Local is lekker for Van Zyl at Centurion

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Centurion

ALONG with earnest opinions on craft beer and discussions on how to minimise carbon footprints, two words not heard in the stands at Centurion are: “Lekker Province!”

But there they hung in the thin air of this starkly concrete place on Thursday having emerged from the thick throat of a large man wearing an even larger T-shirt and a snor that was bigger than anything else about him, particularly a cloth hat several sizes too small.

By the look of him, he could have been thinking with his stomach instead of his head - lunch on the second day of the first test between SA and West Indies was only three balls away.

But, no. Stiaan van Zyl had driven one of Jermaine Blackwood’s flaccid off-breaks into the covers for a single to reach 50 on debut.

Since his inclusion in SA’s test squad in July, the Cobras No. 3 had toiled through umpteen training sessions and sat through too many team meetings. He had endured the humidity of Galle, the heat of Colombo and the dry dust of Harare - where he watched from a distance as Dane Piedt, another lekker Province kid, was given his chance and took it.

But Van Zyl was all dressed up in test whites with no place to go except the dressingroom, from where he watched who knows how many of the 6889 deliveries that were bowled in SA’s three tests in Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.

Then, on Wednesday’s murky morning, JP Duminy, whose injured knee had created a vacancy in the batting department, handed Van Zyl his test cap.

At last, his opportunity was to hand. But first he had to get to the crease. When SA were reduced to 57/3, that seemed imminent. Not so fast: Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers batted for 83.2 overs.

Only then was Van Zyl summoned - and almost summarily dismissed when he dabbed awkwardly at the first ball he faced and sent it just short of leg slip. On two, he was dropped.

A scratchy start smoothed into sensible batting and Van Zyl’s confidence grew in step with his stature. Then, with a crisp cut past point, he joined Kepler Wessels, Andrew Hudson, Alviro Petersen, Jacques Rudolph and Faf du Plessis as the only South Africans to score a century on debut. Wessels did so for Australia.

In the stands, a large man with a big heart was happy. As they say in these parts, lekker Province.