Text: Telford Vice. Article from the July 2012 issue of Sports Illustrated Magazine.
When South Africa toured England in 2008, the Proteas were ranked No 2 in the world and England were 4th. Since then, England have risen to the top of the ICC Test rankings. South Africa are currently a very close second. With the world No 1 Test spot to play for, we review a potentially historic series.
The phallic monstrosity formed by a candy cane thrust into a bauble that the ICC prefers to dub the ‘Test Championship Mace’ says more about the suits who control cricket than it does about the game. What were they thinking when they chose this ugly, silver-and-gold-plated thing as a symbol of cricket at its purest and most enthralling?
At 90cm long and weighing 10kg, the mace looks less like the object of a Test cricketer’s most coveted prize and more like something to be wielded by a drum majorette on steroids. So it really shouldn’t bother Graeme Smith and Andrew Strauss if the other guy hefts this hideousness aloft at Lord’s in August. Except, of course, that it will matter. It will matter a great deal.
Because at the end of the day, the brains, brawn and beauty leading up to that moment will outshine anything the mace itself could ever manage.
For England, prevailing in the series would represent winning the class struggle they thought they’d won when they rose to the top of the Test rankings, before coming off second best against Pakistan in February. England partially redeemed themselves by earning a share of their series in Sri Lanka in March. But beating South Africa would stamp their No 1 ranking with the authenticity it currently lacks.
The whiff of fakery is born of the embarrassing truth that England are the game’s top Test team less because they deserve to be, and more because India lost their focus and their ranking in the afterglow of their 2011 World Cup triumph.
All this, however, is beside the point. The real question is whether South Africa deserve to be No 1. Three clues will reveal the answer. The first is the Proteas’ tough luck in New Zealand. South Africa would have gone to England as Test cricket’s top team had they handed New Zealand a 3-0 snotklap in March. But no team can beat the weather, especially in the land of the long, white, frequently wet cloud. That had a large hand in limiting a demonstrably superior Proteas side to an anaemic 1-0 series win.
Secondly, consider how emphatically England were unclothed as emperors by Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates in February. (England lost all three Tests.) Finally, there is the fact that (at the time of writing) England and South Africa are both on the same number of ICC points (116 – England are fractionally ahead of South Africa), and there are four points of daylight between the top two teams and the rest of the world.
Do the Proteas deserve to be No 1? The answer is an unequivocal ‘hell yes’.
But that isn’t really the question. The real question is this: should any country’s claims to the top spot be taken seriously until they have proven themselves to be at least as good as the Australian side of the 1990s and 2000s?
From December 1995 until July 2009 the Aussies were the finest team in the game. As far as the official rankings are concerned, SA interrupted that sequence of supremacy three times, for a total of seven months. That leaves 157 months – more than 13 years – in which no-one could lay a hand on the sides captained by Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting. Now, that’s a proper No 1 team.
Boxing could teach cricket so much. One of those lessons would be to leave the ‘title’ vacant until someone earns the honour of holding it. But cricket will not do itself that favour.
It has to celebrate a No 1 team, even if they are pretenders to the throne. So best we get our heads around how to be the real deal.
Australia owned the title for so long because they believed they deserved to, even before they did deserve to: they created their own truth. India’s mission was to win the World Cup at home. Once they got their Bollywood ending, the credits rolled – along with their eyes.
England play a bloodless brand of cricket that involves leeching players and coaches from other countries to cover their own inbred deficiencies and then inventing some puerile pastiche of passion to paint it all patriotically perfect. Trouble is, their method – pathetic and parasitic though it is – works. Score 400 in the first innings and unleash the most balanced attack in the game to keep the opposition uncompetitive. Boring? Almost always. Beatable? Almost never.
England are particularly effective in their own backyard. Before this season’s series against West Indies, they had lost just four of the 24 Tests they played at home – stretching back to South Africa’s last tour there in 2008. (At the time of going to print, we’ll assume Kemar Roach couldn’t single-handedly win a Test for the Windies either.)
