It’s good to be here in Cape Town, because we were very disappointed by the display in Durban. I had a bad feeling as soon as we got to the ground and saw there was no tandoori gazelle left for breakfast. Preparation is so vital for top-level sport, and nowhere more so than in the dining room. I had to make do with a few meagre plates of creamed gnu dupiaza and it upset my routine pretty badly.

I said to AB in the first innings there: “Look, none of that fancy running about business, I’ve overdone it on the warthog vol-au-vents at lunch and I’m in stand-and-deliver mode here.” But you can’t talk to young AB – once he sees a moving ball of any kind, he just starts running around like an excitable puppy. I understand as a child he saw a puppy playing with a ball and became terribly confused as to why it was furrier than he was. It affected him quite badly: he’s a magnificent all-round athlete but for some years he would only play sports involving dogs but not a ball. He was one of the most highly rated greyhounds in the country at under-13 level.

Of course, everything changed in the early 90s. A quota system was introduced and there were no longer the opportunities for white guys to compete in professional greyhound racing. Obviously, this was absolutely the right thing for South Africa, but you have to feel for guys who were turning into very promising canine athletes, such as AB, who found their route into the Greyhound Derby blocked by politics. Only then did he take up cricket, and of course he’s done brilliantly, but sometimes something slips out of gear inside his brain and he thinks he’s chasing an electric rabbit around a dirt track with fat men cheering and frankly all bets are off.

Other than the unpleasantness with the buffet and the run out, the other big downer of the Test was the behaviour of Jonathan Trott. Frankly I do not know where he learned to use gamesmanship like that – it certainly wasn’t in South Africa. Well, actually it probably was. But the point remains, all this taking guard, scratching about for hours, it’s really cheating the fans of what they want to see: Jacques blocking out a maiden, me chewing gum or muttering something hurtful in Afrikaans about an opponent’s mother, Ashwell shaking his head sadly as he tries to remember what that wooden handled thing is for.

Captaincy takes a lot out of you, and I needed to wind down after the game, so I spent the evening with my girlfriend, the biltong model Fruiti De Kock.

I said I’d had a hard few days, she said: “I’ll tell you what a hard day is, I’ve just done a swimsuit issue for Boerewors Monthly where I had to stand on a beach all day wearing nothing but a few strategically placed bits of dried meat.”

Apparently Jacques got wind of it – literally, he has an incredible sense of smell for a big man – and hightailed it down there to see if he could pick up any leftovers. Obviously I can’t prove it, but I’m 95 percent certain that he left a straight one in the second dig thanks to the siren call of the sausage.

It’s incredible, though, the opportunities in the New South Africa, especially if you are a swimwear model and look good in smoked meat. I think Stuart Broad would like it here very much – I understand his dad came over to play a bit in the old days, which is surely just as strong a claim as Pietersen or Trott has on being English. I wonder if we can flip him in time for the rest of the series?

By Alan Tyers