Australia clawed its way back into the third Test, but big challenges await

It was, in the final analysis, close to the perfect day of Test cricket: ebbing, flowing, intriguing, with 10 wickets falling and 329 runs-worth of enterprising batting fulfilling Les Favell's trusty old criteria for an entertaining day on the hill.

There was a six-fer for Mitchell Starc, another bundle of tantalising, shot-filled knocks from South Africa's underappreciated batting stars and a pair of remarkable sequences in which Australia took 5-29 and 4-2. Both sides will, in some ways, feel they got the better of the other for telling periods.

The nagging doubt, after day one of the third and deciding Test, is how badly Australia's chances had been damaged before a ball had even been bowled. Not sufficiently recovered from his neck injury, Steve Smith withdrew. Not sufficiently superior to his colleagues in most facets of the game a week ago, Scott Boland was dropped for Nathan Lyon.

Then there was the toss. The minute Pat Cummins won it and elected to bowl first under sunny skies, on a perfect-looking pitch — not exactly a ringing endorsement of Australia's remade top six — it was hard to stop one's mind from wandering away from Newlands and back through time in search of precedents.

The obvious destinations were Edgbaston in 2005, the scene of Ricky Ponting's ill-fated decision to bowl first in that classic nailbiter, and Brisbane three years earlier, when poor old Nasser Hussain got it even more horribly wrong.

By lunch at Cape Town, Cummins's Australians were fighting an unwelcome omen: South Africa's domineering 0-140, obtained with a procession of boundaries off the most credentialed bowling attack in world cricket, comfortably shaded both England's 1-132 at Edgbaston in '05 and Australia's 1-125 in Brisbane in '02. Was Cummins coming similarly a cropper?

Cricket history tends to write inconvenient facts out of these stories. Few remember that in the immediate aftermath of Nasser's nightmare, for instance, Australian skipper Steve Waugh admitted he probably would have bowled first, too, albeit with a caveat. "The significance of the toss is overrated," Waugh explained. "Whatever you do first, you've got to do it well."

To say Australia didn't bowl or field well in the first session of this crunch game is an understatement. The vaunted quicks misfired early. To staunch the bleeding, Lyon had to be deployed in just the 11th over. Normally apt to suffocate opponents with sharp fielding, tight lines and partnership bowling, Australia managed only two maidens in the first 25 overs.

Proteas opener Marques Ackerman, who'd never batted at the top of the order in first-class cricket until his Test debut last week, attacked the bowling like prime David Warner, clubbing 12 fours and two sixes in his run-a-ball, thrill-a-minute 95. With Aiden Markram, he raced to South Africa's first 150-run opening stand in nearly a decade.

Of particular concern for Australia was the captain's bowling performance, the tone of which was set in his first over when Markram freed his arms, swivelled into position as though the ball was travelling in slow motion and cross-batted Cummins over the fence at cow corner. Cummins would finish the day with 0-73 from 18 overs, having extracted almost nothing from the pitch he'd so liked the look of in the morning. South Africa played him as though intent on showing a competitive disrespect.

But at first, slowly, and then in two manic bursts, Australia did pull things out of the fire somewhat from their dismal early position.

Lyon, whom Ackerman had taken a particular liking to, kept his head amid the onslaught and had the left-hander stumped, later roaring back into the game at a critical juncture and sneaking one past Temba Bavuma to bowl the Proteas skipper for a duck. Australia stemmed the flow of easy runs — from 5.18 an over in the first session, down to 3.11 in the second.

Reprieved on 39 when Travis Head dropped a sitter at short cover, Markram had doubled his score but looked set for even bigger things when he fell into a trap set by Hazlewood to be caught on the fine leg boundary. Matthew Breetzke was too casual against Cooper Connolly's spin, the left-armer reviewed an LBW shout cannily to claim his first Test wicket.

In the above-mentioned half-hour of head loss, South Africa lost 3-13 and squandered its momentum. Immediately after tea, the Proteas were even more culpable for failing to resist what appeared to be a very obvious temptation: an outer ring of catchers scattered around the boundary from fine leg to deep mid-wicket and Starc banging it in short.

David Bedingham, who'd reached 50 without much trouble, was the first to fall for it, hooking recklessly to be cleverly caught on the fine leg rope by Hazlewood. Two balls later, Wiaan Mulder tried an equally daft hook and feathered an edge to Carey behind the stumps.

If South Africa is destined to win this match and with it the series — and unfortunately for Australia, there is an air of destiny about that result at the moment — perhaps the Proteas' 97-run seventh-wicket partnership will be looked back on as a critical period. Ryan Rickelton, out of form with the bat until that point, contributed a patient 42 as all-rounder Marco Jensen battered a typically confident half-century.

The latter fun, which threatened to take the game back away from Australia entirely, ended when Starc took the second new ball. Calling it a clinical demolition of the tail would undersell him: with 4-2 in the space of seven ruthlessly full and straight deliveries, the Australian paceman took his 20th Test five-wicket haul and finished with 6-72 from 16.3 overs.

Once the day's surges of chaos were done with, a comment by Cummins before play seemed worth revisiting. Boland's omission, the Australian captain claimed, was that great cliché of cricket team selection: "a good problem to have".

But is it? Perhaps Cummins was implying something else, that Australia's other selection problems — replacing three of its top-six batters with players assuredly not in the same class as Boland — are bad ones to have. Ones that may shape this game more than what happened on day one.

Which brings us to another of cricket's enduring clichés: don't judge a pitch until both teams have batted on it.