Alastair Cook: England still can’t put a whole series together

England win series but disappointed with final Test performance

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England have become the masters of the final Test muck-up. Their heavy defeat by 280 runs, in which their last seven wickets fell in 65 balls, made it the sixth time in the past seven series that they have lost the last match.

“I don’t know if it’s just one of those things,” said the England captain, Alastair Cook. “Certainly, the dead rubber issue is one I don’t mind having if we’ve just won the series but it just shows we’ve just still not managed to put a whole series together.

“I thought we’d have made a really big step forward if we’d played four good Test matches here. We played three and couldn’t quite manage to do it in the fourth. You hold your hands up and it’s not back to the drawing board but back to a lot of hard work.”

Cook, like everyone else, is aware that much of the hard work has to be done in the batting order. Four of the top five in the series, which England won 2-1 after their own crushing victories in the first and third Tests, had a distinctly moderate time of it, with only one half-century each. Cook did not duck the issue with regard to Alex Hales, Nick Compton and James Taylor. “I think at the end of the day results matter and your end column of runs [is] absolutely vital so to say they’ve totally convinced me would be wrong,” he said.

“But there have been flashes. Nick’s 85 in Durban was a very good innings. Halesy batted very well for 60 at Cape Town. And Titch [Taylor] got a good 70 in the first game so there’s been flashes there.

“Obviously, they’ll be disappointed with the overall amount of runs but they can be very proud of contributing to what will be a very famous win in 20 years’ time, beating South Africa away from home, especially as they were the No 1 side in the world.”

Nor did Cook spare wicketkeeper Jonny Bairstow, who missed seven chances in the series, six of them catches and a stumping. That is bound to affect a bowling side’s mood and Bairstow may have become accustomed to the Cook glare.

“Jonny has been outstanding with the bat in this series, he’s kind of come of age and proved he can bat at this level,” Cook said. “He knows he has a huge amount of work to do on his keeping, we can’t afford to keep putting down those chances that he put down in this series. But I remember a certain Matt Prior having a tough series in Sri Lanka. All he did was work and work and work and amazingly no one ever talked about his keeping.”

For South Africa it was a day of redemption and the possible advent of a new superstar. At the age of 20 years 246 days Kagiso Rabada completed match figures 13 for 144. “I focus on doing the basics right,” Rabada said. “If it gets me wickets it gets me wickets, I can only control the controllables. I don’t look at stats, whatever happens happens. The key is to do it for 15 years, not one game.”

Lest anyone thinks England are a busted flush after this disappointing defeat the assessment of AB de Villiers, the South Africa captain, may be worth having. He knew they had been beaten over six weeks by the better side.

“We were outplayed in the first two Tests, they are the team to beat in the next year or so,” he said. “They have a lot of good leaders out there, match-winners, the future looks bright for them.”