After four days of this truncated Test series, the easiest conclusion to arrive at is that it will be decided by the team whose batsmen have the least mental fortitude.

In Cape Town that team was Australia, though they had to plumb some serious depths to 'win' that particular battle, but now South Africa have laid down the marker for the second Test with a first innings that, in several periods, wouldn't have looked out of place in a limited overs match.

Which was telling, because the majority of the dismissals came through strokes that suggested the batsmen had forgotten this is a five-day game.

Graeme Smith will be frustrated with the fact that he felt for the ball that got him out, but both he and Jacques Rudolph could be forgiven for nicking off early on. It happens in South African conditions.

But Jacques Kallis, Hashim Amla, Ashwell Prince, AB de Villiers and Mark Boucher were all guilty of not putting a high enough price on their wickets, with Prince especially culpable at the end of a curious innings.

Exactly why he felt it was necessary to take on Nathan Lyon when South Africa were already scoring at four runs per over in the innings is unclear. He hadn't scored a run in 13 deliveries, but usually he is the most patient batsman in South Africa's line-up, always demanding that the bowlers come to him if they want his wicket.

Kallis' knock was even more bizarre, and almost suggested that he is on a crusade to change his legacy from the sturdy rock on which South Africa based so many innings to some sort of sporty batsman who bullied attacks into submission in the middle order.

Having reinvented his game to fit the game's most modern format, Twenty20, he now seems adamant that this new side of him must be hauled into the Test arena as well.

That is not to say his ability to be aggressive should be wasted, merely that he perhaps hasn't quite learned how to balance it with the side of his game which made him into one of cricket's finest allrounders.

Students of the game in 20 years might look back on this series - or at least the first four days of it, things may yet change - and reason that the two factors which bore the most influence on the low scores were early-season pitches and the eagerness of both sides to gain results in a short series. After all, even when wickets have been tumbling, the batsmen have kept looking for runs which suggests a positive outlook.

Yet this impatience is exactly why wickets have cost just 22 runs apiece in the first five innings of the series - on pitches which have offered something to the bowlers on a fairly consistent basis, the batsmen have rarely been willing to dig in and ride it out.

The overall scoring rate thus far is 3.88 per over, which clearly shows that the pitches haven't been minefields. Instead they've given a fair contest between bat and ball, and it's the batsmen who haven't been up to the task. The fact that not one batsman was hit on the body during that crazy afternoon in Cape Town was proof enough that the pitch was not to blame for 12 wickets going down in a session.

South Africa can point to their lack of preparation, and the fact that many of their batsmen hadn't even played a four-day match prior to the first Test, as some sort of excuse.

And they can thank their lucky stars that they've come up against an Australian side whose series win in Sri Lanka is saying ever more about the dishevelled and increasingly desperate state of Sri Lanka than it does about themselves.

Nevertheless South Africa's collapse on Thursday handed Australia the perfect opportunity to show that they're not as gutless as the first Test suggested. They just need their batsmen to show more mental steel than we've seen so far, with South Africa's second innings at Newlands the only exception.