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DUNEDIN. — The job of the crowd at a sporting event is to create the best possible atmosphere for their team.

They need to be noisy in their support of the home team, nicely nasty when the opposition are around and never short of a contribution to the sporting spectacle in front of them. Dunedin’s university crowd got that exactly right, especially when it came to Morne Morkel, who had a cunning plan to win them over.

“The best way to get them on your side for the rest of the day is to do something funny and I thought I will join the crowd and have a down-down,” Morkel said, referring to his antics on the third afternoon when the students were sculling their beers on the embankment and a thirsty Morkel suspected if he wanted to quench his thirst, he would have to copy their methods.

“I knew if I went to the cooler box, they were going to shout ‘down down’. It has happened to me before, in Australia,” Morkel said.

“After that Faf came to me and he wanted me to bowl another over but I was too bloated. So I said, ‘Faf, you need to give me half an hour here.’”

Luckily for Morkel, a full stomach — and not his bad back — was the only thing that kept him from bowling at that point as he confirmed his return to the Test cricket, after 14 months out of the side.

Morkel had not been part of the Test XI since January 2016, had not played an international match since June last year and had been nursing a bulging disc in his back since.

During his rehabilitation, he had played just one full first-class game and coming into this Test series, the only game time he had was two List A matches.

“I was more nervous that I don’t pull up [a back strain]. That’s the last thing you want, especially when you are playing three seam bowlers. I was a little bit nervous because I hadn’t been in the field for longer than 50 overs. In the back of my mind it was going to be a real test going for more 20 overs with the ball and 100 overs in the field,” Morkel said. “One of my biggest worries was that in Dunedin I knew it was going to be cold, so I was wondering if my muscles would recover. There were a lot of ifs and buts.”

In total, Morkel spent 102 overs in the field and bowled 24 overs. Results aside, just to have put in that amount of time is reason enough for Morkel to declare his comeback a success. “For me to break that mental barrier was quite pleasing.and now I can put those things to rest and just focus on cricket,” he said. “All those demons that were on my mind, I managed to control it and get through it. I have that peace of mind that I can play Test matches again.”

Over the last few months, Morkel has received some medical opinion that his injury would end his career. “In the back of my mind, I didn’t believe it,” he said. — Cricinfo.