South Africa v Australia: second men’s cricket Test, day two – live

Key events

Who knew that not covering the whole ground could lead to a wet outfield?

Sodden outfield seems to be the problem. There will be another inspection in 14 minutes, which means play can’t resume for a good while after that.

“I wouldn’t be astonished if Lyon retires from Test cricket a little sooner than people might be expecting,” emails Paul. “For athletes who’ve performed at a very high level for a long time, one of the hardest things to accept seems to be when they’re no longer an automatic selection, and while in Lyon’s case that’s been for reasons beyond his influence, he doesn’t strike me as someone who’ll be content with a here-and-there role.”

I’ve wondered that too, and also whether this chop-change thing is making him less effective. There are mutterings that he’s contributing in the margins, and his last bag of wickets was over two years ago in Wellington. But by leaving him out this many times recently, is Australia hurting themselves by having a less confident, less settled bowler in their line-up when they do need him?

In Jamaica or in Brisbane, did the fourth seamer win them the Test? No. Would they have won with Lyon in the team? Probably. So is there actually a benefit to the configuration without him? Debatable, but there is an observable negative if you’re unsettling a vital player in the medium term.

“In the old days, the general rule was three seamers and two spinners, which could still be managed if at least two of the bowlers were proper batters, but even more so if the wicketkeeper was batting in the top five,” writes John Starbuck. “Now, the ball can vary so much more from the faster bowlers – swing, reverse swing, knuckle and so on – that the mystery element of spin and flight aren’t needed. Or so the selectors seem to think. Personally, I want to see at least one specialist spinner in every side, just to change the nature of the game.”

Yes, so often the key is the ability to change the type of bowling that a set batter is facing.

I’m told that they did have an inspection. The umpires wandered about and talked to the ground staff. Often after prolonged rain like this, the covered square is ok but the outfield beyond the covers is a problem. Still nobody has adopted the Sri Lanka method of having 300 blokes covering the entire field.

Just quietly, New South Wales just reached stumps in the west with Kurtis Patterson 117 not out. The score is 345 for 4 at the end of Day 1 in Perth.

If there’s a national team looking for a player at some point who makes runs in the domestic competition. A quirky thought.

Luca Human writes in. I’ve met a few South Africans with the surname Human recently, having never seen it before the last year or so, which I’ll admit does make me suspicious that they’re aliens trying to blend in, who didn’t quite understand the context when choosing a last name that they thought would be innocuous. Anyway. I won’t take you to our leaders, because they’re largely absolutely awful.

“South African living here in France who overslept because a) school holidays and b) no cricket. I wanted to know regarding the 2027 CWC, if you think crowds in SA will be respectable? What of Zim and Namibia?”

Well, in the frame of my post about CSA earlier, the ICC does have a marketing budget. A titanic one. And the ICC is essentially an events company. So they will leave no doubt that there is a World Cup on. Ticket registration is already open, the schedule is already done, and apparently numbers have been good already on people making requests.

Not every game will be full, of course, with India games the most popular and so on. But I think that a South African World Cup is a very appealing tourist trip for a lot of Brits and Aussies and New Zealanders. There are also big expat communities of those people in the UK and Europe, who might fly down. Then there are the large communities of South Africans who have Indian or Pakistani backgrounds, so they’ll also be interested.

I have faith the crowds will be good in South Africa, and I hope that for the handful of games in Namibia, novelty value will get people along, and for Zimbabwe, they play all their games at home, so that will be a draw.

Plus, can’t tell you what a difference it makes to tourists to have a year to plan the trip, with confidence that the schedule won’t change, as opposed to all the recent World Cups in India where we get the schedule six weeks out, and inevitably change a few games even after that point. They are truly disastrous hosts from the perspective of people wanting to attend games, so overseas tourists just don’t bother.

In this case, I’m upbeat.

“Shout out to Disney,” writes John Stewart. Unlikely to be that one, no. John Oliver might be watching the cricket with Zaltzman, but he’d be the only late night host.

“They bought the NZ broadcast rights for the SA test series; they mucked up the calendar, and had the test match scheduled to start today rather than yesterday. So they didn’t actually broadcast day 1.

“After about 40 minutes on the blower last night, I convinced the customer support person that cricket goes for five days, so it’s not five different games, and that it wasn’t a time-zone muck up on my part; Joshy was already throwing down his third. Eventually after getting me to turn it off and on a couple of times, she was just like ‘Oh well, you should be able to watch it tomorrow I guess’.

“Imagine having so much money you buy the broadcast rights to a test series, then don’t even notice you’re not broadcasting it. That’s what you and Adam should have done in Pakistan that time. Ultimate flex.”

That is pretty impressive. I can assure you that we did notice we were broadcasting, it was among the most stressful experiences of my admittedly quite pleasant life.

That story is here, if you want something to fill half an hour of your rain delay time. Mike Williams is a brilliant audio doco maker.

Ground staff are repainting the pitch lines, which is great news. There’s an inspection due in about 45 minutes, given how wet the ground got. With any luck, that would then mean action in one hour and 45, with the lunch break considered to have been taken, and we could get straight into a 2.5 hour session. We’ll see.

“Fast bowlers don’t eat as many pies or neck as many beers as they used to back in the day, so the role of the spinner to hold up an end is diminished these days,” suggests David Blackah. “Also drop in pitches don’t take turn until days 4 & 5 and it’s often all over by then.”

There is something to that last bit. Also the fact that teams now bowl about 70 overs a day even when it’s clear and sunny.

