South Africa's defeat in Christchurch is the biggest of the 75 innings defeats suffered by any Test team in the past 10 years. ©Getty
Is a long, dark cloud not of the team's making and out of their control hanging over South Africa in New Zealand? Are they victims of draconian coronavirus rules, out of touch administrators, processes that can seem at odds with what they are trying to achieve on the field, and a public poisoned by their own unresolved anger at the state of their wider reality? Are they, in a word, unloved?
"I don't think so, no," Dean Elgar told an online press conference on Saturday when he was asked whether issues further afield had breached the boundary. "It's definitely not foreign conditions for us with regards to what's been happening off the field. I don't see that as an excuse. As a group we've worked through that already."
Elgar spoke with the debris of his team's
