South Africa v India - SuperSport Park Cricket Stadium, Centurion, South Africa - December 28, 2023 India's Virat Kohli and Shubman Gill
Credit: Reuters Photo
Centurion: You can’t bowl without teeth for close to a hundred overs and bat without skin in the game for two innings and expect to win Test matches.
A showing of such unaccountability will not fetch you sessions or games anywhere in the world, let alone in South Africa.
The Indian team was left to digest that easy-to-understand-but- difficult-to-process truth on Thursday as they lost by an innings and 32 runs at the SuperSport Park.
Oh, how quickly the tides change!
A few days ago, India were talking about history, talking about having what it takes to become the first of their kind to win a series in South Africa.
There was some apprehension after the first day where they were down to 208 for 8, but the second day’s KL Rahul-inspired push to 245 made it seem alright.
Then Dean Elgar’s 185 happened. Then Marco Jansen’s unbeaten 84 happened. Then South Africa’s 408 all out in 108.4 overs happened.
Then - if all that wasn’t humbling enough - India’s second innings of 131 all out in 34.1 overs happened.
By the way, this is after they ‘rebuilt’ the innings courtesy Virat Kohli’s 82-ball 76.
India were down three wickets in 16 overs before tea, and less than ten overs after that, they were down another three wickets. At this point, the scoreboard read 96 for 6.
At the non-striker’s end when India’s sixth-wicket (Ashwin) fell was Kohli. He was so enraged by his partner’s loose cut to gully that he flung his gloves on the ground and turned away with a mouthful.
It’s quite possible that Kohli would have known at that very moment that India were not going to bring South Africa out to bat again.
India were trailing South Africa by 67 runs at the time while attempting to overcome a 164-run deficit.
Going by how the South Africans batted for nearly 459 minutes, one would have assumed that India could, objectively, get those runs and possibly even add to it.
Turns out, South Africa’s run glut had more to do with how poorly the Indian bowlers bowled than it did with how well they batted.
Evidently so because from the time the Proteas came onto bowl in the second innings, it was apparent that they were just better at exploiting these conditions.
Just as they had in the first innings, the four horsemen of the orchestrated apocalypse - Kagiso Rabada, Nandre Burger, Marco Jansen and Gerald Coetzee - kept it simple, kept it tight and kept it in areas which the Indian batters couldn’t resist.
Rohit is the only batter in the line-up who can possibly turn around and say that he couldn’t do much about his dismissal. It was Rabada angling the ball in and shaping it away at the last moment to knock the off stump out.
It was similar to the ball which got rid of Kohli in the first innings, but this wicket was in the optics and the subsequent impact.
Yashasvi Jaiswal was unsure of a bouncer from Burger and ended up gloving it to the ’keeper. Guilty.
Shubman Gill looked good for a while and then let the ball go between his bat and pad in search of an expansive drive. Guilty.
Shreyas Iyer’s feet were stuck in concrete on a drive and ended up inside-edging it onto the stumps. Guilty.
Rahul threw his hands at a full and wide delivery and nicked it to Aidan Markram. Guilty.
The rest didn’t matter because, by this time, India’s fate was written. Kohli stuck around, bolstering his Test numbers, but at the stroke of 5 pm SAST, he flat-batted one over the Jansen’s head. Rabada ran it down from long-on and threw in a dive to complete a fine catch. That’s what commitment looks like. India will want to try it at some point.