A cricket rivalry is a curious thing, a shifting, self-contained world governed and held together by an internal logic — and yet it's full of those delightful little paradoxes that demand engagement and enable understanding.
This is perhaps best appreciated in comparison. Despite the loss of accuracy when generalising, this much can be ventured: India has had Australia's number since 2001, Australia has had South Africa's number for longer than that, and South Africa, in turn, has had India's since readmission in 1991.
Where Australia has stirred India into playing brave, evocative cricket, both at home and away, South Africa has frequently had the opposite effect on India, even in India to a considerable degree, but most plainly in South Africa.
In India's worst displays abroad, certain trends repeat. It struggles to excise the opposition's lower-order often after having made early incisions with the new ball; the batsmen, for all their greatness, are beset by the canker of negativity; the fielding splits like spoilt milk.
Although India has addressed these concerns on its way to becoming the world's best Test side, building a magnificent away record in the process, South Africa has retained its facility for opening seemingly healed wounds. Even after India had finally won its first Test in South Africa in 2006-07, after three barren tours, South Africa swiftly exposed the old vulnerabilities to swing the series.
Significant tour
And so while South Africa isn't India's ‘Final Frontier' — despite matching Australia in Australia, it is yet to win a series there — the tour is its most significant engagement as the No. 1 ranked team.
The six-week enterprise will accommodate a Twenty20 International and five One-Day Internationals later in its schedule, but it's the three Tests that are most keenly awaited.
South Africa has been formidable at home — and not just against India. Only Australia (four times) and England (once) have got the better of South Africa in 31 Test series since it returned to international cricket. Only once in those 31 home series has South Africa failed to win at least one Test.
Cricket has a distinctive tenor in each land: the sonorities of the game, the sounds of its essential rhythms as conveyed by modern-day broadcast, offer a feel for how it's played in different places — the crisp sparkle that emanates from Australia, or the sense of well-worn comfort that is common from many venues in England, for instance.
The timbre of cricket in South Africa has a sombre resonance, “a continued vibration that … would hang in the air and dwell on the ear,” as Joseph Conrad wrote of Africa in another context. It's the sound of a war of attrition, which is how Rahul Dravid described playing South Africa, the sound of a struggle to the end.
As Dravid noted, India will need to stay with South Africa through the course of a Test match, remaining committed to positive cricket. When the opportunities present themselves — as they invariably do in South Africa, where the bounce offers every department something to work with — India will need to capitalise.
Looking back
M.S. Dhoni's side needs look no further than how India, then under Dravid, registered its first win on South African soil. It's the template, in fact, of many of India's famous away wins since the turn of the millennium, the batsmen doing better than their counterparts in difficult conditions, and the bowlers bowling with greater penetration because of the increased assistance.
That win, in Johannesburg in December 2006, was made possible by defiant knocks from Dravid himself, Sachin Tendulkar, and Sourav Ganguly in the first-innings, and a mini-blitz from Virender Sehwag and a valuable 73 from V.V.S. Laxman in the second.
But the game-breaker was Sreesanth. Zaheer Khan complemented Sreesanth's match-haul of eight wickets with five of his own. Anil Kumble took five as well. Encouragingly for India, many of the cast remain. In several ways, this is actually a better Indian team; certainly, it's a team more at peace with itself than the one in 2006-07.
And in Gary Kirsten, who the players credit for creating the atmosphere that made possible this harmony, Paddy Upton, and Eric Simons, India has coaching staff that knows South Africa intimately.
In a contest between closely-matched teams, that isn't an insubstantial edge.
