When a professional adult cricket team is bowled out for 15 runs, whatever the format, it can quicken the game’s pulse in other parts.
Australia and South Africa turned up for a Test match at the Gabba yesterday, but the air was vibrating with talk about the previous night’s Big Bash League game in Sydney, when the Thunder had been dismissed for what looked like a misprint.
Australian captain Pat Cummins celebrates after dismissing South Africa’s Rassie van der Dussen.Credit:AP
No, it was true. All 10 wickets in 35 balls. Likening that scorecard to under-9s was an insult to the kids. Fifteen! It had everyone’s attention. Again, that upstart Twenty20 was cannibalising Test cricket.
There was always the possibility that in Brisbane the strangeness might become contagious. Two top-shelf fast bowling attacks were to operate on a pitch green enough to wear a mask amid the surrounding turf. South African wickets started to tumble and Scott Boland, whose name was already associated with some junior cricket type bowling figures, was rampant.
David Warner fends the first ball of the Australian innings to Khaya Zondo at short leg.Credit:Getty
Through the first two sessions, South Africa lost all 10 of their wickets in 24 overs, two collapses bracketed around a single sturdy partnership between Kyle Verreynne and Temba Bavuma. Nor were the Australians immune to this madcap turn when their time came to bat. Kagiso Rabada and Marco Jansen each took wickets with their first ball of the series, Anrich Nortje with his second. It wasn’t quite a Sydney Thunder category of systems failure, but it was the Test cricket equivalent. And the game was all the more watchable for it.
After Patrick Cummins won the toss and eagerly invited Dean Elgar to bat, he and Mitchell Starc took half an hour to adjust to their good fortune before zeroing in on the Proteas’ top order. At four for 27, the South Africans were not going to be all out for 15, but 50 was a possibility.
On this day, a good partnership was an aberration and yet when Verreynne and Bavuma batted together they barely played a false stroke. The ball suddenly stopped swinging and darting as the South African right-handed pair waited for the opportunity to flay it through the sector between cover-point and third man, where they scored three-quarters of their runs. Not even Brendan Doggett’s top score of 4 for the Thunder could bear comparison to Verreynne’s 64 for South Africa. The South African keeper has scored his country’s only Test century this year, and he was going well enough to target another.
Once Starc got one to clip Bavuma’s inside edge and leg bail, however, the South African procession resumed. The Australian bowlers were all at the top of their game, assisted by some excellent catching from Cameron Green and Steve Smith. The visitors’ batting order had already been thinned out by the injury to Keegan Petersen and the omission of Aiden Markram, and the forecasts that this would be a bowlers’ series were holding true.
Maybe not quite this true, though: David Warner flinched at Rabada’s opening bouncer and was well caught at bat-pad; Marnus Labuschagne and Usman Khawaja nicked into the cordon.
Australia had lost as many wickets in their first nine overs as they were losing in a whole day to the West Indies.
So the question returns about Australia: flat track bullies? After having so much their own way against a weak West Indian attack, they fell in a startling heap once confronted by good fast bowlers in challenging conditions.
This takes on an air of foreboding when the mind drifts ahead to English conditions next year when the ball is coming from Mark Wood, Jofra Archer and James Anderson. If they really want to sort themselves out before the Ashes, Australia are going to need more, not fewer, tests like this one.
And then, inevitably, there is the growing agitation around Warner. Surely no selectors would be game enough to drop him on 99 Test matches. But then he has been paid a few favours since his return from his one-year ban.
In England in 2019, his failures were mitigated and his place was saved by the absence of alternatives. And the off-field shenanigans of the past week have fed that undercurrent of opinion that suggests Warner is holding information about the 2018 scandal. He can, of course, douse all of this speculation by going out and making a big score in the second innings, should it be required.
Late in the day, the Australian innings followed the rhythm of South Africa’s, with Smith and Travis Head not just surviving but making batting look quite easy. Just like Verreynne and Bavuma, they resisted the Thunder effect. Panic breeds panic. Confidence breeds confidence. Only the best can turn one into the other, and if Warner can’t manage it soon, he will be off to the BBL to save the Thunder earlier than he hoped.
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