Johannesburg – You cannot take a step back against this England side or even indicate that you might do so.
It was a lesson that one felt the South Africans didn’t need to learn because they’ve watched England play this year, and before the first Test answered numerous questions about how they’d tackle that approach. They grew so tired of answering those questions, that Mark Boucher was joking about dishing out shots of tequila as a fine for anyone who uttered the word.
And then on Friday, the Proteas did what Brendon McCullum had criticised his own players for doing at Lord’s – they were timid.
Now perhaps Dean Elgar could argue that bowling both Simon Harmer and Keshav Maharaj after lunch was the attacking option. The pitch was dry, and just before the break Harmer got one to spin and bounce so viciously to Ben Stokes that wicketkeeper Kyle Verreynne had to jump and still took the ball at shoulder height.
Maharaj also spun one past the bat of Ben Foakes that struck the batter on the pad and saw umpire Richard Illingworth raise his finger. Foakes reviewed, and "hawkeye" showed the ball had actually spun so much that after it pitched outside leg stump its trajectory would take it past the off-stump.
Were those two incidents enough to warrant the use of both spinners after lunch?
The ball was 56 overs old at the interval and it was still reverse swinging. Anrich Nortje and Kagiso Rabada had bowled magnificently in the first 45 minutes of the day, with Nortje picking up the wickets of Jonny Bairstow and Zak Crawley.
Perhaps a mix of spin and pace would have been better and it would certainly have kept England feeling like they were under pressure from one end. Instead it seemed that – despite one being an off-spinner and the other an orthdox left-arm spinner – England was seeing the same thing. Part of the acclaim for South Africa’s bowling unit is its variety and Elgar failed to use that properly in that crucial period on the second day.
Against the two spinners, Stokes and Foakes settled in very comfortably. The latter, dismissed twice by Nortje at Lord’s when he was shaken up by the pace of delivery, enjoyed an interesting battle with Harmer, but it wasn’t one in which he looked in any danger of being dismissed.
Gradually the English duo asserted their control and by the time Elgar threw the ball to Nortje, it was too late to re-establish a foothold. The Proteas are still paying the price for that horror showing with the bat on Thursday, and in order to get back into the match, they needed to be more progressive with the ball and they failed to do that in the middle session on Friday.
There were a couple of scares for the home team, the most notable of which occurred when Illingworth gave Stokes out after a clever slower ball yorker from Lungi Ngidi, but television replays showed that the England captain had hit the ball.
Otherwise Stokes was his domineering self, and notched up a deserved fourth century against the Proteas in his 15th match against them. South Africa really is one of his favourite opponents, and even in the delight that followed the triumph at Lord’s there would have been a concern that Stokes would not allow his team and its new philosophy to be trampled on again.
Stokes is extremely invested in England’s new way of playing, perhaps even more so than the coach, whose nickname has been attached to the approach.
Yet Friday’s was a carefully crafted innings, where his defence was almost as impressive as some of the prodigious shot-making he unleashed.
In Foakes he had the perfect partner, one who probably felt embarrassed about how easily he was dismissed in the first Test. Their partnership took the game away from the Proteas.
This Test looks lost barring a batting miracle from the tourists and with news from the change-room that Rassie van der Dussen is carrying a finger injury, hopes for salvation appear even slimmer.
IOL Sport