Shabby Newlands fails to deliver

To gain a better understanding of what happened at Newlands on Wednesday and Thursday you need to look below the surface. Not at it. That said, much of the focus on the shortest of all the 2,522 men's Tests yet played will indeed centre on the pitch - a 22-yard long lottery ticket offering no certainty except the impossibility of judging how high, or not, the next delivery would climb after bouncing.

The match was over five minutes short of an hour after lunch on the second day. So, in not quite four-and-a-half sessions. Or in seven overs longer than it would take an ODI to go the full distance. The game was put out of its misery in 642 deliveries, beating by 14 balls the MCG match between Australia and South Africa in February 1932 as the shortest Test. South Africa lost then, too. But by an innings. Not that they would consider their seven-wicket loss to India any less a hiding. If anything, this was even more of a thrashing. And of more than simply a cricket team.

Newlands, you might have noticed, is the darling ground of the game in this country. Visitors approach it from all parts of the game's world with the kind of veneration others reserve for their first sight of the Taj Mahal. The mountain! The Oaks! The atmosphere! The lush greenery! The sunshine that seeps on into the evening hours! The sight, smell, sound, taste and feel of the African summer at its most voluptuous! The fairest pitch in all the land! Not.

"I don't know what people want me to say - whether it was a rubbish wicket or not," Shukri Conrad said. "But you only need to look at the scores, a one-and-a-half day Test match, and the way they chased a little target of 79."

South Africa won the toss and were bowled out for 55, the lowest total recorded against India in their 574 Tests and the home side's lowest in the 390 matches they have played since that game in Melbourne almost 92 years ago. In their reply of 153, India became the first Test team to lose their last six wickets for no runs. Fuelled by Aiden Markram's 106, South Africa's second innings - in which no-one else made more than a dozen runs - reached 176. Mohammed Siraj took 6/15 in the first innings and Jasprit Bumrah claimed 6/61 in the second.

"It's a sad state when you need more luck than skill to survive in a Test match," Conrad said. "All the ethics and values of Test cricket go out the window. This was just a slugfest, a slogathon. That's taking nothing away from India; they were superb. But you ain't going to win too many Test matches scoring 50-odd. You've got to own it, and we own it. It wasn't great; both the cricket and the wicket.

"Often the surfaces you play on make you doubt your technique and how you approach the game. That's where I felt the game was from the first couple of overs of the match. I was chatting to Rahul Dravid this morning, and....we want to get away from the phrase that there's a ball with your name on it. But, on this pitch, we felt there was. That makes you play in a certain way, and that's why we batted the way we did.

"I had so much pleasure in announcing Stubbo [Tristan Stubbs] was debuting, and then I apologised to him after the game for giving him a debut on a pitch like this. It's not going to get any more difficult than this. When you go to the subcontinent, where it spins, you know what you're in for. So you prepare accordingly. That's all us as coaches and players want. This was nowhere near that.

"This has come as a shock to the system, but I'm not going to lay the blame entirely on the doorstep of our playing XI, or the make-up of our team or our tactics. It's been a combination of a red-hot India who were desperate to come back [after losing the first Test by an innings in Centurion], and the conditions.

"We lose a lot of batsmanship because of T20 cricket. Batters like to feel bat on ball nowadays."

The pitch was the first Test surface prepared by curator Braam Mong. Some will say it should be last. Was Conrad among them? "I know Braam. He's a good guy. Sometimes good guys do bad things. Or get things wrong. This doesn't turn Braam into a rubbish groundsman, just like 55 all out doesn't turn us into a rubbish cricket team - a few days ago we thrashed them.

"I'm sure there will be a lot of learnings for Braam. I'll go across there at some stage and wish him well going forward, and see what his thoughts are. It's easy to rubbish certain things, but you've got to feel for groundsmen. Just like cricketers and coaches, who have to take it on the chin, my message to Braam would be to take it on the chin and move forward."

Might the message for Conrad be that he needs to take a greater say in the preparation of the surfaces South Africa play on at home? "I don't want to be doctoring pitches. We've got young batters who need to learn their trade and find their way in international cricket. Playing on pitches like this doesn't do that for them. I never have and never will prescribe to groundsmen, because they've also got jobs to do."

Mong was a visible, hands-on presence throughout the match, and was hard at work for hours after Thursday's early finish preparing the pitch for Newlands' first game in the second edition of the SA20 on January 16. But, unlike most people in his profession, especially at iconic venues, he isn't permanently attached to the ground. He owns a turf management company that has clients throughout Cape Town. Tending to Newlands is among his many duties.

This is not to cast aspersions on Mong or his ability. Instead, it tells us something about Newlands and the Western Province Cricket Association (WPCA) that is supposed to run the ground in a manner befitting its status, real and imagined. Look around the place, especially where the television cameras don't shine, and you will see peeling paint, weeds the size of small trees growing in cracks in the concrete, and waste bins fallen from their wall mounts. Food and drink options for spectators are limited, as are the chances of finding a clean seat to sit on. Seen through a screen, Newlands radiates beauty. Up close and in parts, it is shabby.

That's hardly surprising given the factionalism that has fractured the WPCA along racial, religious and cultural lines. Couple that with the kind of exceptionalism that led West Indies cricket to believe the good times of the 1980s and 90s would never end, and it's not difficult to see why the WPCA is failing as the custodian of the game in the province.

The board is being kept afloat by a bailout from CSA that will amount to more than a million dollars, which won't go far in taking the edge off the monthly bill of USD134,000 the WPCA pay to service the debt created by major redevelopments at Newlands. The WPCA's chief executive, Michael Canterbury, has been booked off since September with an undisclosed illness. In his place, as a consiglieri of sorts, CSA have parachuted in Corrie van Zyl, whose skill and integrity as an administrator was confirmed in October 2019 when he was suspended. The CSA of those awful days, when Van Zyl was acting director of cricket, was presided over by Chris Nenzani and run by Thabang Moroe; bad apples both. The deservedly respected Van Zyl arrived at Newlands a few short weeks ago with a brief to make sure the Test and the SA20 matches went off as smoothly as possible.

Nothing was smooth about the Test pitch. Was it the manifestation of Newlands' and the WPCA's many problems; a symptom of the systemic sepsis? Conrad, who was born in uber-local Lansdowne and is as Cape Town as Capetonians get, who guided teams from here to senior national titles across the formats when he coached them from 2005/06 to 2009/10, a man of cricket from top to toe, is the perfect person of whom to ask that question.

"I think I'm best placed to talk about the cricket surface, but I'm certainly not best placed to chat about whatever else is going on here," Conrad said. "I worked here many years ago, and I moved on. I'm not in a position to discuss the goings on between the walls here."

Shukri Conrad does not shoulder-arms to questions. He will have to forgive us for thinking the real answer lurks below the surface.