Adelaide 2012: Day One

It seems something strange happens when a cricket team hits the top of the ICC World Rankings. Maybe not quite a Well here we are, chaps, let's sit back and enjoy the view, but one has to suspect there's a bit of relaxation when it comes to the aspirational drive that landed you there.

In recent times we've had four sides hit that #1 Ranking in the Test table, and all of them are currently engaged in a series with one of their erstwhile rivals.,

Here are the rankings from 3 September this year (grabbed from here)

                        Matches     Points     Rating
South Africa 25 3002 120
England        36 4195 117
Australia        34 3952 116
Pakistan        29 3148 109
India        32 3394 106
Sri Lanka        29 2834 98

Astute readers will noteIndia, recently #1 has slipped to #5, though they've just finished a nine wicket demolition of England, ho appear to experience a double digit degree of difficulty (add a decimal place and it'd be three) in anything approaching subcontinental conditions.

Which brings us, of course, to the rather remarkable events at Adelaide Oval yesterday. I don't recall ever seeing a day's play in a Test match that was quite like that one.

I've been out checking the neighbourhood for a missing cat, and I've got an hour-long walk coming up, so I haven't had a look at the morning media, but I've got a fair idea what would be in there. I've also missed the entirety of the Gabba Test apart from the odd score update while I was in Japan, so when it comes to revealed form out of there it's a case of not seeing, cannot say apart from a remark that Australia seemed to have managed to dig ourselves out of a rather nasty hole, and we seem to have done it again this time.

So, the batting. Day One of a Test, and you're always likely to lose an opener in the first session, so Cowan's dismissal doesn't come as a great cause for concern. The delivery in question wasn't a jaffa, but they don't all need to be, and while the mode of dismissal was, um, different (what with the possibility of LBW thrown in with the caught and bowled) it can probably go down as one of those things that do happen.

In any case Cowan and Warner had negotiated the first ten overs. It's the sort of situation that calls for your best bat to come in at Three, hopefully to negotiate his way through to lunch. Somehow, I don't think Quiney is the right man for that slot just yet, but someone has to do it.

That someone probably isn't Ricky Ponting either. I don't think I've seen a top ranked bat done over as comprehensively as Punter was by the one that took out the stumps. The mode of dismissal suggests someone in the South African camp may have done their homework. It could have been a complete accident, of course, but when you're looking for a descriptor you'd have to go for comprehensive.

So there we were at lunch, 3/102 off 25 overs, Warner 67, Clarke 18, with a fair bit of rebuilding to be done. The fifty partnership came up shortly after the resumption, though you'd probably have missed that little milestone in the rush of runs. 76 balls for the fifty, by the way, which wasn't too shabby at all, but consider the stats torrent that followed (looking at the Day 1 Match Notes).

The Australian total flew past the 150 off the first ball of the thirty-first, Warner reached his ton off 93, 76 of them coming from balls that crossed the boundary, the century partnership arrived a mere thirty deliveries after the fifty, Clarke's half century came off 57 and the total passed 200 half way through the thirty-fifth.

Drinks came when Warner departed, 108 runs having come in 12.2 overs.

One could continue to reel off the stats, but I think that's enough for the moment because, regardless of how well Warner and Clarke batted, there was definitely something amiss in the South African attack, and it was something beyond the injury to Kallis.

On paper this South African attack has to be the best going around at the moment. The bowling rankings have Steyn at #1, Philander at 2 and Morkel at 9. By contrast we've got Hilfenhaus and Siddle at 6 and 8 respectively, with the other five spots in the top ten going to a Pakistani, a Sri Lankan, an Indian, an Englishman and a West Indian.

Add in Jacques Kallis as a fourth quick and you've got what should be a very handy outfit, even on a reasonably flat Adelaide track.

Then, of course, things start to go wrong. Take Philander out of the mix and you're drawing on your reserves. Based on yesterday's performance there's a significant gap between Kleinveldt and Morkel, who wasn't that impressive on the day anyway.

Have Kallis break down on you as well, and have Steyn getting twinges that may or may not merit cotton wool treatment and things start to go drastically wrong.

But that still doesn't explain a day when 380 runs were scored in four and a half hours after lunch for the loss of two wickets. Yes, the bowling attack was reduced. Kleinveldt doesn't look like muscling any of the other three aside on form, and Imran Tahir might be able to draw on considerable experience but doesn't look like a threat at the moment.

