Notes from (north of) The Oval #10
Running the rule over the "perfect" performance.
As it says in the secondary header above, there is very little to critically evaluate over the 2.33 days at Hagley Oval beyond captain Tom Latham’s pithy yet accurate summation: “You look back and it’s the perfect performance.”
Sure, you could look at a few individuals who didn’t score as heavily as they would have liked, but on a wicket that never stopped offering assistance it was surprising there were not more ‘failures’.
Even failure is a relative term. The least successful New Zealand partnership accrued 18 runs; only four South African partnerships across two innings bettered that.
We’ll address South Africa’s shortcomings soon but it bears repeating that this awesome domination came against a test team New Zealand hadn’t beaten in 18 years, had won just four tests against and has never won a series.
That’s more than a live chance now with the second test starting at the same venue in six days.
To illustrate just how dominant New Zealand’s performance was, I concocted a match MVP scale for the 22 players and I had to go deep before the Proteas made an appearance.