Roelof van der Merwe (Gallo Images)

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Comment: Rob Houwing, Sport24 chief writer

Cape Town – Call it confirmed, I’d say: South Africa’s finest cricketing summer since their return from isolation.

Indeed, 2008/09 should go down as the country’s second most luminary ever, playing second fiddle only to the immortal 4-0 Test series whitewash of Australia in 1969/70, not long before the door shut firmly on them for more than two decades.

Whatever happens in the fifth and final one-day international against the present Aussies at the Wanderers on Friday, the series is quite handsomely sealed after near-ruthless events in Port Elizabeth on Sunday which saw Graeme Smith and company seize an unassailable 3-1 lead and strengthen their foothold at the top of the ICC ODI rankings.

While traditionalists would consider it odious to lump the different formats (Tests, ODIs and Twenty20 internationals) together, if you want to put things in simple terms then the Proteas have won the marathon, back-to-back combat against their fiercest rivals this summer – stretching back to mid-December and the first Test match in Perth – 12-7 as things stand, with a dead-rubber ODI game to play at the Bullring.

And if you had told the average South African cricket enthusiast upfront that that would be roughly the outcome of almost five months of blood and sweat against a generally nemesis nation, he or she would have banked it with a whoop and a holler.

Cherry on top, naturally, was the Proteas crossing a momentous bridge by winning a Test series Down Under for the first time.

Yet we should pause for a minute and give due credit to Ricky Ponting’s troops at one of the most transitional junctures of their history: they did achieve a very key objective in retaining the Test Championship mace with a gutsy and frankly comprehensive 2-1 return series win, against smart-money sentiment, on our turf.

So if the Australian five-day beast was supposedly a corpse-in-waiting, it roared out of its corner in South Africa with an astonishingly vibrant pulse and will doubtless stabilise yet further.

But the Australian one-day arsenal, by contrast, must be considered to be in something not far off a shambles right now, and South Africa’s hold on global ODI bragging rights is a worthy one.

There is a wonderful balance in the purring Proteas machine between youth and experience, as evidenced on Sunday when greenhorn left-arm spinner Roelof van der Merwe again came to the party after a runaway start to the Aussie pursuit of a formidable 318 for victory, and the day’s only century came from 35-year-old Herschelle Gibbs for South Africa.

It removed a monkey from the ever-popular Gibbs’s back because it was his first three-figure knock in 20 ODI innings, even if he has been striking the ball pretty sweetly for lesser returns for several weeks since his “checkout” from a rehab facility.

This larger-than-life -- yet simultaneously strangely complex, too -- fellow has a fairly well-subscribed school of knockers to go with his hordes of enduring admirers, but this performance, not to mention his unfailing quality in the field, goes a long way to extending his visa for a likely swansong at the next World Cup.

With four of the five matches done and dusted, two other seasoned Proteas are featuring strongly in the batting averages: AB de Villiers’s stands at 67.33 while Mark Boucher’s brisk “finishing” qualities are reflected in an average of 57 and excellent strike rate of 123.91.

The Aussies pinned their bowling hopes at St George’s Park mostly on a four-pronged pace attack but they went for six an over, virtually to a man, with Nathan Bracken again a mysteriously pale shadow of the run-choker we once knew so well.

In a 10-over stint between them on a slow track, Aussie spinners Nathan Hauritz and Michael Clarke conceded 73 runs without a scalp, while the SA slow-bowling maestros Van der Merwe and Johan Botha confidently accounted for 20 overs at a collective cost of only 94 runs in a high-scoring game and an important four wickets.

“South Africa have outplayed us in all facets in this series,” Ponting acknowledged, in what amounted to as glowing a tribute for the Proteas’ ODI prowess as they might ever hope to hear.

Mind you, he said something not dissimilar in the 4-1 reverse in Australia; that is how rampant these men in green have been, and 4-1 all over again looks seriously on the cards, you have to say …