You can defeat a South African team – Australia may very well themselves before Friday is over – but you don’t ever seem to be able to make them realise they’re beaten. They are a side who seem to just keep coming, long after just about anyone else would have given in. They had good as lost this match once, on Wednesday evening, when four quick wickets fell for spit in the first 20 overs of their innings, and then lost it all over again when five more went for sawdust on Thursday afternoon. They were 102 runs behind, with 10 wickets left to take, when they came storming back into this match all over again.
You could feel something coming in the morning; there were heavy grey clouds over St John’s Wood, and the atmosphere around the ground felt prickly, but you couldn’t be sure what. It turned out to be a counterattack.
