Temba Bavuma has been put on a pedestal for South Africa. In fact, he is standing on a box. But again, for his country. This is a viral ad for the shirt sponsor.
But over the last two years, especially since the WTC win, Bavuma has gone from one of his country’s most abused cricketers to one of its most praised. He’s on a pedestal, as he’s delivered a World Test Championship and held up their batting as well.
This is the age of Bavuma, a top-five-ranked Test batter and one of the game’s most respected leaders. And hosting Australia after Sandpapergate should be his crowning glory, making him the new king of South African cricket.
The stat that keeps being attached to his name is that he’s won 91.7% of his matches in charge. Which is a hugely sexy number. But from only 12 games, even if one includes a title and the other is beating India away, it’s not a massive sample.
He earned that pedestal, but like his form with the bat, it is all quite new and shallow. It is one of the best transformations in cricket history. He has never been this high.
This loss to Australia was his 13th in charge, and for Bavuma’s South Africa, that is not a lucky number.
Losing one match to Australia shouldn’t dent his reputation too much. But this match has shown that his new empire doesn’t look built on the strongest foundations. This week, Matt Renshaw dismantled Temba Bavuma with bat and, weirdly, ball.
The problem with being put on a pedestal is that once you are there, people wait for you to fall back down.
This is a team that, brick by brick, play for each other. They are supposed to be more than the sum of their parts. This week they crumbled.
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South Africa has one of the best bowling lineups in the world. Kagiso Rabada is a wicket in human form, Marco Jansen’s best ball is unplayable, Lungi Ngidi averages 23 in Tests, plus they have a collection of fast bowlers that barely get a game, and two fantastic spinners who happen to turn the ball in different directions. Throw in Jansen’s batting, and Wiaan Mulder (with Corbin Bosch/Senuran Muthusamy), and you often get five bowling options that all do different jobs.
It is not a perfect unit, but it terms of diversity, skills and talent, it goes pretty damn hard.
For the first Test, Rabada was still injured, as was Ngidi. But even without those two, this was a fantastic attack.
However, it did not bowl well.
Marco Jansen chases magic balls, and he averages 21 in Test cricket. So it would be unfair to say he is part of the problem overall. But usually he is bowling with Rabada, someone who is going to bowl the same delivery on a loop. With Rabada injured, Jansen looked like he was only interested in wicket-taking deliveries at his end, hoping his partner would keep the pressure on. Wiaan Mulder can swing the ball, but even at 128ks, he is not deadly accurate. These two started on day one with the best bowling conditions of the match, took two early wickets, and still wasted the new ball.
That is how talented they are.
But when Australian batters got in, this lack of patience and consistency was used against them.
Simon Harmer’s issues slightly exacerbated this. Not the scoring rate, but because he looked stiff and was obviously pushing out his faster ball. Then Keshav Maharaj struggled to keep the ball in the same spot. So the combined issue was that their two finger-spinners struggled for venom and pressure.
In a five-bowler attack, only Anrich Nortje was on the spot. Which is odd, because he is so fast that you expect him to be the leak.
Compare that to Australia: Mitch Starc started the Test off his best. The footmarks got into his head. He bowled around when he should have been over the wicket. He couldn’t hit the spot, so he delivered more loose balls.
Yet Australia absorbed this. Nathan Lyon came on, became a threat, and never missed. While Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins were their normal selves.
South Africa had a genuine fifth bowler, yet they felt a man short. And Australia had four, and one struggled, and it didn’t matter.
Some of the blame has to go on Jansen not playing much first-class cricket, Nortje warming up by bowling in T20 matches in Malahide, and Harmer clearly not being 100%. South Africa haven’t played many Tests, so the administrators need to be held to account for that.
Bavuma was let down by his bowlers, but he can’t hide behind that, because he wasn’t at his best either.
You can see that on Aiden Markram’s confused face. He is pointing at deep square leg, and now yelling to Temba Bavuma.
This is the last ball of the over, and he wants his captain to bring in every boundary rider. South Africa desperately needed to hear this, because for the previous almost 50 overs, they just let Matt Renshaw steal runs on the fourth, fifth, and sixth balls.
Steal is the wrong term; Mulder said that the big Queenslander had been fantastic at keeping the strike. But Markram’s frustration was from South Africa letting Renshaw bogart the strike.
Mitch Starc was out in the 82nd over, and for ages, South Africa allowed Renshaw to find a single on the fifth ball because they seemed to think he would eventually just get out, or they could bowl a magic single delivery to Nathan Lyon. Neither happened.
The ball was soft, but South Africa were softer. No one on the team seemed upset by this. Sometimes a sweeper would come in, but rarely all of them and usually too late. There were always places to score singles. They never locked Renshaw down.