In all of their home losses, England batted first and were dismissed for totals between 102 and 233. Their opponents all went on to register substantial first-innings leads. Two of those defeats were inflicted by South Africa in 2008, at Headingley and Edgbaston. Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel took 18 of the available 40 wickets (despite Steyn missing the Edgbaston Test with a broken thumb). Fast bowlers also did the damage in England’s other two losses, against Australia and Pakistan. The Aussies took them on without a spinner at Headingley in 2009 and, at the Oval a year later, Saeed Ajmal wasn’t a threat for Pakistan until the second innings.
These same pace-friendly pitches will be venues for the South African series. Steyn and Morkel will be back, this time accompanied by a wicket-taking whirlwind who goes by the name of Vernon Philander. Not to mention the tall order posed by Marchant de Lange’s bowling arm.
But let’s slow things down a bit here – spin will be a crucial factor in this series in more ways than one. Imran Tahir has not lived up to the hype that accompanied his selection to the Proteas Test team. But his presence is invaluable because it means Smith no longer admits defeat when he tosses the ball to his spinner. Tahir is central to plan A. But, if needs be, he can be the fulcrum of plan B.
And here’s a fact to build a dream on: only two of the seven Tests Tahir has played have reached a fifth day (when the pitch is usually more conducive to spin). While only two of the seven Tests England played at home last year did not reach a fifth day.
But while you’re doing the maths, don’t forget the other side of the equation. Graeme Swann has done something close to impossible: he has made off-spin sexy. He has done so by allying skill and talent with a bulletproof personality.
Swann has the best career strike rate of all spinners currently playing Test cricket. He takes a wicket every 10 overs. Swann, more than the barbed fishhook swing of Jimmy Anderson or the obelisk at the crease that is Jonathan Trott, is the greatest threat to South Africa’s chances of creating their own truth by taking the No 1 ranking.
The antidote to almost everything England can do to prevent that happening is two short words: Graeme Smith.
Smith either dazzles or disgusts in his interaction with the world beyond the boundary. No current figure in sport wears his humanity so nakedly. On no other public face is it so obvious whether the day is good or bad. There is nothing fake about him.
Those are the most complimentary sentences I have yet written about Smith. I can’t think of greater compliments to pay anyone in sport.
The ‘realness’ of Smith will always scare those insipid creatures who take refuge in teams of convenience like England. His double centuries in consecutive Tests there in 2003 earned him instant respect. Five years later Smith’s 107 was one of three centuries that helped save the Lord’s Test. Then at Edgbaston, his undefeated 154 won the match – and the 2008 series.
Expect much more of the same from Smith, and not only because he has averaged above 60 in six of his last 12 Test series. Expect it because the Graeme Smith we knew then is not the Graeme Smith we know now. He is married. He is about to become a father. His world is more real than it has ever been.
For England, those are chilling words. For South Africa they mean this: come in No 1, your time is now.
Watch the England-South Africa Test series
First Test: 19-23 July
Second Test: 2-6 August
Third Test: 15-20 August
Live on SuperSport.
How test rankings are calculated
“It’s based on a system used in chess,” explains Andrew Samson, Cricket SA’s official statistician and one of the most respected number crunchers in the game.
“The number of points you earn for winning is based on the opposition’s ranking. You get more points for beating higher-ranked teams than lower-ranked teams. There are extra points for winning a series.
“The system is also weighted over three years. What you did last year will count for more than what you did two years ago, which will count more than what you did three years ago. But there’s no factoring in whether you are playing at home or away, or whether you win by one wicket or by an innings.”
The system was designed by David Kendix, an English actuary who, in his own words, “was so appalling that when I first stepped onto a cricket field my schoolmaster decided very quickly that, being good at maths, I should sit on the boundary. Even though he was not entirely talented at cricket, Kendix applied his mind logically. “The points you get for beating a team that has a similar rating to you will be roughly the same as the points they get for beating you.
“But if you are playing a team that has a rating considerably higher than yours you get more for beating them than they would get for beating you.”
Why?
“Unlike a lot of other leagues in many other sports where everyone plays everyone else over a fixed period, there is a lot of inequality in the Test fixture list. So you need a system that removes any bias from the mix of fixtures so that the ratings of the teams aren’t unduly influenced by whether they have played more or fewer matches against stronger or weaker teams.
“There’s no secret formula. If you plug in the result of a series and the rating of your opponent, that gives you the points you score for that series. The total number of points earned divided by the total number of matches gives your rating.”
Now we know.
See the Player By Player Ratings
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