South Africa won the Fourth Test Match at Johannesburg comprehensively but one has is to view the result from an overall perspective England has been the real winner in this series. The tour began with the T20 series which was tied followed with the one day series which was won by England. With the Test Series being tied one has to admit that England have been the overall winners on the tour.
To begin with England have one of the weakest teams in world cricket. England do not have any world class player and the player closest to being termed world class is Kevin Pietersen who has not done anything specatacular prior to this series. Infact England could never ever boast of having had a great team at any point of time during the the last two decades or so except for a brief while under Michael Vaughan's captaincy. Even under Vaughan's captaincy England failed to beat top teams like Australia and India except for that historic Ashes triumph in 2005 inspired by Andrew Flintoff. With the retirements of Micheal Vaughan and Andrew Flintoff from Tests, this England team is one of the weakest ever and were expected to be thrashed by South Africa in all forms of the game given the fact that South Africans were rated very highly.
South Africa have only themselves to blame as they proved yet again they are chokers. Earlier South Africa were termed chokers because their batting collapsed under pressure and this time around they hit a new low as even their bowling wilted under pressure setting new standards in choking. Not only South African batsmen, batsmen all over the world in general can be pardoned for choking under pressure because batting though appears easy is one of the difficult things because they know it takes only one delivery aided by eleven fielders to get them out and even a mere lapse in concentration is enough to get a batsmen out. Another factor is batsmen really come under crowd pressure whether it is home crowd or away crowd. The pressure from home crowd comes in the form of expectations and the pressure from away crowd comes in the form of distraction.
However as a fielding side there is nothing more inspiring than playing in front of a home crowd and South Africa had a golden opportunity to finish of matches in front of home crowd. South Africa could not have asked for anything better as they need just a wicket in three overs each in First Test to go 1-0 ahead in series and in Third Test to level the series and yet they failed with the crowd rooting for them.
On many occassions though for shorter periods of time, South Africans have been ranked number one team in the world and they could possibily become number one in the world again but in reality they cannot claim to be number one if they cannot handle pressure.