Rabada puts Warner, Australia in fight-or-flight mode
In Twenty20, 14-ball innings of 30 are a dime a dozen. In Test cricket, they are a far more extraordinary sight, and telling too. On day two in Cape Town, it was possible to conclude that David Warner's brief encounter with Kagiso Rabada may be series-defining.
Usually such an innings would be indicative of a team utterly on top, and pushing for a third-innings declaration. But Warner versus Rabada told a rather different tale. It spoke of a batsman and a team stung by a fast and fiery adversary, mounting an attempt to fight fire with fire that left the Australian first innings a smoking wreck on a deteriorating Newlands pitch. Warner, undoubtedly, was trying to assert himself; Rabada, definitely, put a stop to it.
Across this series, Rabada's duel with Warner has been critical to its direction, both tilting further and further towards South Africa the longer they have gone on. In Durban, Warner looked to be on the way to the sort of third-innings bandit job that characterised his domineering South African displays in 2014, before slapping Rabada to mid-on. At St George's Park, aided by a first such dismissal orchestrated by Lungi Ngidi, Rabada homed in on Warner with pace and direction to make the opener look as uncomfortable as he ever has in Tests.
All set the scene for the exchange at Newlands, following Rabada's reprieve from an ICC code of conduct ban. Replying to South Africa's middling first innings at a ground where he made twin centuries four years ago, Warner had reason to think this would be his day, and he dealt with Rabada's first delivery well enough. But the second was faster and lifting, and brought a fearful blow to the arm that caused Warner to reel away, soon requiring medical attention. For all the blows he has copped on the fingers, necessitating the bandages that had him at the centre of outlandish ball-tampering conspiracies in Port Elizabeth, Warner is seldom struck in this way.
His response was to go into a mode reminiscent of the one that England opted for against the speed and physical threat offered by Mitchell Johnson and his offsiders Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle in 2013-14 - fight or flight. One particularly rapid-fire sequence in Adelaide in that series had Matt Prior, Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar all dismissed going for their shots in quick succession to end the match, prompting the contention that Alastair Cook's tourists were "scared". Swann's response, dictated to The Sun, was a denial that told a wider truth.
"I honestly don't think any of our batsmen fear for their physical safety," he said. "Bowling of that pace ups your heart-rate and sometimes people play more shots than normal because of the surge of adrenaline. We've had plenty of batsmen caught on the hook, for example, in the first couple of Tests."
This much was certainly true of the adrenaline rush that flowed through Warner's bat over the next nine balls he faced from Rabada. After a cover-driven boundary and a couple of edgy singles, Warner went into what could only be described as crash-through-or-crash mode: bash, a drive through cover; boom, a still more aggressive punch through the same region; woosh, a leg-side flick that made the chasing Morne Morkel look like he was running up and down on the same spot. Next over came a bouncer and crack, a hook shot, perhaps a little top-edgy, into the crowd beyond fine leg; and smash, a cuff through backward point.
Rabada's temperature was rising all the time, but after his run-in with the ICC code, he had a vivid recent reminder of how important it was to channel his anger constructively. What came next was a scorching delivery down the line of the stumps that sent the off stump cartwheeling with all the slow-motion grace of an Apollo Moon Mission launch - Warner's bat arrived well and truly behind the ball's bullet-train schedule. There was no send-off from Rabada, but utter glee from the hosts; a heavyweight bout ended by knockout.
Looking back on the innings, Australia's coach Darren Lehmann tried to balance Warner's haste, his destructive potential and the quality of the delivery that had done for him. "Davey obviously tried to take the game on. He got a decent ball to be fair," he said. "If he batted another 100 balls he might have been 300, the way he was going - it was Twenty20 cricket there for a bit.
"That's the way David will play at certain times and we've got to accept that as a side. We'd like him to bat longer. But you also want to take the game on occasionally. So from our point of view if he batted another 20 or 30 balls and really took the game on, and got away with it ... 100 balls would have been great." Great in a Roy Fredericks at the WACA in 1975-76 kind of way.
Like Fredericks, there was a wildness to it all that was to be summed up by Warner's boundary exchange with a spectator who had waited for the opportunity to bait him with personal abuse. Warner's retaliation denoted a loss of control; so too did several of the Australian dismissals that followed.
Usman Khawaja did not so much as size up Morkel before hooking him straight to deep square leg, minutes before lunch. Steven Smith was drawn into following a bouncing ball not unlike Pat Cummins' to Faf du Plessis the day before, and Shaun Marsh betrayed 62 balls of composure by wildly chasing a ball well away from his body. Even Nathan Lyon's late rearguard opposite Tim Paine had a runaway element about it.
Asked whether others had been carried up in Warner's slipstream, Lehmann did not disagree. "Yeah, it's not a bad point. They certainly kept going at 5 or 6 an over didn't they," he said. "If we batted 100 overs we'd be 600 the way we were going for a while there. That's what we talk about, batting long periods of time, and we certainly didn't do that today. It was only really Nathan and Tim - Nathan had a bit of luck, but he took the game on. And Tim played really well. Tim's probably been our standout batsman for the tour so far. The way he's played, played reverse-swing and played their bowlers well."
There were two things telling here. The first is that any series in which Paine is Australia's leading batsman is unlikely to finish in victory. The second is that Paine has achieved his consistency during the series by playing with a calmness remarked upon by numerous members of the Australian tail. Paine has batted in control of his emotions and his technique - something that could not be said of Warner's flurry. As Gideon Haigh once wrote after an Australian collapse to England in 1995: "Teams always talk about fighting fire with fire, when one usually fights fire with water." Warner and Australia at Newlands were a fire out of control, set off by Rabada.