Sometimes a Test match will amble past us with barely a murmur. Other times, it comes in like a carpet bomb flattening all in its wake. South Africa versus Australia at Cape Town last month was one of those.
This article first featured in issue 102 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to buy now.
He can barely get the words out. “I don’t think, I would… change my journey… for anything,” says Simon Harmer, to (the ever-excellent) Natalie Germanos at the post-match presentation. He tries again, dropping his eyes behind the brim of his South African cap. “Just… chuffed.” It’s the perfect onomatopoeic word to end on. You can practically see the air leaving his body.
“Yeah,” Harmer will tell me two days later, the dust settling at Newlands on a great personal performance and a series win for the ages. “I had to get out of there quick.”
They don’t sleep much, these cricketers. It’s little wonder they’re done in by the end of it, all those anxieties, those hollowing fears and creeping doubts, deepening across five fitful nights. Marco Jansen, the best pound-for-pound cricketer on the planet just now, went “cuckoo” the night before the final day. Harmer too could be found pacing around, scenario-rehearsing, as the sun roused itself over Table Mountain. As for the Australians, I’d be surprised if they’ve slept a wink in weeks.
On the eve of the final day, the south London pub where a few of your favourite cricket writers like to spend their Friday nights was showing the fourth-day highlights and we all agreed, even the most proudly jaded among us, that alarms would be set for the morning. Others in our cohort, your cricket-adjacent types, would be doing the same. The thing had reach and depth and meaning. Yet again, the game had confounded.
In the event it was effectively done inside the first hour, the champion Kagiso Rabada running through Australia’s top order. In that spell he went to 350 wickets from 13,808 deliveries, fewer than any fast bowler in history. He is in the conversation for the greatest of this or any other century.
Those who described that final day as an anti-climax were mistaken. This was the perfect climax for a team which has had to put up with qualified praise and sniffy condescension, even as world champions. They are not just the best Test team in the world. They are heading towards becoming one that we will talk about for a very long time indeed. The team that finished that series is the strongest version yet fielded under Temba Bavuma’s remarkable tenure as captain – 15 matches, 13 wins. England go there next month. Best look busy.
For all the team’s collective brilliance, Newlands belonged to Harmer: his 10-for, and those six wickets on the final day, the defining moment of his cricketing life. He did well last year in India and Pakistan – 30 wickets in four Tests there – but never at home, never in front of his own people.
He is 37 now, an overnight superstar 15 years in the making. Regular readers of this magazine will know that we have a soft spot for him in our office. There’s something in the sweep of his story – its threads running through county cricket, imbuing, as it does, a kind of humility into all who pass through it, and the adopted Essexness, and the naked urge to drive himself to the edges of things to find out who and what he is, and the quiet return to his homeland, and now this, the denouement, with its classical third-act redemption arc. Gets me going, at any rate.
What will happen to him now only matters in the sense of what he can achieve with this team – and he’s happy to say he’s got half an eye on a certain match at The Oval next summer. But the personal aspect, this profound question he’s lugged around for a decade and more, all that’s now taken care of. He can rest easy. He was good enough after all. More than that, he was good enough to take down the great Australians and still – well, almost – hold himself together, spluttering into that microphone on that outfield: “It all worked out alright.”
The World Test Championship will reach its finale next summer – with that game Harmer’s got his eye on – as a legitimate, toothy beast. It has finally bedded in. The next few months are full of permutations and jeopardy. Every match matters to the final standings, and even those teams – England, West Indies, Bangladesh, Pakistan – who aren’t in the final running seem re-energised somehow: for further evidence of the Windies’ resurgence, witness their victory in Mirpur last month, a win to end Bangladesh’s faint hopes of barging into the top two and another boost to Roston Chase’s team’s self-belief. They are not alone in moving into next year’s cycle with fresh vigour and hope.
South Africa might, as Harmer says (on page 18 of this month's magazine), be cricket’s primary disruptors – the barnacle on the hull of the supertanker – but they are not shy of back-up. Even now, in the face of a deeply rigged system, anyone can beat anyone. Just look at the results table, if you can make sense of it. The game is undefeated.
This article first featured in issue 102 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to buy now.
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