CricDigs Blogs

Recently, when the SA team won those incredible test matches against Australia, Down Under many experts highlighted the fact that it was their batting which had paved the way for these historic wins. Even as the Aussie tour of SA commenced, most people were of the belief that the inexperience of the Aussie bowling attack would again undermine their chances of winning the series and the SA batsmen were favoured to take advantage of it. However, the first two test matches are pretty much the contradiction of what was being expected — the Proteas just don’t appear to get a hang of the nagging Aussie bowlers. Mitchell Johnson has always been a bit of a tearaway but besides him most of the Aussie bowlers are doing a similar thing — they just keep bowling six to eight inches outside the off-stump, even if the ball isn’t swinging, keeping it short which is working on these bouncy pitches. The batsmen are denied chances of playing juicy strokes on the frontfoot and this appears to have worked for frustrating the Proteas.

In the ongoing second test match, it was strange to see a pretty slow medium-pacer like Andrew McDonald to have claimed three wickets. He isn’t a McGrath from any stretch of your imagination. Neither he is capable of swinging the ball. He just made sure that the ball was never pitched-up and in a mechanical way went about irritating the SA batsmen. They further obliged him by playing these strange ‘pushing-at-the-ball’ sort of strokes which if they hadn’t got out to would have yielded a single at the most. Now, things are getting more difficult for the host team to save this test match, having been bowled out for less than 150 and no one would be betting on them to score 400+ runs on the final day which they will be asked to do by the Aussies, in all probability.