How SA beat England – by Dale Steyn
We hunt in packs. Even though I’ve had a fantastic season, look at the records of Makhaya, Morne, Andre Nel, Paul Harris – you’ll find that their economy rates are down and they’ve also picked up five-fers. Everybody bowled well. I may have been the standout but it happens purely because there’s been a lot of pressure bowled from the other end. I’ve been able to bowl these magic balls. We all know what our jobs and our roles are – everybody has a different role. But once you get out in the middle, everybody kind of takes toll of where the game is going.
Graeme comes over and will tell you, “Ok, now I want you to do this and bowl to this kind of field – Morne’s going to bowl from the other side and he’ll bowl really tight, so I want you to attack a little bit more.” It all depends on the game situation but pre-game we all know what our tactics are and what our strengths and weaknesses are. We just try to stick to our strengths.
I’ve never played a game at Lord’s but I think that anybody who hasn’t has played it through in their mind about a million times. Any time you do your visualisation and pick your favourite ground, I think most guys tend to pick Lord’s. They want to score a hundred there and raise their arms at Lord’s. If you want to take 10 wickets in a game, you want to be doing it at Lord’s. I guess it’s now just about going out there and doing the business. It takes away a bit of the nerves as well. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to be my first time – it feels like I’m going to walk out there and it almost feels like it’s a home ground and that I’ve actually got some good performances under the belt at Lord’s, even though I’ve never played there before.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably wake up and just get busy, getting ready in the room and getting my stuff in order. I’ll go and have breakfast, get to the ground and then I really like to just relax. I always like to be the last guy out of the change room – I spend that extra 30 seconds in there alone; it’s just quiet and a little bit more chilled and relaxed. Then I can get up and go down, and I know it’s time to have fun: make the cricket field my playground and go and have a really good time.
First Test, Lord’s
England 593/8 dec (Bell 199, Pietersen 152, Broad 76, Morkel 4/121)
South Africa 247 (Prince 101, Panesar 4/74) & (following on) 393/3 dec (McKenzie 138, Smith 107, Amla 104*). Match drawn. Man of the match: Bell
We got away with a draw. We won the toss, bowled and at the end of day one England were 309/3. I don’t think we were underprepared or rusty: we just didn’t hit the ground running. It took us three days to get into the game. We hadn’t played a lot of Test cricket coming into it, but we all thought we were ready. Physically everyone was in good condition; it was just whether our minds were in the right place.
We’d been really looking forward to this for a few months. We’d been to the subcontinent a lot last season and everyone knows it’s not necessarily the best place to tour: cricket-wise it’s difficult and just generally it takes you out of your comfort zone. We couldn’t wait to get here, and there was a big hype about getting to Lord’s and we’d chatted about getting on the honours boards; we’d had a couple of days at the ground before the game getting the feel of it. And I think we shot ourselves in the foot, trying too hard. It wasn’t our kind of cricket, not how we wanted to play.
We had a serious chat after day three and after that our batsmen showed us the way. Maybe the chat should have come after day one! It was a pretty serious chat: we had the feeling that we could lose the game. We thought we could get away with day one not being so good; day two as well. But after three days in a row we realised we were heading for trouble.
The captain stood up and said what everyone was thinking. It was a great little talk. He made us realise we had to lift our socks – in a harsh but good way. And the guys came back fighting with the bat. And then we didn’t look back.
One thing we was that we were all trying to bowl too many wicket-taking deliveries. We were all striving the whole time. Maybe the occasion got to us. We all wanted to take five wickets at Lord’s; we were talking about getting on the boards. We sat down and asked ourselves what we’d been doing last winter when we were doing so well. The answer was bowl in partnerships and, actually, not try to get a batsman out, because 99 per cent of the time the batsman gets himself out. So why are we trying so hard to bowl wicket-taking balls?
We had to keep reminding ourselves to keep doing the basics. The guys with more experience – the Bouchers, the Kallises, the Smiths – just keep coming up to you and telling you to do the same thing, reminding you what’s going to work and what’s going to happen. And in the end it paid off.
Second Test, Leeds
England 203 (Morkel 4/52, Steyn 4/76) & 327 (Broad 67*, Cook 60)
South Africa 522 (De Villiers 174, Prince 149) & 9/0. South Africa won by ten wickets
Graeme won the toss again and put England in to bat. He said to the bowlers, “Look, we’ve got faith in you and we know you’re up for it.”
I think we did a pretty good job. After bowling England out for 203, we still walked off thinking that was 40 or 60 runs too many. We thought we bowled a lot of bad balls; guys were going for three and a half or four runs an over. But we were just happy to have bowled them out.
So we went back to our basics at Headingley. It wasn’t 100 per cent how we wanted it. But we got them for 200 and bowled well in the second innings too.
