World Cup pits SA bowlers against Indian batsmen

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Melbourne

FORMER test opening batsman Morne Morkel squinted hard into the high noon sunlight at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Friday and focused on the tangle of torqued ambition steaming towards him.

The bowler duly delivered, and Morkel - whose claim to fame as a batsman will always be opening the innings with Neil McKenzie in the third test in Sydney in January, 2009, when Graeme Smith was injured - cracked him through the covers crisply.

Or he would have had the nets not snared the ball with an apologetic hiss. With SA’s World Cup match against India on Saturday looming ever larger, Morkel was taking his preparation utterly seriously.

In the next net, Vernon Philander took throwdowns from Gary Kirsten. Philander pulled meatily - again, and again, and again. Then he played a delicate ramp shot - again, and again, and again.

To Philander’s right, Kyle Abbott launched one unfortunate net bowler after the other straight as an arrow over his head.

Incongruous as the scene was, it captured the kernel of Saturday’s contest: SA’s fast bowlers versus India’s batsmen.

Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan, Virat Kohli, Suresh Raina, MS Dhoni and Ravindra Jadeja comprise a potent top six. But Morkel, Philander and Dale Steyn are three bowlers even those batsmen would prefer not to have to deal with.

SA’s three pace prongs all have better averages than Umesh Yadav, Mohammed Shami and Mohit Sharma - the frontline seamers in India’s match against Pakistan in Adelaide last Sunday. The SA trio have economy rates under five runs to the over and only Steyn’s strike rate is above 30. Two of their Indian counterparts lug strike rates above 40, and one - Shami - is on his way to conceding a run-a-ball.

So, put Yadav, Shami and Sharma up against Hashim Amla, Quinton de Kock, Faf du Plessis, AB de Villiers, David Miller and JP Duminy, and it is difficult to imagine SA coming off second best.

What about spin? Although Shane Warne is the top wicket-taker in one-day internationals at the MCG with 46 scalps, of the top 20 bowling performances here only two belong to spinners. The better of them, Brad Hogg’s 5/32 against West Indies in January, 2005, is 14th on that list. Warne himself never took a five-wicket haul at the MCG.

There is, in fact, an argument to be made for picking Abbott ahead of Imran Tahir, leaving most of the slow bowling to Duminy, and filling in the gaps with Du Plessis’ leg spin, and Farhaan Behardien’s and even De Villiers’ medium pace.

But this is SA’s biggest game of the group stage, and the need to put their A team on the park must outweigh anything else - including tailoring their combination to make the most of the conditions. That would mean retaining the XI who overcame Zimbabwe on a sticky pitch in Hamilton last Sunday.

Which brings us dangerously close to thinking too much: something SA have gone out of their way to avoid this week. They have scaled back their media commitments to a minimum, probably to avoid putting up with the manic Indian press, and when they have had to answer questions they have tried to take the focus off what might be going on in their heads.

Or, as Russell Domingo said when he was asked why SA had not travelled with a psychologist, “If you get your skills right, you can mentally get yourself into a good space to execute under pressure.

“And not the other way round - you can’t be mentally strong but have bad skills. We’ve worked very hard on our skills.”

On Friday, on television channel eNCA, sport psychologist Ken Jennings looked at that equation from the other end: “Maybe they’ve tried to downplay the mental side because there has been so much emphasis on it in the past.”

SA have never won a World Cup, but they have won all three of the matches they have played against India in the tournament.

However, as SA and India and everyone else knows, there is always a first time.