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 | |  Saturday, 29 December, 2001, 13:16 GMT Aussies win round one  Australia tightened their grip on the championship BBC Sport Online's Matthew Allen looks at the implications of Australia's crushing series victory over South Africa. Round one of the "Clash of the Titans" between Australia and South Africa has ended in a damp squib with the world champions rolling over the pretenders with ease. A nine-wicket win in Melbourne was enough to secure a 2-0 series victory for Australia, with one Test to go, after their earlier 246-run mauling of South Africa in Adelaide. The sense of anti-climax as Shaun Pollock's men collapsed once again with barely a whimper in the second Test could be felt around the cricketing world. Poles apart The three-match series in Australia, to be followed by another three Tests in South Africa, looked a genuinely mouth-watering propect at the outset.
Australian batsman Justin Langer, speaking in his BBC Online diary column before the series started, compared it to the "Rumble in the Jungle" heavyweight boxing contest between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. He painted the impending square-up as "a tough, uncompromising slugging match between the hungry hunter and the proud, wise wolf standing at the top of the mountain." He went on to sum up the importance of the two-part series. "This series is like our last hurdle in proving that we have one of the most consistent and powerful teams ever to have played Test cricket," he wrote. "For the last few years, despite our success, there has always been the suggestion that the team closest to us was the South Africans." If the ICC Test Championship table was any reliable indicator of a team's strength then Australia and South Africa were virtually neck-and-neck and poles apart from any other nation.
Australia had a points average of 1.54, South Africa were only 0.04 points behind while the nearest challengers - England and Sri Lanka - were way back on 1.14. South Africa seemed to have a real chance to leapfrog into the number one spot in the official standings, but the challenge to Australia's dominance never materialised. Instead they succumbed to the same combination of individual brilliance and unrelenting collective pressure that has sunk every other team, barring India, to play Australia in recent years. "It was billed as the the championship of Test cricket and we've definitely been disappointing," said South Africa captain Shaun Pollock. Cautionary tale But Pollock's men still have the opportunity to move into top spot when Australia visit South Africa in February. If South Africa win that three-match series then they will achieve their dream of supplanting Australia as the world's best side. But, as Australia captain Steve Waugh said after the Melbourne Test, the psychological damage has been done, and the 0.04 gap between the two teams suddenly looks as lot wider. The cautionary tale to be learned by South Africa and the rest of the cricketing world is that statistics do not prove anything. Australia have shown there is room for only one Titan in Test cricket at the moment. | |
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