The Shorter Wisden 2013 (58 page)

Any lingering concerns about the top three were removed: not even the harshest critic questioned the right of Alastair Cook, Ian Bell and Jonathan Trott to fill those slots. When Bell fell
fourth ball in the final game at Old Trafford, it was his first failure since replacing Kevin Pietersen – now retired from the format, at least for the time being – at the start of the
previous series, against West Indies. Circumstances allowed Trott to bat at his own pace, and Ravi Bopara grew in confidence to the point where he supervised the chase in Manchester like Eoin
Morgan at his calmest. As he also provided some tight contributions with the ball, Bopara was unlucky that Bell pipped him for the Man of the Series award. Morgan himself put a sorry winter behind
him to finish unbeaten in his three innings; his 141 runs came at a strike-rate of 130. Australia had wondered in advance whether Tim Bresnan was a potential weakness at No. 7, but in the event he
was not required to bat at all, while Kieswetter at No. 6 faced only 29 balls. In the four games, England lost 14 wickets to Australia’s 32.

Those facts speak for the Australian bowling as well as England’s batting. Only Clint McKay, persevering and accurate, claimed more than two wickets overall. Pat Cummins was forced to
return home with a side strain after the first game, a worrying extension to his run of injuries. Shane Watson and Brett Lee followed after the fourth match, at Chester-le-Street, because of calf
problems, though not before Lee – who announced his retirement shortly after the tour – had equalled Glenn McGrath’s record of 380 one-day international wickets for Australia.
James Pattinson, built up beforehand, did not appear until late in the series – then went wicketless in 16 overs. And Australia lagged even further behind in the spin department, with Graeme
Swann outbowling Xavier Doherty before Swann was withdrawn from the squad because of continuing soreness in his right elbow.

Arthur tried to find some comfort, suggesting that England had shown opponents the approach required for the Champions Trophy, which they would be hosting in 2013. The Ashes series later that
summer provided another appetising context, with John Inverarity, Australia’s chairman of selectors, saying that David Hussey, Peter Forrest and George Bailey represented the next-best
batsmen below those in the current Test team. Hussey (who turned 35 shortly after this series) barely needed experience in England, after much success with Nottinghamshire, but he and Bailey, the
Twenty20 captain, both proved inconsistent; the only consistent thing about Forrest was his tentative footwork, exposed by the moving ball. A general uncertainty became evident as Australia tried
in vain to reshuffle their hand in the absence of Hussey’s older brother Mike, at home on paternity leave. By the end, the aces were all England’s.

ENGLAND v SOUTH AFRICA, 2012

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Test matches (3): England 0, South Africa 2

One-day internationals (5): England 2, South Africa 2

Twenty20 internationals (3): England 1, South Africa 1

South Africa flew home with England grateful they would not be returning for a bilateral series until 2017. This was their third successive visit – each under the
leadership of Graeme Smith – to coincide with the resignation of the England captain: for Nasser Hussain in 2003 and Michael Vaughan in 2008, read Andrew Strauss in 2012. It was a summer in
which South Africa won the Tests 2–0 to retain the Basil D’Oliveira Trophy and replace England at the top of the ICC rankings; and it left the hosts questioning not only their own
carefully established sense of worth, but the team spirit which had helped get them to the top of the world in the first place.

Quite simply, England fell apart: both on the field, where they never truly recovered after Hashim Amla’s epic undefeated 311 condemned them to a humiliating loss in the First Test at The
Oval; and off it, as a split between Kevin Pietersen and other members of the team sprang into public view. Despite batting brilliantly for 149 in the drawn Second Test at Headingley, Pietersen was
dropped for the final game, at Lord’s, in part because it emerged he had sent “provocative” BlackBerry messages to South African players (although the ECB later accepted his
assurance that the messages had not been derogatory about others within the England camp).

Both teams knew they could not afford to put a foot wrong, but England – defending a record of seven successive Test series wins at home – now found themselves horribly distracted.
It was during South Africa’s second warm-up game, at Canterbury, that reports surfaced suggesting Pietersen, who had already announced his retirement from the international limited-overs
formats, wanted to miss Tests at home to New Zealand in 2013 to spend more time at the IPL. It was hardly likely to endear him to management or team-mates. Then, ahead of the Second Test, Ravi
Bopara withdrew, citing domestic problems. He returned for the one-day internationals and Twenty20s, but his meaningful contributions came only with the ball.

