SA not in a spin over tweakers going nowhere slowly

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Galle

Minutes after SA completed their victory over Sri Lanka in the first test in Galle on Sunday, the parched pitch was given what it had cried out for for the best part of a week: water.

Plumes of the wet stuff arched through the air from the sprinklers and seemed to disappear straight into the strip of bone-coloured earth that groundstaff had denied a drop for the past five days.

Their obsession with keeping the pitch as dry as the Karoo included insulating the surface from any chance of coming into contact with overnight dew by laying foam rubber between the pitch and the covers in the evening.

Fifteen minutes before the only interruption for rain in the match, scores of groundstaff had manned the covers on both sides of the boundary. As soon as the umpires drew the stumps when the shower duly swept in from the Indian Ocean, not 300m away, they sped onto the ground and had the pitch safely under wraps almost before the last players had left the field for a shower. And after all that play was held up for eight minutes.

That would seem a lot of fuss about not much. Perhaps not. Between them, left-arm spinner Rangana Herath and off-spinner Dilruwan Perera bowled 71.35% of all the overs Sri Lanka sent down in the match.

SA had three spinners - Imran Tahir, JP Duminy and Dean Elgar - in the mix, but they shouldered only 44.23% of the workload. Herath alone bowled more overs in SA’s two innings, 82, than all three of the visitors’ slow men: 78.

So, there can be no faulting the groundstaff’s determination to give the home side the driest, most spin-friendly pitch they could manage.

But that did not negate SA’s dominant fast bowlers. Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel claimed 16 of the 20 wickets on offer. How much of their success can be put down to Vernon Philander being found guilty of ball-tampering after the third day’s play cannot be known, but cricket has a way of administering its own justice: Philander went wicketless in 26 overs in which he conceded 65 runs and looked as flat as the pitch.

The lesson is that good bowlers remain good bowlers, irrespective of conditions. But SA will be concerned at the lack of penetration achieved by their tweaking trio. They kept their collective economy rate down to a respectable 3.21 - their Sri Lankan counterparts’ was 3.01 - but took just four wickets to the Lankans’ 11.

Imran Tahir, in particular, was listless for most of the match. Gone was the marauder who took five wickets before lunch on the first morning against Pakistan in Dubai in October. In his place, an uncertain bowler who sacrificed most of his attacking edge by firing in his deliveries too quickly and too full.

Tahir’s troubles were part of the overarching question: why did it seem as if SA’s spinners were going nowhere slowly in Galle despite the favourable conditions?

“We always talk about spinners trying to be consistent in the areas that they bowl,” SA’s spin consultant, Claude Henderson, said. “That doesn’t mean how many runs they go for but how many singles they go for in an over, which Imran did really well on Sunday.

“The other message I’ve had for him is that he mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that because we are in Sri Lanka and the wickets are dry and the spinners come into play, he must take five wickets. It’s about building the pressure. Wickets are a bonus.”

Henderson will have to repeat that mantra many times before and during the second test, which starts on Thursday.

The Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo, where the game will be played, is the flattest pitch in the country.