But batsmen and bowlers perform, by and large, as well as they're allowed to and the South African performance suggests a side that came into the game significantly underdone, which  brings me back to where I started.

With eight days between Brisbane and Adelaide why would you break up the side for a couple of days and then expect things to fall back neatly together when you reassemble at the next venue? And why, once the team has reassembled, do you have two full practice sessions that coach Gary Kirsten did not attend because he was flying back to Australia?

The presence of the coach would, one suspects, be a key element in getting things to fit neatly back together.

The days of the traditional tour, where the visitors played a couple of state games before the first Test, and then took a fortnight between successive Test matches, usually with a state game on the intervening weekend and a midweek country game or two as well kept a sixteen or seventeen man touring party together in an environment where cricket wasn't always the direct focus, but was definitely on the horizon somewhere.

Those days are long gone, but you'd have thought it'd be possible to fit in a game somewhere. Possibly, given a crowded Australian summer, not against a state side, but maybe the ACT?

I'd point out, at this stage, that the longest running #1 side, that great West Indian outfit that ran through the late seventies, the whole of the eighties and well into the nineties dominating almost every side they ran up against, had a couple of strange little habits.

One of them was that when they travelled, they travelled as a team, right down to the maroon blazer. I sighted them in a Brisbane departure lounge the morning after a day-nighter. Seventeen of 'em, no one out of uniform, travelling as a group.

By contrast, the Australian side were scattered across the horizon, some of them hiding behind newspapers in an attempt to maintain anonymity. A bunch of highly excited Aitkenvale Swimming Club kids on their way back from the State Championships put paid to that, to the point where Greg Chappell, standing in the middle of the concourse, asked some underling whether there was a private lounge available because this (i.e. kids with improvised autograph books) is giving me the shits.

By contrast, the Windies were over there, closed ranks, not exactly hostile, but not encouraging autograph hunters to queue up either.

Those days, of course, are long gone, and one shudders to think what the response would be if you started to insist on group travel in uniform.

One also shudders to think of the likely response if the coach announced that, while there might be a fairly comfortable window of time before the next game there were a few issues with the fielding (or whatever) that needed attention, so that's the agenda for the next couple of days rather than giving the boys a break to take in the sights.

Bob Simpson did something like that in the '87 World Cup when a couple of Australian players suggested a side trip to have a squiz at the Taj Mahal.

No, team unity is a very fragile thing. When you break it up it's not always easy to put the pieces back together, and that's BEFORE you start looking at injuries and other issues. It's one of the reasons most of the successful school-kids' Rep coaches I ran across insisted the team sit together as a group while batting, rather than dispersing across the countryside to spend quality time with parents, rellies or billets.

But more than anything else, I suspect that once you hit the top you tend to become complacent and relax. Listening to (I think) Neil Manthorp on the ABC Radio commentary talking about Kallis, it seems to be a case of Jacques doing as much (or as little) work as he feels like. Well, after all he is thirty-seven and you can't expect him to go on forever. Point taken.

But there is, I think, a tendency to ease back when you've reached the summit. A degree of we know what we're doing so we can take it easy because we'll be all right on the day. We know how to prepare. Trust us.

That was, at least from where I was sitting, a significant element in losing the Ashes in 2005, and looking at the Cricinfo window behind the one where I'm typing this there are three video headlines:

Clarke: Counter-attacking has always been my .. (that's what it reads, the Astute Reader can probably fill in the rest);

Warner: Facing lots of balls in the nets helped, and

Kirsten: Bowlers didn't apply pressure consistently.

How little training is too little for South Africa? is the headline here in a story that says it better than I can.

After all, when you think about it in the to and fro of international competition you know there's going to be attack and counter-attack, and you need to have contingency plans in place to allow for the ebb and flow of advantage. From where I'm sitting, it definitely looks like South Africa have come up short in the planning department, though you probably wouldn't be anticipating injury taking out half of your preferred four prong pace battery.

At 5/482 with Clarke to resume on 224, Wade to come and a tail that has been known to chip in with handy runs you'd figure on somewhere around 600 by lunch, with 700 within the bounds of possibility by tea. A session to bowl at the end of Day Two with the follow on margin set at 500 would suggest two possible results, neither of which would be a South African victory.

Of course, there's many a slip between the cup and the lip...