As a result, England were obliged to blood James Taylor at Headingley, and recall Jonny Bairstow at Lord’s not long after he had been dropped amid concerns about his technique against the
short ball. Bairstow played two spirited innings but, despite a late fightback engineered by Matt Prior, England’s leading run-scorer in the series, as they chased an improbable 346, he could
not prevent defeat. Strauss denied Pietersen was a factor in his resignation, which came after 100 Test appearances, 50 of them in charge. “My race was run,” he said. But not everyone
was convinced by his claim; at the very least, the Pietersen affair had overshadowed his farewell – a further source of irritation to other team members.

By contrast, South Africa, who watched the debacle unfold with detached amusement, remained impressively focused, in spite of several potentially destabilising events. Within a week of arriving,
Mark Boucher – the veteran wicketkeeper hoping to play his 150th Test at Lord’s – sustained a freak injury at Taunton, where a flying bail struck his left eye. It ended not only
his tour, but an unflinching career. His distraught team-mates had to regroup quickly.

A. B. de Villiers was pressed into service as batsman-keeper, with J-P. Duminy slotting in at No. 7, a move that actually strengthened the line-up, even though England managed to keep de
Villiers relatively quiet. Boucher’s misfortune, in fact, appeared only to stiffen the South Africans’ resolve. When the series was won, several of them took to the Lord’s
outfield sporting T-shirts bearing tributes to their absent friend.

The touring party also had to defend themselves against allegations of leaking the Pietersen texts, a charge they denied. Weeks later, following several apologies to his colleagues, Pietersen
was preparing for what ECB chairman Giles Clarke called his “reintegration” to the fold, when chief executive David Collier went even further. “The texts were responses to
messages from members of the South African team,” he told BBC radio. “I certainly think that did provoke the situation. There was definitely a policy. There was a tactic that was
used.” South Africa, who had maintained all along that the texts were mere banter – a claim undermined by Pietersen himself, with his admission that they were “provocative”
– issued strenuous denials, amid talk of legal action; Collier apologised. Whatever the truth, the South Africans never let the matter affect their cricket.

For a team with a reputation for faltering in sight of the big prize, their poise was admirable, and much credit was due to Smith and Gary Kirsten, the coach. While Strauss appeared exhausted by
three and a half years of captaincy, Smith’s energy in his tenth year at the helm of the Test side – he, like Strauss, had already ceded the one-day job – seemed undiminished; he
even squeezed in a lightning visit home after the Oval Test to attend the birth of his first child. He had, in fact, been talked into staying in charge in 2011 by Kirsten, who may have had personal
reasons for wanting to win in England: on each of his three tours as a player, South Africa had blown a 1–0 lead.

Not many rival coaches had got the better of Andy Flower, but Kirsten did. He managed expectation and crises with a sure hand, and it was his idea to take the bulk of the squad to the Swiss Alps
for a pre-tour team-building exercise run by polar explorer and mountain climber Mike Horn. They walked and cycled, climbed peaks and plunged into freezing lakes, and arrived in England armed with
aphorisms, which were duly aired at every opportunity. Horn must have purred when, with the Tests in the bag, Duminy tweeted: “Getting to the top of the mountain is just the start of the
work.” Horn, like Boucher, was with the team in spirit every step of the way.

South Africa might have achieved their main goal, but England rallied to earn a share of the one-day and Twenty20 series, preserving their top ranking in one format and regaining it in the
other. But these contests felt like an irrelevance, especially after a dramatic final day of the Test series: they were diminished by rain and the absence of some high-profile personnel, and the
20-over games were used by both sides to experiment ahead of the World Twenty20 (a fat lot of good it did either team). In truth, it was a poorly structured tour, partly because of a clash with the
London Olympics. Whatever happened to assurances from both boards that England–South Africa would always be a marquee series consisting of at least four matches?

