There seems to be a perception that Kingsmead is Durban’s equivalent of Brisbane’s Gabba or how Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados once was: a place where visiting teams came, saw but failed to conquer. In the case of Kingsmead there is a mental image of South African pacemen terrorising the opposition on the mystical ‘green mamba’, the pet name for the pitch that greens up, jags around and bounces. When the humidity rises to sapping levels and the clouds hover, it can indeed be tricky. But the reality is that certainly in modern times it is a reputation for some sort of impregnability built on smoke and mirrors.
The great South African bowlers have taken their wickets here: Shaun Pollock has 44 of them at 21.79 apiece, and Dale Steyn 38 at 23.23. Allan Donald managed 29 at 20.6, but Makhaye Ntini’s 43 came at 28.18, Morne Morkel has 20 at 31.8, and Jacques Kallis only 19 wickets in 16 matches at 43.73. South African dominance at Kingsmead is a fallacy. Overall there have been 40 Tests at the ground, of which the home side have won 14 and the visitors 13. England have played 15 here, won five, including by an innings on their most recent visit, and have lost only a single match, in 1928.
Famously, of course, they were within 42 runs of achieving the 696 they needed to win the timeless Test of 1938 when the ship’s hooter sounded and, after 11 days, they had to pack up and go home. It was here in 1999 that Nasser Hussain batted for 10 and a half hours to make 143 and Andy Caddick produced the bowling of his life (although they and England were ultimately thwarted by Gary Kirsten, who batted for more than 14 and a half hours – 40 minutes longer than Alastair Cook in Abu Dhabi this year – for 275). Perhaps most pertinently South Africa, in their past eight matches on the ground, have been beaten by Australia, twice, England, India and Sri Lanka, and have only a single win, against India two years ago, to reverse the trend.
Given all this, there are considerable grounds for English optimism in the first Test, notwithstanding the untimely calf injury that is sidelining Jimmy Anderson. Alastair Cook has a team still in the process of picking themselves up from the canvas after the humiliation of the winter before last. They have started to play an adventurous style of cricket but one which, inevitably, until they find some equilibrium, will have them teetering between extremes. It is consistency they seek. But where it is easy to say that they have won only one of the four Test series they have played this year, only in the UAE have they lost. The glass can be half empty or half full on that one. By the end of this series, incidentally, England will have completed no fewer than 17 Tests since the start of April, a condensed run of matches surely unprecedented.
South Africa, on the other hand, still ranked No1 in the world, have played only seven Tests this year, and won just one of them, against West Indies back in January. Since then they have twice drawn in Bangladesh, and were humiliated in India, a country in which England were famously victorious three years ago. They have suffered injuries to Steyn, although he is fit again now, and to Vernon Philander, who is not. There has been no even adequate compensation for the loss of two great batsmen in Graeme Smith and Kallis, and with Hashim Amla going through a poor run of form, the team have been kept afloat on the efforts of AB de Villiers, a truly remarkable athlete, in a manner which resembles that of another famous AB with his Australian team of the mid-80s. The confident talk of how things will be all right once they get back to home conditions has something of a hollow ring to it. If England are a side on the way up, then they will quite possibly meet and perhaps pass South Africa on the way down.
This match may not be played out in quite the manner expected in any case. Even two days out from the game, the pitch was dry and patchy, and even some rudimentary research will show that recent games have been won here by the spin of Harbhajan Singh, Rangana Herath and Graeme Swann, while Ravidra Jadeja had a significant impact for India in the game they lost two years ago. There may be more relevance than first thought to Moeen Ali’s six wickets in the recent warm up match in Pietermaritzburg, something that will need support from Jonny Bairstow behind the stumps.
The rapid return of Steve Finn following his foot injury, certainly helps offset Anderson’s absence, with Stuart Broad now left as the leader of the pack, and, so he says, the right to choose ends. Chris Woakes will be Anderson’s replacement and will be a diligent workhorse rather better than his Test match figures suggest, while Ben Stokes has learned rapidly some of the subtleties that underpin the bombast of the fast bowler. It is a decent quartet and the least of the worries, which will largely centre around the suitability of Alex Hales as Cook’s latest partner (this will be his ninth if we count a one-off with Kevin Pietersen, which puts the England captain alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor) and whether, by the end of the series, it will actually be Nick Compton who, like Richard Burton, gives it another crack instead. There are international bowlers in other parts of the world who are bemused by the idea that Hales, a terrific white ball cricketer, is a Test match opener.
They would, they say, deny him any width to free his arms, and bowl in at him. If he deserves the chance, then he has an awful lot to prove.
