JOIN chief cricket writer Malcolm Conn for a live chat during the first hour of play in the crucial third day of the first Test.
Read Malcolm's analysis of last night's extraordinary series of events, then join his chat above from 7.30pm AEDT.
THE cricket world is now inhabited by flat-track bullies ... batsmen brought up on a glut of short-form cricket and easy Twenty20 money who are unwilling or unable to deal with the moving ball.
That 23 wickets can fall on a single day of Test cricket in this modern age of covered pitches and full-time professional players is an indictment on every batsman involved.
That Australia can collapse to 9-21 after almost making South Africa follow on in the second day of the first Test in Cape Town is utterly shameful.
How is it that multi-million dollar batsmen cannot register a double-figure score between them before tailenders Peter Siddle (12) and Nathan Lyon (14) dragged the score to 47?Most worrying of all, this is not an aberration but increasingly Australia's norm as soon as the ball starts to move consistently. The last two Ashes series highlight that.
It's the third time in little more than a year that Australia has been bowled out for under 100 once the ball started to deviate. The Aussies were dismissed for 88 against Pakistan at Headingley and 98 against England in Melbourne.
By contrast, Australia had been bowled out for under 100 just once in the preceding 25 years, against consistently better attacks, and that was on a raging turner in India.
Whatever hollow platitudes administrators and players may mumble about Test cricket being the pinnacle of the game, it is increasingly being treated with contempt.
This South Africa-Australia Test series is a beacon to the marginalisation of the once-sacred game.
Just two Tests were squeezed into unseasonally early November because the money-making Champions League, a glorified domestic Twenty20 competition of peripheral interest, is now an annual event set in stone.
Even so, there was still room on the South African tour for two Twenty20 matches and three spaced-out one-day games before jamming the Tests into a fortnight.
Test cricket is called Test cricket because it is the ultimate test of skill and courage.
Does anyone remember Steve Waugh's twin centuries against the moving ball in Manchester on the 1997 Ashes tour?
They were great innings of concentration, fortitude and resolve. One of the best match performances I have seen by a batsman in almost 30 years of covering international cricket.
Michael Clarke showed all those qualities during his epic first innings of 151 in the current match.
But now his greatest moment has been engulfed by his darkest day.
Of the 31 wickets to fall on the first two days of the Test, Clarke is the only player to pass 50.
This not only highlights the quality of Clarke's innings but the failure of every other batsman in the game to adapt to the conditions when it mattered.
But with Clarke falling for two in the second innings as the entire Australian team failed to manage a third of his score, that sparkling century will be forgotten among the wreckage of Australia's lowest score in 109 years.
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