They are probably not that superstitious at the England and Wales Cricket Board but they did nominate their batting coach, Graham Thorpe, to talk to the press before the final day of that match at Headingley and here he was again at Centurion when the victory target of 376 is even bigger than the one required against Australia in August. Moreover the pitch here seems less dormant than the one in Leeds, though the manner in which Rory Burns batted on Saturday evening suggests that it is not deteriorating quite as rapidly as anticipated.
Wisely Thorpe was making no promises. “We’ll wake up tomorrow and we’ll have a chance in this Test match,” he said. “I would say it’s a long shot, we’ll have to play very well, but we’ve given ourselves a fighting chance. There’s a lot of runs to get but there is belief in our dressing room and maybe that’s because of what the players achieved in the summer. We’ll keep fighting all the way and if we have a good first session and take the Test match deep, who knows?
“South Africa will think if they get a couple of early wickets the game is theirs. We will come with the right attitude and hopefully do something really special again.”
Much depends upon how severely Joe Root and Jos Buttler have been affected by the bug that refuses to go away. Thorpe revealed that Root was reckoned to be too weak to come into bat at No 4 on Saturday night. In the final session Ben Stokes was padded up and prepared to bat in Root’s position.
“Hopefully we can all get out of bed in the morning,” said Thorpe. “They [Root and Buttler] will both benefit from a night’s sleep and that’s what is even more important about the way we played today. If we were four or five down it probably would have been a struggle for them.”
Thorpe declined to use the bug as an excuse for what he described as England’s “inconsistency” in this match – a reference to their first-innings batting and some of their bowling on Saturday morning. “It’s been tricky but you have to cope with it,” he said. “It’s been an interesting buildup for us and the Test match itself has been full of ups and downs. All we’ve really tried to do is stay level in the dressing room.” Sadly this has included too many of the players being horizontal.
Anrich Nortje, the South Africa nightwatchman who mustered an unlikely 40, remains dutifully optimistic. He described the final passage of play as an “investment session”. And when asked whether there is any feeling of deja vu from the defeat to Sri Lanka earlier in the year at Durban (when Sri Lanka made the highest score of the match – 301 – to win with one wicket to spare) he gave a predictably monosyllabic answer: “No.”
