Australia, SA first ODI today

PERTH: There’s never an urn at stake, or the odds of a billion people ganging up against you in cricket’s naked dance of the riches, but the adrenaline is forever in attendance whenever these two take each other on, manically surging up to woo the cricket romantic in you.

South Africa and Australia aren’t cricket’s best couple ever but, quite astonishingly, they make the best kids. “Australia is our favourite team to play against,” Faf du Plessis admitted recently. And so here they return, with a short three-match ODI series that reeks of inadequacy, to replenish their cricketing rivalry that had gone missing after the Newlands ball-tampering fiasco. The first ODI at Perth on Sunday (November 4) will be the first time Australia play at home since then, and it adds an interesting dynamic to a series that’s being played in the backdrop of the Longstaff cultural review: which Australia will turn up against South Africa after all?

It’s an interesting identity crisis to have. While decades of faulty conditioning, and more importantly in a ratifying winning culture, is bound to leave some residue — “that culture from years back is going to be hard to crack,” Dale Steyn has said — the world now also stands “woke”, allowing Australia little room to goof up and redefine the line, again. But a less pompous Australia can be an unrealised broadcaster’s nightmare; you can’t invest USD. 1.2 billion and afford to see failed attempts at marking out aggression from infidelity by someone who’s grown up believing that the two are one and the same.