There was controversy on the first day. AB took a catch, he thought it was out, we asked for the replay, it showed it was not out and we just got on with it. There was an incident at lunch when Vaughany said something to AB about the catch – then the same thing happened to him later on, so maybe there were one or two things said after that. But we’re not the kind of team to dwell on things like that or have a go at the opposition. That’s not how we play cricket.
We play it hard on the field but we don’t get nasty. In the build-up to Edgbaston both teams were coming in to have lunch together and having a bit of banter and chatter and laughs. So I don’t think there’s any hard feelings: a lot of our guys have played county cricket. I’ve been team-mates with a couple of guys on the England side – Alastair Cook, Ian Bell – and they’ve played in world XIs together and things like that. So I don’t think we need to get ugly with each other.
People have said I seem to have Michael Vaughan worked out. Well, I can say that whenever he comes in I get the feeling I can get him out. He has a good technique, but you do feel you can find the edge of his bat: his feet don’t move so much early in his innings. I’m the kind of bowler that suits that kind of batting.
Whatever his recent form, Vaughan’s a big, big wicket for us. He’s the leader of the team. With us, I look at Graeme and he leads by example. He takes the brunt when we get into trouble. It all falls on his shoulders. To get the skipper out for 0 or 2 sends shivers down the spine of the entire team. So it’s nice to have that kind of stranglehold over somebody like him. It feels that, once you get someone like him, you have some control over the rest of the batters as well.
Ashwell Prince led our batting again here – and again without getting much fanfare in the media. Nobody outside our team really knows a lot about Ashy and that’s a fantastic thing. He’s like a duck – looks very serene but under the water his feet are going ballistic, by which I mean the training that he does, the stuff he does to prepare. And the beautiful thing is that he doesn’t get caught up in the hype of being in the papers and worrying about the pressure. It’s almost part of his gameplan.
No big celebrations. We know the series isn’t over just because we won one game. We know that South African sides have come here before and led series and walked out with a draw or a defeat. So we had our usual little fines meeting and a couple of drinks where we celebrated everyone else’s success. But we know that Edgbaston is a big game. There could be a whole different scale of celebration after the next Test!
This is an edited version of Dale Steyn’s England tour diary that originally appeared in SPIN magazine’s October issue. For subscriptions and a free Shane Warne book, visit, click through right here.
v Bangladesh A, Worcester
It was during this game that I found out that I would be missing the next couple of weeks’ cricket, thanks to an injury to my left hand. It actually happened during the second Test: I was fielding off my own bowling off James Anderson or Cook and I broke a little piece of the bone off the thumb on my left hand. We didn’t know it was broken for several days; in fact I thought it was just bruised but when it hadn’t been recovering the way a bruise would, I went for an x-ray and eventually saw the specialist about three days after it happened.
A little chip, but it’s right on the joint – the specialist said if I got another bump on it, it would mean surgery and having a plate put in and I could get arthritis in the next five or ten years. So the safest route is to wait until it’s sorted out. You always want to get back on the park as soon as you can but like the doc said: you can’t beat biology. Four weeks she said. The cast comes off on the last day of the Edgbaston Test but we’re going to try and speed up the process by replacing the cast with a split.
We were batting when we heard the news – then we went out and bowled Bangladesh out for 112 and Andre Nel bowled like a legend. So the worries were eased by knowing that the guy replacing me is in such good form. We know he’ll do a good job. If he takes 15 wickets, he’ll make me the happiest man alive: we’ll have won the series and I won’t have to rush back.
On the Saturday, being 12th man, I actually watched every game from Twenty20 finals day on TV. We spend a lot of time in hotels, anyway, so I’m always on Sky Sports: I follow my old team Warwickshire, see how they’re doing. I watched Essex in the Twenty20 finals day. I thought it was brilliant: I don’t know why we don’t have a finals day in South Africa.
Of course there’s a lot of talk about the sudden upsurge in Twenty20. My opinion is that it’s fantastic – I haven’t played professionally for as long as someone like Kallis or Boucher so their view may be different. But I just think about my own home town: when I was playing back in Palabora we didn’t even have a local team. I had to travel for an hour and a half to go and play my club cricket at the weekends. Now my best friend there has started a Twenty20 league and over the last four years he’s gone from two teams to eight teams in the town, playing this mini-T20 competition. There’s a prize giving, everyone gets a trophy, and that shows where international T20 cricket has taken things – to a little town where I came from. And my mate, Brett, has done a fantastic job in doing that. On a professional level, it’s fantastic too: guys are playing Test cricket at a higher rate, you’re seeing new shots, the 50-over game has become more exciting as a result. It’s not nice to be a bowler, but watching it, it’s great.
I’m okay with the injury. I’m dealing with it. Coming up to the third Test, I still go to the ground every day for the warm-ups and fitness work. I’m loving the football in the mornings now: the guys don’t go in so hard on the tackles. I’m getting away with murder! Ironically, being injured gives you a big chance to work on your fitness in the gym. I’m doing a lot of stability work and working on my legs, aspects of my game that I don’t often get a chance to work on during the season.
