South Africa vs England: Hosts in control despite final session fight back

South Africa end first day on 329-5

(Getty Images)

Hands up those who remember The Oval last August. The ghost came back to haunt England yesterday as events of the opening day of the fourth Test against South Africa bore an uncanny and worrying resemblance.

Then, with the Ashes safely secured, they went into the final match and played as if they might as well have partied for the entire 12 days between victory and what proved to be hapless defeat. Now, having seen off the world’s No 1 Test team 2-0 with one to play, they offered a constant supply of lackadaisical bowling of which the former champs took full advantage.

The chances of a replica outcome suddenly seemed pretty high on the predictor scale. Although there was a partial exorcism in the final session when South Africa went from 237 for 1 to 273 for 5, they added another 56 runs before the close without further loss. The curse of the dead rubber is far from being lifted. In their past six test series, England have lost the last match five times.

Hashim Amla scored an almost seamless hundred, his 25th in Tests and he was joined by Stephen Cook whose innings had only one tiny flaw which did not prevent him becoming the 100th player and the sixth South African to make a hundred in his first Test. Amla played as a man free of the shackles of captaincy; fluent, controlled, imperious. Cook, selected as a specialist opener at last at the age of 33, made the selectors appear dolts.

In part, England manufactured their own destiny. Their stirring victory last Saturday up the road at the Wanderers, which secured this series improbably early, was created by spellbinding bowling supported by wonderful catching. Now, with the bowling less potent on an equally less forgiving surface, two chances were put down behind the wicket. They were sharp, they should have been taken.

When he had barely started, Amla, on five, edged a searching ball from Ben Stokes towards first slip. Jonny Bairstow dived towards it a touch robotically and if his glove might have glanced the ball it never embraced it. Alastair Cook at first slip was perhaps disconcerted but in any case he could not retrieve the situation.

Cook was spared on 47, once more by Bairstow, going to his right and this time Stuart Broad hardly bothered to conceal his annoyance. It is a trade-off that England must be prepared to sanction if they continue to choose wicketkeepers who are, like Bairstow, by their own definition works in progress. But that made it the fourth time in the series that Bairstow had dropped a catch for which he has had to dive to his right. This suggests he is either moving too late or with insufficient flexibility.

How they were made to pay. The pitch was much easier to bat on after about an hour, as pitches should be, and England’s bowlers erred much too frequently. The most culpable and the most punished was Chris Woakes, who as expected took the place vacated by Stephen Finn. Eight of Amla’s 18 boundaries came off Woakes, most of them in the cover or mid-wicket area.

But Woakes was not alone at fault and this is only his sixth Test match and his fourth recall. There was a general lack of zip. The questions about Jimmy Anderson, wicketless in 21 overs, failed to recede: he was largely ineffective with both new balls. No-one sustained a line or a length for long enough and Amla and Cook knew what they were doing.

The only break for the tourists in the first two sessions came when James Taylor took another blinding catch at short leg off an inside edge from Dean Elgar. It seemed to be going down until he somehow clasped it between his legs, somewhere in the nether regions, and then grabbed it with his right hand at the second attempt.

If Amla was the more poetic in the second wicket partnership of 202, Cook played an authentic, properly developed opening batsman’s innings. It was precisely what South Africa had been missing in experimenting with non-specialists. He left with fine judgement at the start and then knew instinctively when to clobber the bad ball.

Understandably he became a little agitated in the nineties, not least because England were setting awkward fields – seven on the off side, two on the leg – to curtail scoring options. To Amla a one point the split was eight to one. They needed to do something to claw it back.

Amla went at last when he played indecisively forward to a typically dogged Stokes and was bowled off an inside edge. Almost immediately afterwards, AB de Villiers was dismissed by Broad for the tenth time in Tests and for his second successive duck in his two matches as captain. He fenced at a ball outside off, a good one to have to face so early, and was smartly held by Joe Root at second slip.

Cook also chopped on, to the persevering Woakes and when J-P Duminy played grotesquely across the line to be lbw to Moeen Ali, it seemed that England might make serious inroads. But Temba Bavuma and Quinton de Kock counter-attacked intuitively against the second new ball, which yielded 48 runs in 10 overs. The ghost was walking again.