The series is level at 1-1, and the decisive Test at Newlands now carries the weight of a full campaign. For South African cricket, the swing in fortunes could hardly have been sharper. Four days after absorbing a 214-run defeat in Durban, the Proteas left Gqeberha with a win by an innings and 31 runs, a turnaround that resets the competitive stakes against Australia before the decider in Cape Town from 27 to 31 October.
The shape of that comeback is what makes it remarkable. Australia won the toss in Gqeberha and put South Africa in to bat on a wet pitch under rain-grey skies, with the visitors already holding a 1-0 lead in the series. The start was poor. South Africa stuttered through a rain-ruined first day and at one point sat on 111 for 6, a position from which most innings, and most series, collapse.
Temba Bavuma had other ideas. The captain batted for nine hours and turned that precarious position into 179 off his own bat, an innings built on stubbornness rather than fireworks. Alongside him, Marco Jansen with 85 and Simon Harmer with 82 put on a record eighth-wicket stand of 183, dragging South Africa to 425 for 9 declared. The tail refused to simply make up the numbers, and that accumulation of runs proved decisive.
Then the same match flipped again. Jansen, having contributed with the bat, ripped through Australia’s top order for his fifth Test five-wicket haul, bowling Australia out for 99 and enforcing the follow-on. Australia fought in the second innings, with Steve Smith battling through a neck injury, but it was not enough. South Africa completed the innings and 31 run win, and the series went to 1-1.
The scale of the reversal is the point. In the space of a week, a team went from a heavy defeat to one of the most complete victories available in Test cricket, and it did so after slipping to 111 for 6 in the very match it needed to save. Determination, discipline and self-belief, in that order, carried the side through, and they are precisely why this team wears the World Test Championship crown. There is plenty that can be questioned about this Proteas group, but not their ability to get off the canvas.
That refusal to stay down is, in a sense, the broader South African trait the column’s writer celebrates. It is a national identity that includes people who made pineapple beer during lockdown because the bottle stores were shut and nobody was going to be told what to do with their own fruit. It includes surviving Stage 8 loadshedding and still showing up to work the next day with a joke about it. The country does not know how to stay down, and neither do its sports stars. You never write South Africans off.
The next chapter comes at Newlands in Cape Town, a winner-takes-all showdown against Australia. On current form, and given the momentum generated in Gqeberha, the writer offers a simple assessment: he would not want to be Australia walking into that one.
Meanwhile, there is a second fixture worth noting in Cape Town this week. The Springbok Women host Ireland in a historic first-ever rugby series on South African soil, at Athlone Stadium on Saturday 24 October at 15:00, with the second Test on 31 October, also at 15:00. Ireland arrive ranked fifth in the world, but the South African women come in on strong form after wins over Italy and Spain in the WXV Global Series, a Rugby Africa Women’s Cup title, and a drawn series against the USA earlier this year. Anyone in Cape Town is encouraged to go and support them.
The scoreboard reads 1-all, and the decider awaits.