Silver lining to cricket’s cloud

‘We wuz robbed” is a refrain from losing sporting teams grumbling about their defeat. Today, it could be South African Test cricket fans saying that.

That’s because many of them pitched up at Newlands in Cape Town and many more loaded up the snacks and drinks in front of the TV at home, expecting an entertaining five days of what is referred to as the thinking person’s version of the game for “flannelled fools”, as Rudyard Kipling labelled them.

Instead, the fans got what looked more like a pair of back-to-back one-day internationals… although even that would have made two days – and the second Test against India ended yesterday in barely a day and a half.

As the wickets tumbled, there was macabre humour. TrafficSA posted a traffic warning on X: “Cape Town – Newlands: Extremely busy between the pitch area and the dressing rooms.”

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On the other hand, there are silver linings to this particular cricketing cloud. The Proteas won the first Test, so pride is not totally destroyed and this is not the Death of the Game.

And, if you didn’t blink too often and caught most of the action, you would have seen history in the making as the shortest Test match on record.