Still, I don’t buy the argument that because a game may be shorter, you don’t need a spinner. If it ended in three days without the spinner playing a role, then picking one didn’t hinder your team. And if you think it’ll be a short match but it goes longer, then you have the resource that you need.

I’m told that the St George’s Park band has been playing music for most of the morning, which is hilarious, but even they have stopped now. Tired out. The covers are coming off, though.

“Hello Geoff, thank you for your efforts in informing us about this almost game. I do hope they let you do your work from home!” In this case, yes, Mark Gretton, though more often I’m doing these updates from the ground.

”More pertinently, I was struck by the ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ tone of cricket SA after hardly anyone turned up to watch the first Test. I can save them money on their enquiry as to why that was: 1) finding the time of year when you can pretty much guarantee there won’t be an uninterrupted day’s play and, overwhelmingly 2) this serving to reinforce the point you’ve made repeatedly over the the past few years that Test cricket is no longer that important to you. I’m not unsympathetic to Cricket SA as to why they have elevated T20 as their cash cow of choice. But to then don sack cloth and ashes regarding Test attendance suggests foolishness, dishonesty, or both.”

Well, quite, and there’s also the fact that there has been no Test cricket in the country for close to a couple of years, and they didn’t bother telling anyone that it was back. All reports from Durban were that promotion was non-existent. And yes, we know that CSA are very short on cash and probably don’t have much marketing budget, but it also is hard to believe that it would be highly expensive in a South African context to engage local workers for some postering or flyering or targeted online ads.

There is a tendency, for those of us who are obsessed with cricket, to imagine that everyone else knows about it too. How could they not know about the Return from Sandpaper series, right? But, truth is they didn’t.

That XKCD comic about “average familiarity” could apply to our field as well.

This one.

I’ve pondered this a bit, since Lyon’s very public show of dismay after missing out in Brisbane last summer. In a way, I like that he’s so fired up about missing a Test, and I like that he’s candid about having feelings instead of brushing over them. And I don’t like the increasing attitude that spin is not effective enough, but pace bowling magically is.

At the same time, I wonder how justifiable it is to be furious about missing a game when you’ve played 140 of them, more than almost anyone in the history of the sport. Does that then become a display of ego, thinking you’re more important than the decisions the team is making about how best to win a game, or more important than other players, because literally everyone else on your team has had less opportunity to play for Australia than you?

It’s a mixed grill, this one.

John Dean – an OBO reader, not Nixon’s lawyer, though I suppose one could be both – has written in regarding my questions about the state of mind of N. Lyon.

“Sadly there isn’t a small door behind a filing cabinet on the 7½th floor of a Manhattan building I can crawl into to enter the mind of the GOAT. However, I’d imagine as hard done by as he’d feel, he recognises no one has been more hard done by on selection than ScoBo. He’d be filthy, but not at Bayside’s favourite son.”

The rain radar that I can find doesn’t look promising either. Apart from depicting clouds as giant bilious green snot-chunks, which is highly unappealing, it has these chunks circling about and not moving anywhere. The main piece is off to the east of Gqeberha, but the smaller part over the town is largely static both in the prior tracking and the projection, just shifting in small circles.

A bit of a dance went on with the covers, where they came off, umpires talked about an inspection, then the covers went on again. A tale as old as time.

If there was a draw, it wouldn’t cost Australia much in WTC terms: less than one percent on the ratio count, compared to an Australian win. But it could cost South Africa a lot, more like five percent versus a South African win. Not to mention that Australia won the last series between these sides, so if there’s a washout here, South Africa can’t win the series or take the trophy, such as it is. It still doesn’t have much of an identity, although hopefully it doesn’t end up being named after two randomly plucked players.

Later, once South Africa finally get to bowl, which may be Day 3 at this stage, we’ll have the return of Rabada. He was the main character at this ground eight years ago.

All of this rain will give Nathan Lyon more time to think. The more time lost from the match, the more it suits the Australian approach of four fast bowlers, because the less they’ll need a spinner to carry any slow periods of play. But I’m curious about what he makes of the situation. Is he as angry as he was when left out for four quicks in Jamaica and Brisbane recently? On the third time in the last eight Tests that he’s been fit for, is there a level of acceptance? Does it cause despondency?

Interested in any reader thoughts about the role of spin in the modern game, given that England don’t bother picking a proper spinner most of the time either.

My sources at the ground confirm what everyone else’s sources at the ground say, which is that it is now absolutely pouring down. This is not what qualifies as breaking news.

This was the risk of Test cricket in October, we’re told by South Africans. More likely to have bad weather. In 2018, of course, this tour was played in March and even strayed into the first days of April. Seven of the last eight Australian visits started in February or March. But that can’t happen anymore, because that would displease the IPL, whose owners want Australian players, and would displease Australian players who want to earn the extra slice from the IPL.

Well, perhaps more importantly it would deny that same chance to South African players, who need that extra payday much more urgently given how little they comparatively earn from their home board, or more realistically it would see a Test series shorn of anyone who got picked up by the IPL.

Does the rain mean we’re doomed to have a draw? Not necessarily, given the speed at which Test cricket moves in this era. Even in Durban, which was an uncharacteristic grind of a match relative to many recently, they only played about 360 of a possible 450 overs. All the time lost to bad light didn’t matter, and it wasn’t a close-run thing to finish the game on day five. If wickets keep falling when we get some play, the rain may not matter. But that’s only if it clears up and stays away after this morning.