South Africa won most of the tricks that mattered, and England’s top three batsmen each had a personal nemesis. Morne Morkel, thrown the new ball on the first morning of the series to
general surprise, picked up where he had left off in South Africa on England’s tour in 2009-10, tormenting Strauss from round the wicket and removing him with his fourth delivery. Morkel
dismissed the England captain only once more, but he was a constant thorn in his side, and Strauss’s last act – padding up to Vernon Philander late on the fourth evening at Lord’s
– was that of a man who had simply become overwhelmed. Only once before, against Sri Lanka in 2011, had he averaged fewer in a series of at least three Tests than the 17 he managed here.

Philander – whose ability to swing the ball received belated reward at Lord’s, where he also played two valuable innings – removed Alastair Cook cheaply in each of the three
matches after he had begun the series with a century. And Dale Steyn accounted for Jonathan Trott in four of his five completed innings. England’s average score at the fall of the second
wicket was 67, to South Africa’s 124. But even that barely did justice to the gulf in quality between the two batting units.

Smith, who had been sidelined before the tour by an ankle problem, as usual scored heavily, taking his aggregate in 12 Tests in England to 1,355. If his century at The Oval in his 100th Test
brought the satisfaction of setting up a crushing win, his fifties at Headingley in two opening stands of 120 were equally valuable. His unorthodox method sent England’s bowlers into a
predictable tizzy. At Headingley, they came up with all manner of theories, when a simple off-stump line, with a view to an outside edge, was later confirmed as the best policy during the one-day
internationals (Steven Finn thought he had removed Smith that way during the Second Test, only for umpire Steve Davis to call dead ball because he had dislodged the bails with his knee).

England presumably spent less time in advance worrying about where to bowl at Alviro Petersen, but he shook off a foot injury to keep them at bay for a nine-hour 182 after they had chosen to
field first in the Second Test.

Nothing compared, though, to the majesty and might of Amla who, in going unbeaten for more than 13 hours at The Oval to make South Africa’s first Test triple-century, broke not only
records but English spirits. His tactic of moving across his stumps to Graeme Swann was instrumental in the off-spinner going wicketless for 52 overs; Swann was immediately dropped by Flower for
the first time since being left out of two Tests in the West Indies in 2008-09.

In Swann’s absence at Headingley, part-time off-spinner Pietersen took a wicket with his second ball, and finished with four in the game, which only highlighted the extent to which England
had been thrown off course. For his part, Amla was unfazed by ascending such heights: he crafted runs serenely for the rest of the tour, finishing with 900 in all internationals (including 100
fours and two sixes), and top-scoring in eight innings out of 11.

The series had been billed as a showdown between two experienced and proven pace attacks, and particularly James Anderson and Steyn. It turned out to be a non-event. Anderson’s removal of
Petersen for a duck in his opening spell sold everyone – not least himself – a huge dummy, and he soon gave way to frustration as the ball stubbornly refused to be as pliant in his
hands as in the opposition’s. His nine wickets in the series cost 40 apiece.

Stuart Broad was well down on his usual pace – the England camp blithely dismissed these concerns – and was little more than a passenger, except for one vibrant spell on the final
afternoon in Leeds. Why, wondered observers, didn’t he always bowl like that? Finn, brought in to stir the attack out of somnambulance, looked their most potent weapon, and bowled
exceptionally well on the fourth afternoon at Lord’s to keep England in the game.

Steyn it was who first stirred South Africa into action. They had laboured largely in vain on the opening day of the series, but he bounded in on the second morning – the skies now handily
obscured by grey cloud – to trigger a collapse; South Africa proceeded to win the next ten sessions too. Steyn was a constant threat, although Morkel, thanks to his height and unorthodox
angles, posed the most consistently awkward questions.

Jacques Kallis’s role as a frontline bowler had appeared to be numbered, but he balanced the attack in impressive fashion. His muscular efforts late on the first day and early on the
second at The Oval brought the prized wickets of Pietersen and Ian Bell, and gave Steyn the support he needed in slowing England’s advance. And his hard work meant South Africa did not miss
Marchant de Lange, who pulled out of the tour in the first week because of a back injury.