Times Media
TELFORD VICE, Centurion
WEST Indies played ball for 15 of the deliveries bowled on the first day of the test series against SA at Centurion on Wednesday. Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers took superb care of the remaining 454.
They pulled the innings back from the brink of 57/3 and pushed it to 340/3 at stumps. Amla scored 133 not out, De Villiers made an undefeated 141, and they will resume their partnership this morning on 283 - SA’s highest for the fourth wicket against any opponents.
“I get tired of looking at this guy down the other end of the wicket,” De Villiers joked about his partner, who he said had helped him get through a long day.
“We tried to keep it light-hearted out there - quite a few little jokes. He is actually a really funny guy in the middle. And I love batting with a guy like that, who keeps it simple.”
After lunch, Amla and De Villiers hatched another party game - who could play the most audacious stroke?
De Villiers drove Sulieman Benn for four through a gap at cover that was barely big enough to accommodate a pizza box. Amla, also facing the left-arm spinner, found the space and the timing to scold a full delivery swiftly to the square leg ropes.
The closest West Indies came to separating them was four balls after lunch with SA on 98/3, when Kemar Roach rattled Amla’s off-stump without dislodging a bail.
Amla and De Villiers would have had a quiet chuckle at that. But so, said fast bowler Sheldon Cottrell, did the Windies: “We saw the funny aide of it - ‘oh damn’.”
Not, however, for long: “That (feeling) soon disappeared.”
So did the ball, often all the way to the boundary.
And to think Denesh Ramdin had won the toss and, under sweaty clouds, either inserted SA or refused to bat - your call. But the fact that, by then, the Windies had picked a spinner and SA had filled their quiver with quicks suggests the latter.
Having been given what should have been an advantage, the ineffective Jerome Taylor and the inconsistent Cottrell wasted the new ball and allowed Alviro Petersen and Elgar to raise 50 off 60 balls, 36 of those runs scored in boundaries.
But SA would not run away with the game quite so easily - Petersen, Elgar and Faf du Plessis were all removed in the space of 15 balls while the total remained stuck on 57.
“At 57/3 we were abusing Hashim for losing the toss, but you can never get carried away,” SA coach Russell Domingo said.
Roach straightened deliveries to Peterson and Du Plessis to have them caught at first slip and gully, and Elgar could have hammered a short, wide ball from Cottrell anywhere. Instead, he drilled it into gully’s hands.
Taylor never threatened and Cottrell, tall and slingy and equipped to make matters awkward for batsmen with his left arm sweeping through from a sloping angle, did not threaten often enough. Benn was tight and found bounce, but he also did not trouble batsmen consistently.
The exception was Roach, who remained tidy and testy in the face of SA’s superiority. Then, after tea, he injured an ankle while bowling his 16th over and left the field.
Unless Roach returns on Thursday, West Indies’ only chance of staying in the game will have gone with him.
“I’m very anxious to see him on the field in the morning,” Cottrell said.
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