There's always something exasperating about watching a team follow on productively. Where was this poise and aplomb when they needed it the first time around? Yet it's remarkable how often it happens, as though the team upagainst it, having conceded the outcome of the match, feel purged.

In such perverse fashion, South Africa followed their worst batting of the series with their best. Utterly spooked before lunch, they rediscovered their nerve thereafter, in the persons of Gary Kirsten and Boeta Dippenaar, probably the two of their number with most to prove.

Kirsten was twice fortunate, largely eluding his nemesis McGrath at the outset of the second innings then escaping Mark Waugh's uncharacteristic clutch at second slip off Lee when 12, though it was noticeable how much tighter his bat became to his body as time elapsed.

Dippenaar made his own luck. Hitherto, he has been obsessed with hitting the ball behind point from an open blade, twice harpooning the ball to gully. Today, he played with rigid self-mastery in front of the wicket, and drove through the covers with alacrity. His concentration was likewise impressive. Eleven of Dippenaar's 21 Test innings have been cut short between 20 and 50; on this occasion, he travelled calmly through that zone, and dealt impressively with an errant over from Ponting before tea without a second thought of the adjournment.

The Australians appeared puzzled, even nonplussed, to have encountered this bedrock of resistance. It wasn't Laxman at Calcutta 2001, but it was an insurrection, the more notable because the batsmen seemed to have digested the lessons of their previous dismissals, and made observers resume their lament that Australia and South Africa do not seem destined to meet over the full five-Test course in the foreseeable future.

What it illustrated, though, was how well-suited this Australian team is to the modern vogue for the three-Test series. They plan assiduously, hit the opposition hard, and expose weaknesses that take time to learn from - time that opponents, in the span of the abbreviated tours of today, usually do not have.

It offers, in fact, an alternative explanation of Australia's supposed weakness in so-called dead Tests. It may not, after all, be a case of a slackening of Australian effort; rather, there is a period of adjustment to the tempo at which Steve Waugh's men tackle the game, which while initially overpowering, can eventually bring out the best in their rivals, just as mountaineers gradually assimilate the rarefied air at high altitudes. This will be scant consolation to South Africa, who must feel like victims of an avalanche, but it does hold out hope for them in the ensuing rematch on their home soil.

Gideon Haigh is one of Australia's leading cricket writers and the author of several books including The Summer Game, the acclaimed history of Australian cricket from 1948 to 1971, and a new biography of Warwick Armstrong.

More Verdicts
Day 1: Busy making history
Day 2: Not so United

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd