England wins in South Africa

Though curtailed the one-day series between South Africa and England was not without excitement. Adam Bayfield reviews it.

south-africa-vs-england-2009 The one-day series between South Africa and England may have been bookended by washouts in Johannesburg and Durban, but it was certainly not a damp squib. At Centurion, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth play was not only possible but engrossing and even thrilling, as the tourists became just the second visiting side to win a bilateral one-day series in South Africa with a 2-1 victory.

Although they will be grateful to the rain for lending them a helping hand, England fully deserved their victory. They demonstrated considerable mental fortitude in bouncing back from crushing defeats in the second T20 at Centurion and the third ODI at Cape Town to record convincing wins of their own in the following games.

Somehow, England are now emerging as a formidable one-day outfit. That sentence cannot have been written many times before. Despite inventing the limited-overs format, the English, public and players alike, have always viewed it with an infuriating mixture of suspicion and disdain, regarding it as inferior to the ‘real business’ of Test cricket. This half-hearted approach has, in the past three decades, yielded precisely what it has deserved: nothing (with the heart-breakingly transient exception of reaching the final of the 1992 World Cup). Indeed, before this series, England had claimed just three overseas one-day series victories since 1997.

Qualified success at the Champions Trophy in September was as pleasing as it was surprising, but was widely assumed to be nothing more than a blip in this dismal catalogue of failure. Performances in this series have suggested that perhaps, just perhaps, a more fundamental transformation is taking place.

At the 2007 World Cup, England and South Africa met in a crunch Super Eight fixture that was a quarter-final in all but name: the winner would progress to the semi-finals, the loser would go home. Having won the toss and elected to bat first, Ian Bell and Michael Vaughan crawled to 9-1 after eight overs. They were eventually skittled out for 154, and the Proteas romped home with few alarms. The performance embodied not just England’s hopeless efforts in that tournament, but their misguided approach to modern one-day cricket in general. Four runs an over is not good enough. Ian Bell is not good enough. It has taken a while, but there are signs that a thoroughly uncharacteristic fearlessness has at last permeated the squad, and it is paying dividends.

‘Attack’ is now the watchword. It is not always successful, but even in resounding defeats like that in Cape Town consolation can be drawn from the fact that England at least gave it a go. The return of Kevin Pietersen has been important in this respect, psychologically if not in terms of actual runs as yet, but the real key has been Eoin Morgan – having a powerful but also intelligent batsman at number 5 imbues those above him with the freedom to play more aggressively.

Nobody has benefitted more from this freedom than Paul Collingwood. In the last few years the Durham man has looked physically incapable of hitting the ball as far as the boundary rope, the very personification of a ‘nurdler’, but since the Champions Trophy he has been cracking sixes with remarkable regularity. He appears to relish batting with South Africans; his affinity for Pietersen is well-known, but his partnership with Jonathan Trott at Centurion was as impressive as any he has amassed with KP. Both players looked every inch the 171-match veterans that only one of them is.

Tim Bresnan and Luke Wright, meanwhile, are evolving from admirable but ultimately inconsequential ‘bits-and-pieces’ cricketers into genuine all-rounders. There are still concerns, from the quality of wicket-keeper to locating that elusive consistency, but this series nonetheless represented a dramatic and hugely encouraging turnaround from the 6-1 reversal against Australia at the anti-climactic back end of the English summer.

South Africa, on the other hand, have a litany of problems to confront. Mickey Arthur, the coach, attempted to engage in mind games at the start of the tour, accusing England of being ‘predictable’ and repeatedly reminding people of Pietersen and Trott’s South African roots (and by ‘roots’ I of course mean ‘actual nationality’). When interviewees respond to tricky questions diplomatically, they are often said to have ‘shown a straight bat’. Well, Arthur seems to have attempted a switch hit and top-edged the ball into his own face, because there was only one side that looked nervous and distracted, and that was his own.

They are becoming totally reliant on Graeme Smith in the way that England used to be totally reliant on Pietersen – if the captain gets going he sets his side up for a big score, but if he falls early the other South African batsmen start to worry and the English fielders sense an opening. Even more alarming is the way that some of South Africa’s brightest talents, like JP Duminy, Roleof Van der Merwe and Albie Morkel, all of whom have experienced significant success over the past 18 months, were made to look decidedly ordinary by England. Morkel and Van der Merwe were more or less hit out of the team, while Duminy doesn’t appear to fancy the short ball any more than Philip Hughes.

The Proteas sat proudly at the summit of both sets of rankings in September. They are no longer number one in ODIs, and India look poised to knock them off the top spot in Tests as well. It may not be a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes exactly, but the slide should still set one or two alarm bells ringing. Their strategy looks a lot more confused, and their side a lot less settled, than they perhaps want everyone to believe.

They can start to put things right in the hotly-anticipated Test series, which starts on December 16. Staging the one-day series beforehand has been a stroke of scheduling genius – the hype is already palpable. It is England, however, who have laid down a marker.