Australia v South Africa First T20 Report Card

Featuring calling from the studio, the Bride and fielding on your knees

Calling From The Studio
Grade: C

Remember that Test series between England and India? Of course you don’t. Old news. A contest that didn’t even have a winner. Tiresome of folks to keep banging on about it.

Instead, we’re off to the top end of Australia for some white ball stuff between Australia and South Africa. And when I say ‘we’re off’, I mostly mean Brendon Julian, who was the only Fox commentator they could afford to fly up there. The other three - Howie, Junior and Skull, to use their official handles - were calling off the television from back in the studio. Which led to the highlight of the night, when one of them described a dot ball late in the South Africa run chase as a ‘well-run two’.

Wonderful, perilous commentating. This is why the modern generation love the T20 format so much - every ball has so much riding on it. You don’t get this kind of gripping tension from a boring old Test match where the commentators are actually in the ground, watching it live, with nothing riding on a pull shot to deep backwards square that may be a dot, or may be two, but is definitely not a single, because the same batter is back on strike.

Another fine contender, from much earlier in the evening, was this magnificent exchange:

HOWIE: We saw Maxwell opening in the Caribbean.

JUNIOR: (who you know, deep in your innards, didn’t see a single minute of that entire West Indies tour) Yep.

But that’s nothing to do with them calling from in the studio. That’s just Mark Waugh being Mark Waugh. Good on him, I say.

Anyway. Great to have the Fox team back in action.

The Bride
Grade: B+

Also great to have back in action, on Australian soil at least? The Australian T20 cricket side.

And, in action, they certainly were. Because, having been put into bat, they went into the kind of action sequence eerily reminiscent of The Bride fighting the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill: Volume One, with batter after batter meeting an untimely demise, despite having fearlessly charged into the fray.

Why, at one point, we (very briefly) had Glenn Maxwell and Tim David batting together. Watching Maxwellball while suffering from Tim David Fever™? Heady stuff. Well, except for the fact that Travis was already out.

At 6/75 (!) after 7.4 (!!) overs, it felt very much as if South Africa had, rather embarrassingly, mistaken this match for the World Test Championship final.

Despite this, David stuck around, tonking sixes and refusing dots, and somehow guided Australia to 178.

Weird innings.

Fielding On Your Knees
Grade: A-

Was that enough for Australia to win the match? Of course it was. They weren’t playing in Darlose, were they?

South Africa’s run chase proved far too sensible to compete against Australia’s screwball antics, which carried over into their fielding. It began with Cameron Green, tired of all the tall jokes (explanation: Cameron Green is very tall), taking a catch in the covers, while fielding on his knees to trick Aiden Markram into thinking he was a normal sized Earth human. Same old Aussies…

It ended with Maxwell taking one of the most extraordinary catches you’re ever likely to see. I mean, we’ve seen Maxwell pull off nonsense in the field before. But fielding at first slip? And taking a catch off Josh Hazlewood? Wild. (He also did one of those outfield dancing catches, leaping back and forth over the rope with pinpoint precision, but, y’know, yawn… seen that one before, Maxi.)

The too-sensible-by-far innings saw South Africa finish on 9/161, well short, and Australia had, somewhat improbably, won their ninth T20 international in a row.

Wild stuff. Nine in a row?! Who do they think they are, the Australian women?