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After a Test like Cape Town, there will be a hell of a lot written about the uniqueness of Test cricket. Some of this will be a bit banal.
I mean, saying “Test cricket isn’t like any other game” doesn’t mean much: netball isn’t like any other game, either. Or curling, or pelota, or caber-tossing.
Every game is unique, and every game has its particular tensions and dramas.
But of course not every game lasts five days. And not every game has four possible results – most only have three.
Some say Test cricket is the only game you can play for five days without a result, but obviously that’s untrue – a draw IS a result, and while at times it is the dullest, at others it is the most thrilling.
Some draws are a deflating anti-climax, but there have been plenty of draws that felt just like a win to one team, and just like a defeat to others.
Cape Town would’ve been one of them. Like Faf’s Last Stand in Adelaide, if South Africa had held on they would’ve been cock-a-hoop with the thrill of victory. Australia would’ve been desolate.
As it turned out, it was the baggy greens leaping for joy and the Proteas slumping, the overall vibe that of a grand final won with a kick after the siren.
Which is the most unique of all the uniquenesses of Test cricket – that a match can be so desperately close, while simultaneously being a colossal thumping.
Two hundred and forty-five runs. The margin of victory makes it quite clear that Australia thrashed South Africa.
South Africa were never in the game. They were pounded on day one, walloped on day two, shattered on day three, and flayed alive on day four, before gritting their teeth and almost surviving the deadly water torture of day five.
Australia won the game by miles, while at the same time sneaking home by the skin of its teeth. It’s like a schoolyard football game where one team has kicked 15 goals to nil, but with two minutes to the end of lunch, someone yells “next goal wins!” and hope burgeons for the hapless losers.
South Africa were never close to winning, but Australia were terrifyingly close to not winning. And if Australia hadn’t won, everyone knew they would really have lost, and if South Africa hadn’t lost, they knew they’d have actually won.
It’s the most perverse and cruel, and therefore the most noble and beautiful of games. Unlike just about every other sport in existence, outscoring your opponent isn’t enough; you’ve got to apply the killer blow.
It’s a brute of a sport, the asymmetry of bowlers striving for just 20 successful balls out of hundreds bowled, to achieve success, while batsmen must attempt to face hundreds without letting a single one defeat them. It’s a sprawling, twisting, maddening, desperate treasure.
Which is why it’s so good at producing epic stories. The football codes can make heroes of players for periods of desperate, besieged defence, but only a Test match tells the tales of men who do nothing but stand straight and refuse to fire a shot. Only Test cricket makes self-denial exciting enough to stay up half the night for.
Heroes littered the ground thickly at Cape Town. The man of the match was David Warner, who seemed to achieve some kind of transcendence, playing in a parallel universe where the game was somehow orders of magnitude easier than it was for anyone else on either side. Batsmen battled and bowlers toiled, but Warner simply played.
But Warner didn’t make the match’s top score. That was Michael Clarke, an elegant and fluent player whose skill with a stick of willow in hand is almost unmatched among today’s players, but who scaled dizzier heights in this game by showing he would rather let a bowler break his bones than take his wicket.
That elegance and fluency arrived, but only after Morne Morkel had beaten upon Clarke’s body like a drum, doing absolutely everything but forcing him from the field. One ball looked like it may have broken the captain’s jaw. If it had, one doubts whether he would’ve gone off anyway.
On the last day, courage of a different kind was on display from the Proteas.
AB de Villiers never looks likely to get out, and this day he looked less likely than he ever has. A man who loves nothing better than cracking the ball to all corners resolutely refused every temptation offered.
He swayed out of the way, shouldered arms, and presented what progressively seemed like a fifty-foot wide bat to everything straight. It took a practically perfect ball to dismiss him – anything less had no chance.
Kyle Abbott played the knock of his life. For 89 balls, he denied his instincts and defied his capabilities to drive the Australians to frantic distraction. He was never good enough to stand against this attack, but willpower can be an amazing thing.
In the end, he was defeated only by his own determination to offer the bowler nothing, so intent on resisting temptation he lifted the bat when he should have brought it down.
And at the end, Vernon Philander and Dale Steyn, the men whose ability to destroy opponents with the ball had temporarily deserted them, felt the iron enter their soul – if they couldn’t win with the ball, they’d save with the bat.
Philander attacked more than any of his teammates, hooking and driving dangerously but placing himself like a human shield between the bowlers and victory when it came to the crunch. In the end he was still unbeaten – in both innings.
But the final hero was a crumbling relic of a fast bowler.
The best fast bowler to play for Australia since Glenn McGrath, and the most perpetually injured since Bruce Reid, Ryan Harris was too old to bowl as fast as he did, too injured to bowl as long as he did, and too exhausted to bowl the balls that he did.
With bone floating in his knee and body screaming incessantly at him that enough was enough and any reasonable man would at this point give up sport and take up model aeroplanes, Harris – whose last over had produced the sort of gentle, friendly floaters that Ian Botham might have been proud of ten years after his retirement – took the ball in his tired hand.
He kicked his decrepit joint into place, and somehow defied medical science to charge in and bowl what was surely the Ball of the Century – a fast, swooping yorker that dipped under the defiant Steyn’s bat and miraculously broke back on pitching to flick the off stump.
Two balls later, energised by the sound of flying bails (the panacea to any bowler’s ills), he shot a ripping inswinger through Morkel and all the pain was gone.
Five days into a game that one team had never had a chance in, the other team had just barely managed to snatch a victory that had seemed impossible.
Now that, you do not get from curling.