SORRY, FAF, IT’S NOT EASY TO TURN THE TABLES OVER HERE
Derek Pringle looks back at history to suggest that South Africa may find it difficult to overturn an early series deficit
South Africa’s collapse in the final innings of the Lord’s Test suggested a team in discord rather than harmony and pining for their leader, Faf du Plessis. But while he returns for the second Test at Trent Bridge with bold plans and rhetoric, the march of recent history says that few teams recover from going one down in England to win the series – comeback kings being somewhat rarer here than fall down pharaohs.
The current series against South Africa will be the 48th one at home for England since 1990, discounting oneoff Tests against countries like Sri Lanka. In that time teams which have found themselves one down have gone on to win the series just six times.
On four of those occasions England were the team fighting back with visiting teams having prevailed just twice after going behind – Australia in 1997 and New Zealand in 1999. Otherwise, the best that could be achieved was a drawn series, something managed five times in that period, two of them by the home side.
This South African team have the bowling to win Test matches with Morne Morkel, Kagiso Rabada and Vernon Philander as good a trio of pace bowlers as any currently playing for one team. Unhappily for them, Rabada will be kicking his heels at Trent Bridge after being handed a onematch ban for accumulating four demerit points under the ICC’s Code of Conduct – three of them for shoving Sri Lanka’s Niroshan Dickwella in a oneday international seven months ago, and the other for telling Ben Stokes to ‘Eff off’ after dismissing him at Lord’s.
Aside from the inconvenience of replacing Rabada, no easy thing given his pedigree, South Africa’s main concern will be their batting. With Hashim Amla not firing at Lord’s and Du Plessis on paternity leave, it looked distinctly brittle, especially against the turning ball. Quinton de Kock is a thrilling sight when taking bowlers apart but while 50-minutes of bravura can turn T20 matches, it rarely provides more than a footnote in Tests. If South Africa’s batsmen are to give their bowlers something to work with they will have to resort to type – which is to bat with gritty determination and bat long.
Even an uplift in performance may not be enough to get them on the comeback trail. Unless England fall apart, something highly unlikely under the vigour of new captain Joe Root and the thorough stewardship of Trevor Bayliss, the head coach, you just cannot see the home side losing two of the next three Tests.
Yet South Africa can take a smidgen of succour. In 1999, New Zealand did manage to overturn a one-nil deficit in a four-match series to beat England. Then, the home side had gone one-nil up under a new captain, Nasser Hussain, but managed to lose two of the remaining matches (the other was a draw).
That, though, was the sole similarity. Otherwise, the situation back then was one of turmoil for England who had just experienced the humiliation of exiting a World Cup on home soil before the knockout stage – the fall out of which saw both the captain, Alec Stewart, and the coach, David Lloyd, sacked.
Fair enough, you might think, but then in one of the more bizarre decisions taken by the England and Wales Cricket Board only one of them, the captain, was replaced for the Tests against New Zealand. Instead of being joined by a new coach, Hussain and his team had to make do with David Graveney, the chief selector, who stood in until Duncan Fletcher was appointed at the end of the season.
If chaos and dejection played its part in England losing both their lead and the series on that occasion, it was Australian superiority, in particular the consistent brilliance of Steve Waugh, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath that did for them in 1997. One piece of compensation for England, after they
had gone one-nil up in the opening Test at Edgbaston, was the unexpected sight of the Aussies doing naughty boy nets on what would have been the fifth day of that match.
That series comprised six Tests so there was plenty of scope, should it have been needed, for Australia to mount a successful counter-attack. This series is two matches fewer than that one, which means less opportunity to overturn the early setback
Which leads us to the series which saw, arguably, England’s greatest comeback of the past 20 years, the -1 win away to Sri Lanka in 2001. Beset by challenging conditions, the brief nature of the three-match series, and the terrible umpiring on show, it was an incredible achievement against the odds after their defeat in the opening Test at Galle. It was bad tempered too, due mostly to some appalling umpiring, something that would have made victory all the more satisfying.
What so often added to the difficulty of getting back into a series abroad was the “bias” of the home umpires. It was not always deliberate but the sense that dodgy decisions would occur simply added to the grievances which could build up over the course of a series. If South Africa fail to make headway, it is unlikely to be due to bad umpiring, the likelihood of which is now reduced by neutral umpires from ICC’s elite panel and the technology of the Decision Review System.
South Africa can also call on their reputation for travelling abroad better than most teams, though set against that is the fact that only five of the team who played at Lord’s had toured England before. That number is likely to remain the same for this second Test, too, Du Plessis’ return being cancelled out by Rabada’s ban, a situation, unless their flaky batting improves, which suggests they will struggle to gain a foothold in the series let alone turn it on its head.