“Hit him again!” – a Wanderers spectator as Zak Crawley prepared to face his first delivery after being felled by a bouncer to the head from Anrich Nortjé.
TELFORD VICE at The Wanderers
DROPS dripped. That’s a sentence, complete and perfect, from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It was just as true about the Wanderers on Friday. Drops started dripping, in their millions, late on Thursday night and continued unabated until the afternoon. Drops also dripped, in singles, from the pressbox ceiling around the time of the scheduled 10am start. A bucket placed beneath caught them apologetically. You might say it was a sorry sight all round. And you might also have made a decent dent in reading War and Peace as the dreary nothingness of the morning wore on towards a lost day.
But, at 1.20pm, Vernon Philander stood at the top of his mark at the Golf Course End on one of cricket’s fastest drying outfields, Zak Crawley awaited him, and away we went. And for the best part of the next three hours not a lot happened. For South Africa, anyway. The closest they came to putting anything like a dent in England’s batting was in the third over before tea, when Crawley missed a pull and Anrich Nortjé dinged him on the helmet with a bouncer timed at 149 kilometres per hour. Play was held up for eight minutes while Crawley was medically assessed and tried several replacement helmets on for size before being allowed to continue. When he did, up went a cry from the country’s most raucous crowd: “Hit him again!” That followed Dom Sibley winning a reprieve after being given out caught behind to a legside delivery from Beuran Hendricks that flicked a pad, and surviving being caught in the gully because Philander had bowled a no-ball.
Aside from those minor spikes the Richter scale readout of the first half of Friday’s play was a serenely level line. On the meanest junkyard dog of a pitch in the land, and having opted to fling five fast bowlers into the fray, South Africa looked as if they had brought a plastic straw to a lightsabre fight. Hendricks, instead of Nortjé, sharing the new ball with Philander looked too much like the blunder of Dane Paterson, instead of the now banned Kagiso Rabada, doing so at St George’s Park. But there was poignance in the fact that Philander is playing his last Test and Hendricks his first. “I’m always tuning into ‘Vern’, making sure I can get enough info out of him,” Hendricks said after stumps.” Even so, their shortish length and widish line allowed Crawley and Sibley to select balls to hit as if they were picking their favourite bits out of a salad.
Crawley drove straight with aplomb — once almost sawing Sibley in half — and Sibley repeatedly showcased his mastery of one of the most challenging strokes in the game, the on-drive.
The last ball before tea, a legside effort from Nortjé that Sibley smeared to fine leg for four, took England to 100 without loss. That marked the third time in succession in the series that South Africa’s bowlers had failed to strike in the opening session of a match. It also sealed the only occasion in the 16 Wanderers Tests since Graeme Smith and Herschelle Gibbs put on 149 against West Indies in December 2003 that a pair of openers have shared a century in the very first innings of a match here, only the third time it’s happened at all in the 41 Wanderers Tests, and the first time it’s been accomplished by the visiting team.
The Wanderers is an ominous 13th on the list of all 121 Test grounds in terms of the lowest average for the first wicket: 31.51, or marginally outside the top 10 percentile. If that doesn’t get the point across, this should: the Wanderers is a damnably difficult place to bat, and exponentially more so on a fresh pitch against well-rested bowlers armed with a new ball.
Clearly, no-one told Crawley and Sibley, who seemed as at home as if they were having a laugh on the Kent and Surrey featherbeds of their youth. “They left well and didn’t play at anything that was loose,” Hendricks said. “I was surprised at how comfortable they looked.” By now, someone has told them that no England pair had shared a century stand in the first innings of a Test since Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook put up 196 against Australia at Lord’s in July 2009.
They did so with too much help from their friends in the other dressingroom. “We told ourselves [at tea] that we were better than what we bowled,” Hendricks said. He took that seriously, and in the third over after the resumption another of his scrambled seam legside stranglers did for Sibley. Sixteen balls later Crawley played a weird, lazy hybrid between a stroke and a leave and was taken behind. Then came two grassed chances in the space of 23 deliveries by Pieter Malan and Dwaine Pretorius, neither of them straightforward. Drops dripped, you might say. Only for Joe Denly and Ben Stokes to be dismissed 16 balls apart, and a match that had listed heavily in one side’s favour less than two hours previously had been yanked back to something like level with all the rudeness that is visited on pedestrians who dare try cross Johannesburg’s car-centric, pavement-poor streets.
And the Wanderers, like Stokes discovered as he stalked off, is this city congealed into one wet spot; the kind of place were boorishness comes standard. Even the umpires, Rod Tucker and Joel Wilson, weren’t spared when they called time for bad light. They were booed all the way off the ground and assailed by a loud and clear, “Fuck you!” Welcome, gentlemen, neither to war nor peace, but to Joburg.
First published by Cricbuzz.
Bulletproof Truth 