da supremo： For the third time in the series, the South Africans spotted a goodbatting pitch – and for the third time in the series they took fulladvantage
The Wisden Verdict by Steven Lynch04-Sep-2003For the third time in the series, the South Africans spotted a goodbatting pitch – and for the third time in the series they took fulladvantage. At Edgbaston, in the first Test, they purred to 398 for 1 by theend of the first day. At Lord’s, after England’s inadequate 173, it was151 for 1 at the first-day close, and 412 for 2 at the end of the second.And now, after the less-than-perfect pitches served up at Trent Bridgeand Headingley, it was business as usual at The Oval. You don’t losemany matches after piling up 362 runs on Day One, and the series isas good as won.
Running away with it: Herschelle Gibbs and Gary Kirsten set off for another run
For once the main man in the big-scoring bonanza wasn’t GraemeSmith. The game was only an hour old, but already England werebowling for run-outs, and they got one when Herschelle Gibbs pushedoptimistically into the covers and Smith’s despairing dive was wellshort.There was a time when that might have fazed the excitable Gibbs, butnow he settled in, determined to put off the embarrassing explanationsto his captain for as long as possible. He started by driving dreamilythrough the covers, graduated to classy cuts, and finished off by notingAndrew Flintoff’s semi-Bodyline field – three men deep on the leg side- and smashing hooks past them anyway. Gibbs’s raw power wasbreathtaking: he hit the ball so hard that you could almost hear the poorpainters who will soon be giving The Oval its winter spruce-up sighingas another defenceless fence-post copped a bruise from one ofGibbs’s 36 boundaries.It was Gibbs’s day – there were two early lbw appeals which Venkatmight have given, and later the thinnest of edges off Flintoff didn’tregister on Simon Taufel’s personal snickometer. But it was amemorable innings, and an overdue one – Gibbs had been subduedsince his 179 at Edgbaston on the first day of the series.Three late wickets – two for Ashley Giles, who occasionally flighted theball well, and one for Jimmy Anderson in the last over – saved Englandfrom total disaster, but the fast men were off the pace for most of theday. Stephen Harmison rarely put two balls in the same place,Anderson mixed up testing toe-crushers with freebie four-balls, andeven Flintoff, usually the tightest of the fast men, was expensive. AndMartin Bicknell, playing on his home ground at last, must havewondered whether passing that fitness test was such a good thing,after Gibbs eased forward onto that front foot in the third over andspanked him past a motionless cover fieldsman.Sadly for such a fine county performer, Bicknell’s international recallhas come a year or two too late, as his pace has dropped one notchtoo many on the speed-gun. He is surely destined to end up as a quizquestion – who won four Test caps, in pairs, ten years apart? He willbecome cricket’s Ian Callaghan, the nippy Liverpool winger who playedtwice for England in the World Cup year of 1966, and twice more than 11 years later. That belated experiment didn’t work, either.Steven Lynch is editor of Wisden CricInfo.Wisden Bulletin: Glorious Gibbs gives South Africa control