Marcus North on the South Africa and Australia rivalry
Marcus North looks ahead to the Australian Test summer with a glance back at his own baptism against the Proteas
We are only a couple of weeks away from the start of Australia’s international summer, with South Africa’s tour shaping up to be a fascinating one.
Playing at home is a huge advantage for Australia.You see it all over the world now that not many teams win away from home and Australia have played very well in their own country for a number of series.
Our batsmen enjoy batting at home more than anywhere else in the world and the conditions they will face against South Africa will be completely different to those they faced in Sri Lanka, when they were thrashed 3-0.
Although, saying that, it’s interesting to see that the last time either country won their home series against the other was back in 2005/06 when Australia were victorious Down Under. Since then, both teams have been successful in the other’s backyard with Australia winning 2-1 in South Africa three years ago.
Things in general have changed in the past decade or so, though, and teams are finding it very difficult to win away from home so Australia definitely have the advantage.
The conditions in the countries are not too dissimilar. The pitches are not a million miles apart and both sides have great fast bowling options with good pace. Both sets of batsmen play well off the back foot, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that both teams have been successful in the other country in recent times.
I was part of the Australia team that won in South Africa in 2009, when I made my Test debut, and it was a great series to get my first taste of Test cricket. The mentality of the way that each country plays sport in general is very similar.
The competition is there in rugby as well as cricket. Both countries play an aggressive brand of sport and there is an expectation there from the public to win and be successful. That creates a great rivalry, but there’s still a huge amount of mutual respect.
The difference between this series and the Ashes is that the rivalry between England and Australia has much more of an emotional attachment because of the history and everything the Ashes stands for. From a cricket competitiveness view, though, there’s no difference. Both teams will fight for everything and that’s built in the culture of both sides.
All Test cricket is special but to have made my debut against South Africa, perhaps, gave me a bit more incentive. Looking back, there were a few things that worked in our favour.We were a very new side with a few new faces. There was myself, Phillip Hughes, Andrew McDonald and Ben Hilfenhaus all on our first tour.
We came off the back of a losing home series against South Africa, where Brett Lee and Andrew Symonds had been playing, so there was a sense of a changing of the guard. Perhaps the expectation was that there wasn’t a lot of hope for this new set of Australians playing against a very established South African team.
That made us very determined, and perhaps it will be the same for the Australian team this time around. There will be more pressure since they are at home, but I also believe the team is more settled than many are making them out to be.
Yes, Australia had a disastrous tour to Sri Lanka earlier this year, and it was disastrous, there’s no way around that. But Joe Burns and Usman Khawaja both had brilliant 12 months before that and were averaging over 50.
We came off the back of a losing series against South Africa where Lee and Symonds had played so there was a sense of a changing of the guard
Before that Sri Lanka series, nobody would have been saying the Australia team was unsettled, and even now there are positives to be seen. Shaun Marsh made a century in the last Test of that series, so it showed the strength in depth of the squad with the bat.
The batting shouldn’t be a problem for Australia. The big thing, though, is how tested the depth of Australia’s fast bowling unit has been over the last several months.We saw a lot of new bowlers getting exposed at international level in South Africa, and these lads are probably third in line when every other bowler is fully fit.
That’s no disrespect to them but when South Africa have the likes of Dale Steyn, Kagiso Rabada and Vernon Philander, you want your best bowlers. Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood look as if they will be and that’s huge for Australia.
Rabada and Starc will be key to this series. I can’t wait to see how Rabada fares in Australian conditions and though Starc’s time off has been enforced through injury, the rest would have done him well and he’s hungry to get back in.
I’m going to tip Australia for a 2-0 win. There will definitely be a result at Perth, and the day-nighter at Adelaide, and I reckon Australia will edge it. A talking point this week has been the fallout between Michael Clarke and Shane Watson with Clarke saying in 2013 that “there is a number of players, a group in this team at the moment, that are like a tumour and if we don’t fix it, it’s going to turn into a cancer.”When asked if it was about Watson, Clarke admitted: “Shane was one of those players.” I can only assume things happened after I left the team, because I never saw any major problems.
People have to understand that it’s not always going to be happy families inside a changing room full of 11 competitive men. Regardless of what sport you play, you need different characters to challenge each other all of the time.
There are no doubts that people will fall out but that’s the nature of human beings.When you spend ten months a year travelling around with each other, there will be fallings out.
Shane always put his best efforts into playing for Australia, but clashes of personalities happen.