It’s hard to avoid all the talk about England’s team selection in this series: Pattinson and Flintoff coming in at Leeds, for example, was all over the papers and the TV. We follow it – but it really doesn’t bother us. We do our video analysis of the opposition but we focus on our own game. We want to compete against the best opposition we can: so it’s nice to play against Flintoff. We heard the day before the Edgbaston Test that Harmison wasn’t going to play: in a way, the batters were relieved, but they were also disappointed because they wanted to test themselves against someone like that.
Third Test, Edgbaston
England 231 (Cook 76, Bell 50) & 363 (Collingwood 135, Pietersen 94, Morkel 4/97)
South Africa 314 (McKenzie 72, Kallis 64, Flintoff 4/89) & 283/5 (Smith 154*). South Africa won by five wickets.
Man of the match: Smith
I was very upset that I didn’t get to play at what is basically my home ground. I’d been really looking forward to it – there was even talk about it last summer when I was playing for Warwickshire. But I don’t think I could have written the script better. Neller came on the tour not thinking he would get a game, and he’s getting two Tests. It’s just fantastic. At the end of the day, it’s a big team sport and we’ve really worked hard for this. The thing about our bowling line-up is that when one guy drops out, another guy just steps up and fills his place.
I don’t think the historical thing – that no South Africa side had won a series since re-admission – came to mind when we were playing. I mean, we knew the history behind South Africa touring England and not winning. We all knew that before we came on the tour, But the game itself drew us in: it was full of emotion, swinging one way then the other. It was almost self-contained; we were caught in the moment of this great match, rather than thinking about the series itself or what it meant. It was a great Test match. Five days’ great cricket crammed into four days.
It was unbelievable.
The run chase was tense stuff. There’s always going to be panic in the dressing room when you’re 90/4 and one of your best players has been out to a full toss. It just makes everything kind of alive. Two batsmen back in the hut after being yorked and not seeing the ball – there was a lot of tension about and people wondering what was going on. Some of the guys are hiding away in the toilet; some of the guys don’t even want to hear the crowd. I wouldn’t say we didn’t believe we could knock off the runs, but there was a lot of pressure on. I thought it was all brilliant, actually! But once Smith and Bouchy had settled the ship, they were batting quite nicely. And by the time they took that last half hour it felt as if we were in total control.
I was alright during the run chase, but when we were bowling and they only had an 80-run lead and they were six or seven down and Collingwood and Ambrose had their partnership, I was one of the guys hiding away!
Throughout the game, we had to contend with the issue of the windows at the Pavilion end. One of the guys said they just couldn’t see anything when the window was open – they were ducking into every yorker that Freddie bowled and ducking into full-tosses. But it was really only Fred who was causing the problem. And most of the left-handers, like Graeme, didn’t struggle; nether did the shorter right-handers like AB. But one or two guys couldn’t pick up the ball when it was bowled full. Jacques seemed to get it worst. I don’t think he was happy at all to be out twice like that in one Test. You know what it’s like in Test cricket: you get someone running in and bowling at close to 90 mph, a big, tall, strong bloke and all of a sudden he bowls a ball and you can’t see it. For him to do that and clean up our best batsman twice in a Test was quite scary.
Graeme Smith was unbelievable. That knock sums up what kind of character he is. He was just so calm – he obviously felt that if he, as skipper, got half the runs, the rest of the team only needed to get half the runs between them. We knew we only needed one good knock and it was just fantastic. It was him, the captain of the team, taking it all on his shoulders and winning the game for his country.
He called us all together before the run chase and said, “The worst thing that can happen is that we can lose: we still have another chance at The Oval. It won’t be the end of the world.” And then he went out and won it single-handedly.
If we’d lost the Test or drawn it, I would have taken my cast off and played at the Oval – but now we’ve won the series I’m keeping it on the next two weeks. After that I should be 100 per cent ready to go for the one-dayers
When we won we didn’t leave the dressing-room until nine, half past nine. We had a bit of a celebration. The England players didn’t come in for a beer. They were out of there pretty quickly, I think, which was a shame. I do feel for them. It was a very close game. We could have gone to the Oval for the decider, a massive pressure game. The real celebrations will happen after the Oval game, after we pick up the little trophy or whatever we get for winning the series. The celebrations will really happen then.
I don’t think we’ve played our best cricket, yet we’ve still outplayed England, which must be a big positive for us. We’ve got some improvements to make – our next goal is the tour of Australia at the end of the year.
The difference between the sides? Our batters played well and never gave their wickets away at any time. At Edgbaston, the English gave their wickets away quite a bit. Maybe that was the big difference.
Dale Steyn’s England tour diary originally appeared in SPIN magazine’s October issue.
