“People are coming and going like the walking dead, padding up and unpadding.” Michael Clarke surveys the hallucinogenic scene in front of him at Newlands in November 2011, the grand view of Table Mountain unlikely to ease the agony, his first-innings 151 now chip-shop paper. Clarke’s Australia are 21 for nine, sliding towards the lowest total in Test history.
Nathan Lyon and Peter Siddle get them to 47 to avoid record-breaking embarrassment but it’s barely consolatory. “By the time we go back into the field, we’re still unable to accept what’s happening,” Clarke writes in his autobiography. “We look like a cricket team, but we are 11 ghosts, unable to believe this reality.” South Africa have a target of 236 – hardly straightforward – but Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla ton up in an eight-wicket procession.
