Too little, too slowly from batters in SA's T20 competition

Newlands has trees, the palpable snootiness of the obliviously privileged, a brewery just beyond the boundary, and a mountain looming uber alles. The Wanderers offers nasty traffic, snarling crowds - both symptoms of the defensive brashness that is a survival tool for people who have to live in Johannesburg - and thunderstorms powerful and beautiful enough to jolt even the most jaded.

Centurion's sweep of concrete and grass is an oasis of civilisation in the sprawl of nondescript company head offices that line the highway linking Joburg and Pretoria like paeans to thoughtless consumption. Another sparkling incongruity in this parade of expensive mediocrity is the arresting Nizamiye mosque - built in the grand Ottoman style - whose vast dome and four minarets, each 55 metres tall, tower over its lesser neighbours.

St George's Park, the gods' own cricket ground for those who've given their souls to the Eastern Cape, has everything: history, atmosphere, cricket on a human scale, pancakes made by church-going matriarchs, and a brass band. Spectating there, on long days of sun, wind and endlessly unspooling songs by the band, whether runs are flowing or wickets falling, becomes an exercise in meditation more than it is merely watching a game.

Kingsmead? Less than a kilometre north of the middle of Durban's sub-sea level pitch, beyond a B field and its surrounding office park, the modest but golden dome of what maps list, inadequately, as the Durban Hindu Temple has stood since 1898. Devotees know it as Shree Thakurdwara and Dharmashala. Two other temples in the area were demolished to make way for a courthouse and a railway station, but the survivor has been there since 25 years before Kingsmead's first Test, between South Africa and England in January 1923, which was also its inaugural first-class match. Due south is a bluish, metallic, slumping wedding cake that was, until January 11 this year, a Hilton Hotel. It was opened in 1997 by Nelson Mandela and closed by Covid-19.

All around is a hustle and bustle of municipal offices, law courts, police barracks, assorted shops, an international convention centre, and the shrine of the Memorable Order of Tin Hats, an organisation founded in 1927 by former soldiers to, the group's Wikipedia page says, "keep alive... the finer virtues that war brings forth". Whatever those are.

Not too far away, in streets that aren't all that meaner, it isn't difficult to buy drugs, sex and tat that looks African to tourists' eyes. The first two of those trades are plied, albeit less freely than before, along what used to be called Point Road. It is now Mahatma Gandhi Road. Then, to the east, comes the sticky, warm, rolling embrace of the Indian Ocean.

Kingsmead is easily the most urban of South Africa's major grounds. It is rooted in the reality of its place in downtown Durban, a city rich with the diversity of its Zulu, South Asian and colonial past. Gandhi became part of that history in May 1893 when he arrived in Durban from Bombay as a London-trained barrister. Three days later was thrown out of court for refusing to remove his turban in the presence of the magistrate. The Natal Advertiser headlined the story "An Unwelcome Visitor". In response, Gandhi wrote a letter to the paper: "Just as it is mark of respect amongst the Europeans to take off their hats, in like manner it is in Indians to retain one's head-dress.

Not least because the outrageous humidity could cause you to drown in your own sweat, nothing moves too quickly in Durban. Except the sun. Even on summer days it drops out of the sky like a spilled slip catch, casting a greying pall over the scene and causing umpires to flick bails off stumps at an hour when the light is brilliant elsewhere in the country. That's when it isn't raining in Durban, which it tends to at the merest mention of cricket.

None of the above explains why CSA decided to put its franchise T20 tournament at Kingsmead - the fact that conditions there should be more or less like what they will be at the T20 World Cup in India in October and November is no doubt closer to the truth - but it's a useful hook on which to hang a tale of cricket in the time of the pandemic.

Four days of practice, some of it on pitches cut into the outfield, were followed by 17 matches - all of them day games to comply with South Africa's lockdown restrictions - contested on five surfaces over 10 days. Most pitch and outfield preparation had to be done late at night and early in the morning. That was a challenge considering as much as 50 millimetres of rain fell on some nights. But the daylight hours were largely dry: only two games were affected by the weather, and not enough to prevent them from being decided.

On match days the nets were available only to the teams who were playing. If other sides wanted to train that day they went to the Chatsworth Oval, 28 kilometres south-west of Kingsmead and operating under identical bio-bubble conditions. The six squads of 20 players each all stayed, along with the match officials and CSA types, in the same hotel in Umhlanga some 17 kilometres to the north. Around 800 coronavirus tests were conducted. None of them returned positive results.

The success of the tournament, and the similarly seamless staging of six women's white-ball internationals between South Africa and Pakistan at Kingsmead in January and February, is an unmitigated triumph for the KwaZulu-Natal Cricket Union (KZNCU). Twenty-three matches in five weeks, none of them washed out, is all but unheard of at a venue that has, perhaps unfairly, become synonymous with unhappy endings: seven of the 47 men's white-ball internationals there have met a watery fate. By contrast, all of the 64 men's internationals in the shorter formats played at Newlands have been won and lost. So take a bow KZNCU chief executive Heinrich Strydom, groundskeeper Wilson Ngobese, and the rest of the staff, for dodging the downpours and doing a lot else besides.

There was less to celebrate about the cricket itself. Kingsmead's own Dolphins reeled off five consecutive victories to reach the final, then choked against the Lions - who almost blew it against opponents they had reduced to 38/4 and limited to a total of 107/7. The Lions took 19 overs to win by four wickets. The whipping boys were the Cobras and the Knights, who each lost four of their five games. The Cobras should know the feeling well: they've won only two of their 13 matches across the formats in the past year. Even the Knights, who have won seven of 13 in the same period, are doing better.

Lions opener Reeza Hendricks was the leading batter after the league stage of the tournament with 186 runs in five innings. David Miller, Pite van Biljon, Rassie van der Dussen, Temba Bavuma and Christiaan Jonker all scored more than 140. The Dolphins' Keshav Maharaj stood out as the star bowler before the knockout rounds. No-one sent down more than his total of 20 overs, yet no-one could touch his economy rate of 4.35. Prenelan Subrayen, Imran Manack, Chris Morris, Lungi Ngidi and Anrich Nortje also went for less than a run a ball. Ngidi and Sisanda Magala took 10 wickets each during the round-robin stage with Robbie Frylinck, George Linde and Mthiwekhaya Nabe claiming eight apiece.

Of the 14 players who appeared for South Africa in their T20I series in Pakistan in February, only Janneman Malan - because of injury - didn't feature in the franchise competition. So the overall standard should have been higher. An argument why that wasn't noticeably true, particularly on the batting front, could be that the conditions, by design, didn't allow for stroke-making as freely as is often the case in white-ball cricket in this country. Only the Cobras' Zubayr Hamza scored two half-centuries, and there were just 11 other 50s. Raynard van Tonder's 57-ball 81 not out for the Knights against the Warriors was the closest anyone came to scoring a century. That nobody else in the Knights' XI reached 20 in that match tells it own story.

So does the fact that not once in the nine games won by the team batting second was that side able to earn a bonus point for reaching their target inside 16 overs. And that despite them chasing less than 120 three times and less than 150 in four other games. The Lions deserved their success, but they provided the worst example of this lacklustre tendency by dismissing the Knights for 106 and then taking 18.1 overs to wend their way to a ponderous seven-wicket victory.

Too often teams batted with little discernible urgency, an approach South Africa will not want to take to the T20 World Cup - where the pitches will likely be slower and the bowling definitely better. Shree Thakurdwara and Dharmashala's dome has added elegance to downtown Durban for 123 years, but even the most devout don't hang around admiring it all day.