Bavuma's batting masterclass takes control from Australia

A few days before this Test series began, a digitally manipulated image was doing the rounds on social media.

Modelling South Africa's new Test playing kit, a pensive expression on his face, Proteas skipper Temba Bavuma was flanked by teammates Ryan Rickelton and Marco Jansen.

The visual punchline, in this case, was that Bavuma had been shrunk even smaller than his already-diminutive self, dwarfed by his teammates, even though he was standing on a superimposed shoe-shine box. My sides!

Never mind that 5'4" Bavuma's batting inspiration, Sachin Tendulkar, stands only an inch taller, nor that the previous owner of India's "Little Master" moniker, Sunil Gavaskar, is the same height as Bavuma. Nor, indeed, that a certain lad from Bowral who did kind of OK in the 1930s and 40s was only 5'7". None faced quite the same level of condescension or fixation on their physical stature as Bavuma.

In reality, Bavuma is, by a few key measures, as big as anyone in the story of South African cricket in the post-apartheid decades. On the world stage he captained his country to victory in the 2025 World Test Championship decider, banishing years of big-tournament heartbreak.

Australians, apt to wipe such unexpected defeats in crunch games from the collective memory, are thus obliged to bracket Bavuma with a select group of figurehead skippers of recent decades — Clive Lloyd, Sourav Ganguly, Michael Vaughan, Virat Kohli — who've engineered famous and important victories against great Australian Test sides in their pomp.

Now Australia reckons with his batting. On day three of the second Test at Gqeberha, Bavuma played an innings that, for context and quality, ranks among the highest calibre; a towering and important century that any of the all-timers above would envy.

Beginning the day on 41, with his side wobbling away at 5-97, Bavuma finished it with a stunning set of numbers next to his name: 179 runs from 334 deliveries in a total of 9-425 declared.

Due to the rain and delays of the opening stages of this game, Bavuma's epic stretched across three days, clocked in at a shade under 10 hours and required nothing less than the total psychological and physical mastery of the most complete pace attack in world cricket. Australians scoff at the mere concept of moral victories, but here Bavuma and South Africa claimed a resounding one.

It was the highest score of Bavuma's career, his fourth century (out of five all up) since becoming captain and moving up the order, and it means that a game in which Australia fancied skittling the Proteas on a green pitch is very unlikely to be won by the tourists — and possibly worse.

The "possibly worse" part got its preview sequence in the final moments of the day, when South Africa's returning paceman Kagiso Rabada marauded his way through Nic Maddinson to leave Australia one wicket down at stumps. Had bad light not limited Bavuma to the use of spinners in the final three overs of the day, the carnage could have been worse.

It has been said that the Australians respect but don't particularly warm to Bavuma. By this theory, he is aloof, undemonstrative and unlikely to engage in banter, verbal sparring or fun. In that way, he is more like a bowler who always had Australia's measure, Curtly Ambrose. "Curtly talks to no-one," Ambrose once said. It worked out just fine for him, too.

Bavuma's knock was a masterpiece of the kind of tempo batting that makes Test cricket tragics swoon. His watchful first 50, comprised almost entirely of judicious nudges, nurdles and leaves, took 140 deliveries.

His second, which grew to encompass sumptuous on drives, square drives and a cracking pull shot off Pat Cummins to reach his century, took only 86 balls. His third, a by-product of an acceleration phase when he and Simon Harmer removed any thoughts of an Australian victory, came from just 73 balls.

It was hard to believe this was the same player who'd scratched around for a combined total of four runs in 45 tortured deliveries last week in Durban. But like Matt Renshaw in that game, it was not just Bavuma's own runs that turned this contest on its head but the partnerships he forged with his side's highly capable tailenders.

There was a thrilling stand of 132 from 186 with Marco Jansen, whose 85 came at almost a run a ball and, to be fair, presented a truly arresting example of cricket's capacity to attract all shapes and sizes. Paired with the 6'8" beanpole, Bavuma brought to mind the famous photo of NBA basketballers Muggsy Bogues and Manute Bol.

Even more profitable — game-defining, most likely — was Bavuma's union with Harmer, the spinner whose surprising selection reprieve suddenly seemed completely sensible as he hammered his way through a sparkling knock of 82 from 157 deliveries. Their partnership of 183 traversed 46 overs and was South Africa's highest eighth-wicket stand ever — not the sort of record with which this Australian squad likes to be associated.

In the final analysis, 315 runs came after the fall of South Africa's sixth wicket. It was a total wipe-out for the Aussies.

What did Cummins get wrong? There were some indefensibly defensive field placements, in truth, especially in the crucial phase when Jansen went berserk and Bavuma fed him the strike with easy singles to men stationed in the deep.

But as Richie Benaud once said, the best attribute a captain can have is luck, and there wasn't much on offer here for Cummins. Josh Hazlewood, missing with illness on day two, was thus obliged not to bowl for the first two hours of the day. The green pitch, which had promised carnage early in the game, turned docile and offered minimal lateral movement even for Scott Boland. And after the second new ball brought the wicket of Jansen — Boland's fifth — very little else transpired, so the field spread again.

Of the Australian bowlers, Boland was clearly the pick with 5-81 from 29 overs, and the overall picture of gloom rather rubbished the claim that his otherworldly Test statistics could be attributed to being slotted into an attack that was always firing from the other end (and anyway, by that logic, Andy Bichel, as the last backup quick to receive acclaim like that heaped on Boland, would have easily maintained a bowling average far lower than 32).

In the Boland years, as in the Bichel ones, sometimes even great sides have to admit it has not been their day. That was Australia today; at the mercy of the biggest small man in cricket, who doesn't have to open his mouth to say something profound.