'Mission accomplished' – Gibson hails all-round South Africa

"We did exactly what we set out to do," Gibson was quoted as saying in ESPNcricinfo. "We wanted to play four fast bowlers, and the way we played, the pitches suited four fast bowlers. The four fast bowlers did a fantastic job. Batsmen struggled for runs, but they still scored, we got two hundreds in the series, and all in all, mission accomplished."

South Africa closed the series with a 107-run win in the third Test on Monday, 14 January, as their bowlers took seven wickets in the morning session to bowl out Pakistan.

It is fair to say this was a series dominated by the bowlers. Duanne Olivier, the Player of the Series, picked up 24 wickets, while Kagiso Rabada (17), Dale Steyn (12) and Vernon Philander (6) combined with him to make for a potent pace attack. For the visitors, Mohammad Amir picked up 12 wickets, while Shaheen Shah Afridi had nine in two games and Faheem Ashraf took six in his only Test.

On tricky surfaces to bat, only two batsmen got hundreds, and given the situation, Gibson was all praise for their efforts.

"I keep saying to the batters [that] when the wickets are like this, you don't need to score 500," he explained. "If we get 262 in the first innings, with our four fast bowlers on a fast bouncy track that's a great score, because we know that we can knock a team over for under that, which we did.

"It's been tough for the batters. They might complain outside the dressing room, but inside the dressing room none of the batters are complaining about the pitches. We're just getting stuck in and trying to get as many runs as we can get to give our bowlers the chance to operate."

Speaking to the official broadcaster, he added, "Coming from the Caribbean, you grow up on fast bowling ... you come here and you have the quality of fast bowling that we've put out in this series, you feel you have to give those guys the conditions and the support to do what they've done in the series.

"To be fair to the guys in the dressing room, especially the batters, they've bought into what I've been saying. To score Test match runs has always been difficult, but we've been seen that in some of the pitches we've played on, as much as people have said how difficult they were, when you've applied yourself and you took a few blows, you got your reward.

"Faf [du Plessis] got a brilliant hundred in Cape Town and Quinton [de Kock] got a special hundred here. It's not like the wickets were minefields, you had to work a little bit harder to score runs, and when you did, what a good feeling it was."