Hot to Trott

The Englishman on the plane from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth was a friendly giant, one of those big men who was conscious that he was intruding into your seat space if he sat in a normal position but was happy to tolerate an uncomfortable, sideways compromise in order to fill more aisle space with his excess mass than my seat space.

“Jonathan Trott was given hell on the boundary in Cape Town,” he assured me. “I was sitting right there and it was non-stop and never-ending.

Half of it was in Afrikaans but there was a fellow translating it for me just to make sure I understood everything that was being said. Eventually I had to ask him to stop translating because I’d got the message after an hour!”

The man from Somerset felt that Trott had been intimidated and that had contributed to his poor show with the bat. Just 24 hours later he might like to reassess that view just as surely as South Africans might want to revise the policy of sledging the latest countryman to have returned in opposition colours.

Surely nobody has forgotten what Kevin Pietersen did when he was vilified five years ago. Trott’s response in Port Elizabeth on Sunday was calculated and clinical. He has barely stopped scoring runs since he arrived and he is certainly not the sort of character to be intimidated into doing so, either by the crowd or the opposition.

The St George’s Park debacle can best be explained by the enormity of the success barely 36 hours earlier at Newlands.

The hardest thing for a coach and captain to do when a team performs as well as they did to square the series is to keep an artificial lid on the bubbling cauldron of confidence and self-belief. It is a team which has become used to winning and they expect to win – sometimes too much.

Great rugby teams can beat their nearest competitors by 30 points in ideal conditions but they also have the knowledge that driving rain, a soggy field and attritional defence sometimes mean they have to grind out a 15-9 victory on penalties.

The Proteas didn’t see the conditions at St George’s because they vision was still blurred by the perfect hiding they gave the tourists in Cape Town. They needed to knuckle down and scrap for singles, not try and blow England off the field for a second time in three days.

If the players expect to win every game then they cannot have gripes about their fans expecting the same thing. And to be fair, they don’t.

“You would have thought we’d lost five in a row if you read some of the things that were written after the Centurion game but there were four days of newspaper columns to be filled so it’s inevitable that there’ll be a lot of speculation in that time,” Mickey Arthur said.

“Now we’ve done it again and we can expect more criticism. England did it the right way – they got thrashed with the next game taking place barely a day and a half later! We’ll just have to make sure we square the series and keep on learning. You can’t win every game, let alone every series, no matter how much we all want that to happen.”

If there is a Trott problem brewing, however, it had better be sorted out before the test series begins. The prospect of another South African applying salt to his countrymen’s wounds is too horrible to contemplate.