Recess is over

So, normal service has resumed. The Australians are once more dinkum Australians, and not the pale parody of themselves we saw when South Africa toured there in the first half of the southern summer.

Gone are the gritty contests of Perth, Melbourne and Sydney, the battlegrounds on which Graeme Smith's team earned their country's first series win in Australia. Gone, too, is the gawky bravado that series generated in South Africa. For a while there we were all golly gosh goosepimply teenagers again, agush with the wonder of the damn straight fact that everyone - like, everyone, dude - knew we were way cool.

Our collective confidence pulsed as palpably as Morne Morkel's despair does these days. Morkel's mojo will doubtless return. He is too talented, too humble and too deserving for it to desert him permanently. But it's hard to see where South Africa's next Test victory over Australia will come from. Cape Town? So what? What, exactly, would that prove?

Alas, we're suddenly a country for old men. All because the cricket-minded people of this land have been smacked silly by a sledgehammer punch that connected where it hurts most - in the memory. A generation of South Africans has become grudgingly accustomed to taking hidings from Australia, in the same way that a dog cowers but does not snarl at a cruel master. Here he comes again with that awful look in his eye, we think to ourselves, and there's nothing we can do about it.

This time that sick feeling is somehow worse. To be given false hope is the unkindest cut of all. How South Africans hoped, prayed, and believed, even, that their team would beat the Australians at home this time. "They have no bowlers," became a common pre-tour refrain among those who knew no better, as well as those who should have. By the time the Aussies had taken control of the first Test, in Johannesburg the best the Wanderers crowd could come up with was, "Siddle is a wanker." They knew there was enough pitbullish mongrel in the stocky Victorian alone to disprove their theory, and they decided to get their retaliation in first.

They had nothing to say against Mitchell Johnson. They wouldn't dare. He surely bristled with enough aggression to turn around and target the crowd with his lethal left arm.

"Phil Hughes? Who the hell is Phil Hughes," one South African reporter bleated haplessly early in the tour, when told that the man from Macksville (population: 2658), a New South Wales hamlet so small the locals cite Coffs Harbour as the nearest point of urbanised reference, would be the victim at that day's press conference. Informed that Hughes had come primed with a first-class average of 50-something, the hack remained unimpressed. Now that Hughes has raised that mark to 62.40 and averages 87.50 after his first two Tests, we trust our man is suitably impressed. Or at least a mite more educated. He should know that that Marcus North bloke also isn't the worst.

It's hardly news that Australia invariably send quality debutants into the fray, who often perform beyond their few years and above their already considerable abilities. It has also been true that the hardest South Africans, who seemed able to out-guts all other opposition, melted like marshmallows in a microwave when the Aussies loomed.

Then came the first half of 2008-09, when the earth moved and nothing could ever be the same. Now the earth has moved back, and nothing has changed.

To add injury to insult, Smith, he who would not be moved by a mere shattered finger in Sydney, has been sidelined by, yup, a shattered finger. Worse, in the wake of that calamity, South Africa gave the impression of indecision. They picked Ashwell Prince as a straight swap for Smith as both captain and opening batsman. Less than 24 hours later, Jacques Kallis was the skipper.

Good sense prevailed in that Prince - the designated vice-captain before he was invalided out of the tour to Australia - would be allowed to concentrate on rediscovering his feet as a Test batsman. But that was lost on an increasingly cynical public. "That's just great," mused one observer at the passing of the leadership from Smith to Kallis. "We've exchanged one fat captain for another." A few months ago, Smith and everyone else who wore the Protea were undeniably phat.

Yes, non-South Africans, it really is that bad. It's as if Barack Obama himself padded up and boomed, "Yes! We! Can!" as he strode down the dressing-room stairs, then took the biggest, most stupid swish any of us had ever seen at the first ball he faced and fell on his stumps face first.

Oh, to be anywhere else now that Australia are here.