How to score big runs in Sri Lanka? Depends ...

TMG Digital

TEFORD VICE in Lisbon

EIGHT batsmen have scored Test centuries for South Africa in Sri Lanka, and their names comprise as varied a list of the dogged and the dashing as can be compiled.

From Dean Elgar to Daryll Cullinan, Jonty Rhodes to Jacques Rudolph, Hashim Amla to Lance Klusener, and Hansie Cronje to JP Duminy — they’ve all been there, done that, and raised a bat to claim their applause.

Good luck plotting a pattern through that lot, a task only made more difficult by the fact that no-one besides Rhodes and Elgar has faced fewer than 200 balls in their centurion efforts: Rhodes 107 for his 101 not out in Moratuwa in August 1993, Elgar 187 for his 103 in Galle in July 2014.

Elgar? He of the chronic, and often much needed, stodgy approach?

Yes, that Elgar, who never faced more than 26 deliveries between boundaries in that innings, went from 40 to 50 in four deliveries — one hit for six, another for four — and reached his ton with a straight six.

The master-blasting Klusener? He spent 219 balls on his 118 not out in Kandy in July 2000.

Amla needed 382 deliveries to make an undefeated 139 in Colombo in 2014 — the most faced by a South African in a Test innings on the Asian island, but also his team’s highest score there.

Only Cullinan has twice reached a hundred for South Africa in Sri Lanka: 102 in Colombo in 1993 and 114 not out in Galle in 2000.

All of which means there is no surefire formula for how to score big in Sri Lanka, where pitches tend to offer fast bowlers even less than in India and the heat and humidity tends to be more sapping than anywhere else in the game.

The most successful non-subcontinental batsmen in Sri Lanka are Alastair Cook, Stephen Fleming and Brian Lara, who have scored three, two and five centuries.

The only point of connection between them is that all three bat left-handed, but they do offer hope for those unfamiliar with the conditions.

Cook has scored more runs in Sri Lanka than Virender Sehwag or Mohammad Azharuddin did, albeit from more innings, while Fleming had more than Azhar Ali, and Lara was ahead of Sourav Ganguly and Misbah-ul-Haq — and Fleming and Lara had fewer trips to the crease than their rivals.

South Africa could do with a few additions to their Sri Lanka batting honour role in the series of two Tests which starts in Galle on July 12.

Like all teams, Faf du Plessis’ side is a combination of the dashing and the dogged. But the balance would seem to tilted towards the latter, what with Du Plessis, Amla, Elgar and Temba Bavuma likely to share a line-up with the more attacking Aiden Markram and Quinton de Kock.

Fine players, all. Which matters more than anything — in Sri Lanka as much as anywhere else.