Low on quality but high on drama; SA and Pakistan have served up a feast in the first Test

When is bad cricket actually quite good cricket? Perhaps when it is played like in this first Test. Pakistan and South Africa have produced a very watchable Test match, featuring a lot of awful cricket.

The quality of the batting has been mediocre, the bowling, not much better. Full tosses are getting lbws and a plan hatched to bowl a 122km/h bouncer, worked. Batters chased balls wide of off stump and in one case a batter left the ball, but still deflected it to third slip. 

Cricket hey? 

However amid all that foolishness there have been enough moments of skill and perseverance to ensure this match has never descended into total club cricket amateurism.

Aiden Markram was superb in the first innings, when every other Proteas front-line batter flopped and in the second innings, as Pakistan whipped up a storm with the best bowling in the match, he stayed calm and produced some stylish stroke play.

Kagiso Rabada bowled two excellent seven-over spells in Pakistan’s first innings, Dane Paterson’s set up of Mohammad Rizwan in the touring team’s first dig, was out of the bowling manual and he served up a ‘jaffa’ to get rid of the talented Saim Ayub in the first innings as well.

No Test match can be good all the time, and this one certainly hasn’t been, but it’s also been difficult to look away. Some of Pakistan’s batting on Saturday was downright comical, but South Africa's bowling must have infuriated the coaching staff too. 

Marco Jansen admitted he has struggled throughout the match. “You train every day to hit that off stump and ‘fourth stump’ line. I’m not as consistent as I should be regarding line and length,” he said. The same goes for the rest of the South African attack. 

At the same time, Saud Shakeel acknowledged that Pakistan’s batters got out to bad balls. “It was disappointing,” he said somewhat understatedly. He made 84, a gutsy effort that showed he’d learnt from his first innings performance, when in eight minutes at the crease, he scored 14 runs, faced six balls, hit three fours and played like someone who came into the match without a plan. 

Across Friday and Saturday, he spent almost three hours at the crease, and had his partners shown just a modicum of responsibility or nous, Pakistan would have been in a position to set South Africa a target closer to 300, something Saud said was optimal. 

They didn’t even get to half of that. Such has been this game. Low on quality, but high on entertainment. And then on Saturday evening it got tense, when Pakistan produced their best passage of play of the entire match. 

South Africa will want to respond in kind on Sunday in the manner of a team worthy of playing in the World Test Championship final. 

Ultimately, from a player's perspective, it’s the outcome that matters. Whether you score a goal that deflects off a defender’s behind, it still counts as a goal and a try from a fortuitous bounce is still worth five points. 

Asked about his dismissal of Saud, with a full toss, Jansen said: “I was going for the yorker but missed it by a shin length. People can say what they want, he missed it, it was a wicket and I’m happy for that.”