hope of saving the match. For 236 balls that yielded 75 runs, 40 of them in fours, that hope lived. The 237th ball snuffed it out.
But there was something like sweetness in that bitter bite. Imagine batting with the class and backbone Markram showed and scoring a century only to end up in the wrong dressing room. He deserved better than that, and he got it by being dismissed when he was.
That Markram didn’t fall to Hazlewood was another small mercy. Surely he has never bowled better — hardly a bad ball, some of them all but unplayable, all but a few prime candidates to take a wicket. The match was the 35-year-old fast bowler’s 79th Test. So it says plenty that, at this stage of his career, he was able to improve his career-best figures to 6/49.
Hazlewood settled the issue an hour after lunch when Anrich Nortjé pulled and blooped a catch to short midwicket to seal Australia’s victory by 214 runs.
Where to now for South Africa? To Gqeberha and St George’s Park for the second Test, which starts on Sunday. They have nine Tests left in the current WTC cycle and they will have to win seven of them to make the final.
That won’t be easy. But this team have proven, more than once, that they don’t mind doing things the hard way. This is another one of those times.
