Temba Bavuma and Co. ready to celebrate their WTC triumph despite recent setbacks ©Getty
These are strange days indeed for South Africa’s men’s team. They suffered their biggest defeats in both white-ball formats in the space of four days this month, which followed what was then their heaviest ODI hiding last month.
But they have come home from Australia and England with only one loss from the four rubbers they played in the past five-and-a-half weeks.
As if that wasn’t incongruous enough, in the coming days they will parade around the country the ICC mace they earned by beating Australia in the WTC final at Lord’s in June.
That’s an odd set of circumstances. But it’s not without logic.
Two of the thrashings above – ODI losses by 276 and then 342 runs to Australia in Mackay and England in Southampton – were suffered in dead rubbers. Or in matches that had no business being played.
We cannot expect elite cricketers to perform as frequently as the modern game demands without conceding that, sometimes, they won’t be at their best. As much as everyone involved wants to cling to the notion that every time a player pulls a national team shirt over their head they are automatically inspired to give of their best, it is a fallacy.
Players are human, and humans prioritise – consciously or not. So as much as cricketers tell themselves every match is important, especially if it is an international, they also know that they don’t need to win if a series has already been decided. Human nature, in that scenario, is not to try as hard as you might have.
But players are also always competitive, which leads to an interesting tension. They know going down in an irrelevant match doesn’t matter, but they also don’t enjoy being beaten.
“You never like losing and you don’t like losing by big margins,” Aiden Markram said in audio released by CSA on Sunday. “It certainly hurts the ego and the feelings.”
Markram spoke at Trent Bridge on Sunday after the deciding match in the T20I series against England had been washed out. South Africa won the first game, a rain-truncated shootout at Sophia Gardens on Wednesday, by 14 runs. Two days later at Old Trafford they crashed to defeat by 146 runs, their biggest loss in the format and England’s most monumental win.
“We’ve addressed it post that second T20, now that it’s happened three times, and I’ve put a lot of emphasis on making sure it doesn’t happen again. If you look at the way we approach the game, our processes off the field, we have to have belief that it’s not going to continue.”
Sunday might have given the South Africans – and the rest of us – an answer either way. Instead they’ve been left hanging.
“You take a lot of lessons from the second game,” Markram said. “We reflected on it and we were excited for the opportunity of trying to fix some of those things today, but the rain came and didn’t stop. We’ll have to wait for the next T20 to start putting those things in place.”
That chance will come in Windhoek on October 11, when Markram and his team will help inaugurate the Namibian capital’s brand new ground. The match will be the first of 14 T20Is South Africa have left before the World Cup in the format in Sri Lanka and India in February and March.
Markram will hope to have turned a corner by then. His matchwinning 136 in the WTC final shimmers among the most consequential innings played by anyone for any team in the history of the game, but his subsequent 11 trips to the crease have yielded just two efforts of 50 or more: 82 in the first ODI against Australia in Cairns and 86 in the ODI series opener against England at Headingley. His 49 in the second game, back at the scene of his Lord’s triumph, merits an honourable mention.
As does his 20-ball 41 in the second T20I in Manchester. But that was Markram’s highest score in 18 innings in the format. He has gone 33 T20I innings without reaching 50. Batting average is an imperfect measure in T20 cricket, but it says something that, in those 33 innings, Markram’s has dropped by 8.87.
“I’ve felt like I’ve got in a few times, but I haven’t cashed in,” he said. So it is to be hoped that when he next lays hands on the ICC mace something is jogged loose and he remembers who and what he is.
That could happen in Kimberley next Tuesday, when South Africa begin their trophy tour. They will visit Bloemfontein the same day before moving to Durban. From there they’ll be off to Gqeberha and East London – taking in King William’s Town and Mdantsane – before ending in Cape Town next Friday.
Temba Bavuma and his men haven’t been able to celebrate their glittering success with their supporters until now because of South Africa’s busy playing schedule. If you don’t believe modern cricketers are too busy for their own good, let that sink in.
© Cricbuzz