It felt like the teams had an agreement: South Africa were happy to get one or two balls at Lyon, and Renshaw was okay with just ticking the scorecard over.
It was great Markram stood up, but why on earth did it take so long for an intervention? This is not just Bavuma. They have Markram, Maharaj, Harmer and Bedingham. These are real cricketers who know the game. Plenty of experience, and they had a collective brain fart that lasted half a day.
Even after Nathan Lyon was out, it continued. In the 136th over, with Josh Hazlewood on five from nine, Renshaw pushed an effortless single to a sweeper on the fifth ball. They just didn’t get it. And that is when they lost the game.
Australia could have been bowled out for 180, it looked like Renshaw was going to run out of partners for his hundred, and then again for his 150, until finally it seemed like his 200 was inevitable because South Africa did nothing.
Dan Gallan said, “Renshaw tiptoed his way to a big hundred”. And that knock won the game.
Australia tiptoed their way to a 214-run victory.
It wasn’t just the strike on the final deliveries of overs. When the ball wasn’t doing much, South Africa’s main threat was hoping another magic ball would come, but usually allowing Australia to get away from any pressure.
Bavuma is used to throwing the ball to a fantastic Test option on a friendly pitch, and taking a wicket.
In this Test, we saw what happens on a flatter (though certainly not a road) surface when that is your plan. They seemed to have little, or no, plan B. It was hope Jansen bowled his unicorn stuff, Nortje is fast, Harmer outthinks someone or Maharaj rags one.
There was no manufacturing of wickets.
Obviously on win percentages, it is hard to argue that Ben Stokes is a better captain than Bavuma. But for all the English leader’s weaknesses, he would not have let the game drift as his much-vaunted South African colleague did.
Despite many times when disruption was needed, he felt the opposite. When he did put a fielder in a funky spot, it felt 20 overs too late. They never fully committed to any bouncer spells, and when they did, executed them poorly. Bavuma would not gamble, take risks, or play on Australian egos.
He just expected his bowlers to take wickets at their normal rates, and when they didn’t happen, he stood still.
At times, if someone had exchanged South African fielders for large blow-up dolls, the results would have been the same. That is probably true, and undoubtedly unfair.
But Bavuma hasn’t captained much at Test level, and almost all the 12 previous Tests he’s been involved in have been low-scoring.
No team had ever made this many runs in the first innings against his side. In fact, only in one of his matches in charge has a team gone past 260. How do you learn creative captaincy tactics when your head is spinning from all the wickets?
This is a bowling era, this is a bowling team, and at home the pitches have been even more bowlery. His leadership is about planning, getting buy-in, and leading by professionalism. His tactics have been fine, but it is a little like watching Ricky Ponting captain. What is your plan A? Glenn McGrath. What is plan B? Shane Warne. What is plan C? Glenn McGrath again.
Bavuma was completely let down by his attack, but he also didn’t give anything back to them.
One issue is that South Africa relies so heavily on their bowlers, and this time they left it to their batting to save them. Narrator: it did not.
When it comes to runs, this team is mid. They are the fourth team in Test history to have seven players average in the 30s. This is partly due to the modern era deflating batting averages, and keepers being better with the bat. But even so, this is a weird anomaly: everyone can hold a bat, few make you worry.
Break down this team, who is the guy most likely to make a 200?
It is not Aiden Markram, who has never passed 152 in Tests, yet has in ODIs. It is not Temba Bavuma, who is the king of the 50s. It should not be Wiaan Mulder, though we are all screaming it now because of his triple hundred. Kyle Verreynne is a keeper at seven, so pretty unlikely. At five is Tristan Stubbs, who on potential makes sense, but this was his 33rd first-class match.
That leaves us with Ryan Rickelton, who has a Test double century, but in 29 innings has passed 50 three times. And David Bedingham, who has passed 150 seven times in first-class cricket. Neither really feels like grind-you-into-the-dust batter.
This is a team of 30-odds and great ball striking, but there are no big daddy knocks.
Matt Renshaw has made two Test hundreds, and both are past 150. That might be a fluke, but it feels like who he is as a player. And for South Africa, they don’t have those types.
Even in the field, they let it go. Well, one player did. Bavuma is one of the best fielders in the world, but one afternoon he missed three simple balls, walking past one to allow a single, and twice the ball just went through him. It was like his entire game was unravelling piece by piece.
He didn’t make any runs. He can argue he was unlucky to be dismissed playing the reverse sweep caught at slip, but he was batting horribly before that. And in the second innings he was out to Matt Renshaw. Which is one he can’t argue away.
This was one of the worst Tests of his career. His team were terrible and so was he. He wasn’t knocked off the pedestal; he seemed to step off it meekly. The foundational bricks he built, might have cracks in them.
This week South Africa were less than the sum of their parts.