Dog day afternoon wilts Elgar’s pomp and circumstance

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Galle

At 4.22pm yesterday, a stray dog that had wandered onto Galle’s outfield snuffled at a spot near the cover boundary and proceeded to dig a hole.

Just then, AB de Villiers speared a delivery square through the off side. For a moment, ball might have bitten dog. Happily, it sped past, followed by a fielder. Only once the boundary had been scored did the dog bother to look up.

“This hole will need to be much deeper,” it seemed to say with a dismissive glance over its shoulder, “if you are to bury Sri Lanka here.”

In the nine overs that remained, SA scored 22 runs and lost two wickets to reach stumps on 268/5. At tea, they had been 194/1. The dog would have been right.

Dean Elgar’s gutsy 103, the first test century by a SA opener in Sri Lanka, and Faf du Plessis’ gritty 80 set the visitors’ tails wagging. But they will indeed have to dig the hole a lot deeper to bury Sri Lanka.

“We would have loved to be one down or three down, but such is the nature of the beast that we’re five down,” Elgar said. “But we still have batsmen in the shed.”

Then, if SA’s quicks don’t get far on a pitch bespoke for spin, it will be up to Imran Tahir, JP Duminy and, yes, Elgar to do the business. “Pies get wickets as well,” Elgar said with a naughty gleam.

Elgar, whose silky square drive and a late cut played as deftly if he was putting a cherry on a cake, delivered an innings of more pomp and circumstance than Du Plessis.

The latter faced 51 balls before hitting his first boundary, took 29 deliveries to score another run and spent the next 29 balls on 19 not out. But, in the nine balls that followed him reaching 20, Du Plessis drilled two consecutive fours and a six.

Elgar never went more than 26 balls between boundaries, much less singles, and leapt from 40 to his half-century in four deliveries with a six and a four. Fifteen minutes before tea, he slammed a six down the ground to go to his hundred.

With that, he drew a finger across his top lip and smiled. In the dressingroom, Prasanna Agoram, SA’s stats man, reached for his razor.

“I don’t think people liked that moustache of his, so I told him that if I got a hundred in this test he must shave it off,” Elgar explained.

Agoram had the last laugh when SA’s team bus drove out of the ground while Elgar was still talking to the press. The centurion made it back to the hotel in an auxiliary team vehicle.

At times it seemed Elgar had more trouble with the heat than the bowlers. He spent time on his haunches at the non-striker’s end and found a way to save energy by signalling to the dressingroom for water as well as fresh gloves all in one elaborate sweep of a sweaty forearm.

He took just three singles off the last 23 balls of his innings, which ended with a weary slash outside the off-stump to Suranga Lakmal and a catch by wicketkeeper Dinesh Chandimal.

That brought Hashim Amla to the crease for his first innings as a test captain. He spent 37 minutes and 36 balls acclimatising, a task he seemed to have completed when he flicked Rangana Herath past the man at midwicket and to the boundary with a matador’s grace and precision.

Two balls later, Amla lifted an innocuous delivery straight to extra cover. Then Du Plessis fell to a sharp catch at short leg by Kaushal Silva and AB de Villiers played on to Suranga Lakmal.

Every dog day has its afternoon.