It is staggering how ruthless South Africa are at unearthing talent, and then at manufacturing replacements so effortlessly.I mean, after Rassie van der Dussen, they produced something even better in the shape of Breetzke. Breetzke! This guy averaging at above 60 in ODIs. He makes 150 on ODI debut, the highest score any debutant has ever made, then passes fifty in each of his first five innings, which nobody in the history of the format had managed. Fourteen innings, 822 runs, an average of 63.23, and the stand-in ODI captaincy already, at 27. At Lord's he took England's spinners apart on purpose and gave South Africa their first series win there since 1998. No shortage of talent in south Africa.

Australia basher😂? Ijaz Ahmed failed in 58% of his Test innings. Then Australia would arrive, and he turned into somebody else entirely. Against Australia, 1,085 runs at 47.13. Against everybody else, 2,230 at 34.31. Six of his 12 Test hundreds came against the single best team in the world, and he shares Pakistan's record for it with Javed Miandad. Faisalabad, 1988. Pakistan collapse to 25 for 4 against Australia and a 19-year-old walks out for his first Test hundred. He makes 122 and drags them to 316. Sydney, 1995. Craig McDermott, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, at or near their peaks, on a ground where Pakistan never win anything. Ijaz makes 137. Nobody else in the side reaches 40. Pakistan win the Test. Perth, 1999. His last Test century. Against Australia, again. In between all of it, 54 scores below 20 from 92 innings and 33 of them in single figures. He was dropped after the 1992 World Cup, but the same pattern runs through his one-day cricket. In the mid-1990s South Africa had the most feared ODI attack in the world, and Ijaz dismantled them in both hemispheres. In October 1994 at Rawalpindi he made 110 off 110 balls against Donald and Fanie de Villiers. Two months later at Kingsmead in Durban, chasing 207 on their own ground, he made 114 not out off 90 and won the match and the award. A strike rate of 126.66, in 1994, against Allan Donald, when 70 was considered a perfectly good one-day tempo. He remains Pakistan's leading run-scorer against South Africa. And in 1997 at Lahore he reached a hundred off 68 balls with nine sixes, finishing on 139 not out. Happy birthday, axeman.