Notes from (north of) The Oval #10

Running the rule over the "perfect" performance.

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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.