It feels like solid confirmation that this team is finally getting somewhere. Or at least it should.
And they’ve done it with a group of players that some may label a motley crew, lacking significant experience, strong reputations and even the kind of super-egos that makes professional sport the stuff of celebrity. Only three of South Africa’s current squad have previous Test experience in England. Many of the rest had never even been to Lord’s before and spent time earlier in the week just soaking up the feeling of arriving, as cricketers, to their spiritual and sentimental home.
But even with the full house and the media hype and the pressure, South Africa were doing more than just being. They were bossing it. At the end of only three days of this series in England, the birthplace of the empire, they were able to nail their colours in triumph to some seriously prime property on the visiting change-room balcony. That’s the kind of decolonisation we can all get behind.
This performance stands out because it came from a team who did things their predecessors were conditioned not to do, like bringing on a spinner in the eighth over with three short catchers, and then seeing him take the two wickets that started the victory march. And they were able to do it because they have resources previous teams have not had.
The attack allows Elgar’s “margin for error to be a lot bigger”, and he doesn’t seem to be erring too much as he has learnt how to use his arsenal strategically. The quickest of his bowlers doesn’t get the new ball, so an opposition line-up cannot relax when the change bowlers come on. Imagine seeing off Rabada only to face Nortje.
Maharaj is not in the mould of the classical South African spinner who bowls an over before lunch, another before tea, and then tries to hold an end in the third session. He is “world-class”, as Elgar put it, and Elgar trusts his gut feel for when to bring him on. Together they set creative fields and get results. As a collective, the attack pushes each other and Elgar still wants more. “I need to achieve; them to want to achieve more,” Elgar said. “Once they all buy in to that, which I am sure they are doing with great victories like this, we’re going to be a pretty special bowling attack.”
Because of the chaos of the last three years, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in South African cricket who doesn’t think of cautious as optimism’s first name. Despite everything the Test team has achieved since Elgar took over the captaincy, the words “great” and “best” still don’t quite seem to be the right ones to describe them. But there are others that Elgar used.
“What we’ve laid down over the last year has been pretty solid,” he said. “It hasn’t been fake, it’s been unique. It’s been real. It hasn’t been far-fetched. These are our team goals that I have with the coaches. It’s not unrealistic. It’s pretty achievable. As a player group, we are a special bunch and we play bloody good cricket when we are doing well.”
That’s what it feels like to win at Lord’s.
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