Bavuma's nine-hour masterpiece is the art we risk losing in South Africa's Test purge

Have you read George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf? It might not sound like a grabby reference, or a killer hook for the algorithm. But it is a useful place to start when thinking about what the sport is up against.

Orwell wrote about Hitler's ideas at a time when the world did not yet know what Hitler was "all about", and then described, better than anyone before or since, the terrifying nature of the world Mein Kampf proposed: its utter boredom, "the eternal grey repetitions, same struggle, same triumph, same boot stamping on same face". And yes, you are probably thinking about T20 franchise cricket. It is fine. The mind goes where the mind goes.

Which makes it all the more striking that the greatest story of the sporting week, by an absolute mile, comes from the polar opposite place. It is Temba Bavuma's match-winning nine-hour hundred in the second Test against Australia in Gqeberha, a story so big and so personal that most people seem to have ignored it.

A captain always chasing legitimacy

Bavuma walked out to bat with the summer running away from him. South Africa had been thrashed in the first Test in Durban, and at 12 for two they faced one of the great bowling attacks. Bavuma has been a transformative Test captain, with 12 wins in 14 matches, four hundreds and a World Test Championship mace, all stretched over three broken years. Yet he is still chasing legitimacy and affirmation in a way that is unique to cricket and to his position in this sporting nation: the first black middle-order batter, and the first black captain.

Two days later he was last man out for 179 in a total of 425 for nine, sprinting off with a kind of light around him, waving his bat giddily, 36 years old, with his wife and child in the crowd. "The greatest moment of his sporting life," as Ronay puts it.

Poise, patience and a partnership

There were many parts to the innings. There was the survival period, with his endearing tic of gently jutting his chin at the bowler, mixed with deliciously clean whips, pushes and clumps. In Gqeberha he was all poise and measured severity. When he plays a cover drive he seems to lean at 45 degrees, knees bent, his whole body easing into the shot.

The game turned with a partnership of 106 with Marco Jansen before lunch on the third day, brilliant counterattacking Test cricket. It was also, in Ronay's telling, an amazing tableau: the gangling Jansen at one end, and at the other the "tiny, super-smart" captain. Bavuma reached his hundred by swivel-pulling Pat Cummins through midwicket, "holding the shot", a moment in which the batter feels what has happened a second before anyone else.

Born in the transition

Bavuma is a child of the transition period, born three months after Nelson Mandela left Victor Verster Prison. He grew up a township boy in Langa, playing in the street. Plucked out at 10 on a scholarship to one of South Africa's top schools, he struggled; ten is relatively late to start trying to become an elite batter. He is also the 10th shortest man ever to play Test cricket.

There was a slow-burn start to his career, with years of quota talk and "the weird dual burden of innate outsiderdom and suspicions of favour". Yet, as Ronay notes, Bavuma has never made a point of making a point. He has simply made it by being relentlessly himself.

The wider Test story

Ronay also praised the wider drama of the match: Steve Smith wearing a foam neck brace after whirling round to check whether an edge had carried, Marnus Labuschagne acting out his thoughts at the crease, and Anrich Nortje looking on "like the hand of fate from a deserted balcony". The series heads to Newlands for the decider, "an impossibly fine piece of narrative work".

But Ronay ends on a sharper note. In the first Test in Durban, as Australia wrapped up victory, the TV commentator praised the spirit of the contest and said it was "credit to the people of South Africa". The camera then panned back to show a completely empty stadium. It is a neat image of a format whose spectacle is being hollowed out, and a reminder of why moments like Bavuma's are worth defending.