The late, great New Zealand batting technician Martin Crowe, who would have turned 56 on Saturday, once said the same party trick does not always come off in a Test match. It may not be his exact words but Australia applied this concept on Aiden Markram. Sure, an accurate, relentless and hostile short-ball attack is enough to have most sane batsmen committed, but the idea of "once bitten twice shy" does not work for everyone. An over before tea from Pat Cummins, Australia’s cannonball among the rapid-fire machine guns that razed the Proteas first innings and the better part of the second, seemed to have confirmed this. The perfume ball was not the go-to on this slow surface but the armpit tucker that makes a batsman’s elbow contort like a chicken wing. It is the one that cramped Markram for space just before tea on Friday. His dismissal was the catalyst for the cataclysmic collapse that followed in the evening. Cummins steamed in from the Mngeni End and tried the same thing with the...
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