Vishwa Fernando – Bulletproof Truth

Job done, but questions remain

South Africa’s win was their first in five Test series.

Telford Vice | Wanderers

AT least Dimuth Karunaratne was able to fetch his century before he left behind the wretchedness of the past 11 days. In the third over of the morning, he cover drove and cut Anrich Nortjé for consecutive boundaries to get there after more than three hours at the crease in which he scored runs from 40 of the 123 balls he faced. Well played, skipper. Richly deserved.

But Sri Lanka were still savouring Karunaratne’s success when, 11 minutes and 15 balls later, he pulled too late at a rising delivery from Nortjé that speared towards his ribs. The resultant top edge blooped high and hung in the sky over midwicket forever before Wiaan Mulder, the sun in his eyes whiting out much of what he might have seen, took the catch. Karunaratne scored his 103, his 10th Test century, on one of the more seaming, swinging, bouncing pitches he would have seen since had made his first ton at Hagley Oval in Christchurch in December 2014. His others have all come at home, in Dubai, and in Harare.

The stoke that undid him wasn’t the best to play in the circumstances. But it was far from the worst seen at the Wanderers on the third day — and the last day, as it turned out — of the second Test on Tuesday. South Africa took the six wickets that were standing at the start of play for 35 runs in 17.5 overs.

Whatever it was Lutho Sipamla had worked on when he came out after stumps on Monday to bowl on one of the practice pitches, accompanied by bowling coach Charl Langeveldt and his trusty catcher’s mitt, and delaying for 10 minutes the dozen groundstaff who stood holding patiently the last tarpaulin they needed to place to complete the covering of the pitch table, it seems to have done the trick. Sipamla went wicketless for 34 from eight overs on Monday. He bowled 11 deliveries on Tuesday, and took three wickets for the addition to his tally of six runs. Sipamla conceded 66 runs for no reward in his first 12 overs as a Test bowler; now he has 10 at 16.70. Clearly, he learns quickly.

South Africa wrapped up their victory, by 10 wickets, in the ninth over after lunch. With no pressure on them, Aiden Markram and Dean Elgar gathered runs as they were picking up seashells on Unawatuna beach in Galle.

The Sri Lankans will go home wondering which gods they had angered and how seriously to merit losing four players to injury while enduring the insult of an innings defeat at Centurion, which preponed their loss at the Wanderers. And what they can do to appease these cruel deities in time to give a better account of themselves in their series against England, which starts on January 14. South African conditions won’t have done much to prepare them for that engagement, but at least they will know that their surviving fast bowlers — the Fernandos, Vishwa and Asitha, in particular — are up for a fight regardless. But Sri Lanka will have to bat exponentially better to be competitive. Specifically, they will have to stop playing the kind of ill-disciplined shots we saw too many of on Tuesday, which were suited for nothing except lobbing the ball into the air.

South Africa won a Test series for the first time since they beat Pakistan 3-0 at home in December 2018 and January 2019 — five rubbers ago. They also avenged their loss to Sri Lanka in February 2019, when the islanders became the only Asian side to win a series in South Africa. But, as emphatic as that makes their success appear, they also face questions, and also mainly about their batting — which was too frequently derailed by a loss of patience after much hard work had been done. Indeed, they left five half-centuries unconverted.

More happily, Mulder has announced himself as a major talent and Sipamla has made a solid start to his career. Faf du Plessis’ 199 at Centurion and Elgar’s 127 at the Wanderers were welcome indicators of continued excellence in the old guard. And it can’t hurt that South Africa won a series without Kagiso Rabada bowling a single delivery.

Sri Lanka’s first international cricket and South Africa’s first Test series in the pandemic went off smoothly, which was not a given considering England’s abandoned tour last month. You won’t read this often, but perhaps the real winners were CSA. Now for its next trick — successfully staging tours by Australia and Pakistan between February and April. Before then, South Africa will be in Pakistan later this month and in February.

Cricket’s brave new world is upon it. Soon, it will not be new. But, as long as Covid-19 is with us, it will remain brave.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Elgar the toast of South Africa’s fizzless batting

“It’s nice to put yourself through those challenges and you come out the other end of the tunnel and you’ve done relatively well for your team.” – Dean Elgar

Telford Vice | Wanderers

DEAN Elgar had scored a dozen Test centuries before he retook his guard at the Wanderers on Monday. But he did so having spent a night in the 90s for the first time in his 112 Test innings. Did he lose sleep wondering where his next eight runs would come from? Not quite.

“I had a glass of wine, and that made me sleep very well,” Elgar said. “I didn’t feel anxious. I woke up nice and early, as well. I thought I might not wake up to my alarm, but I woke up two hours before.”

Elgar made 127 in South Africa’s total of 302, which earned them a first-innings lead of 145 over Sri Lanka — who were 150/4 in their second innings at stumps after two days of the second Test, a lead of five runs for the visitors.

The Wanderers is among the more difficult places to bat, but Elgar seemed to relish what the conditions asked of him. “I want to score runs on any pitch, but if you’re playing at this level you’re always going to be up against either a very good bowling unit or a tough wicket to bat on or both,” he said. “At the Wanderers, there’s quite a lot of seam movement and the weather allows swing in the air. We had both of those elements against us. But it’s always good to challenge yourself.

“You prepare so hard on various technical and mental aspects, things that people don’t really think about; the external [factors] of this game. It’s nice to put yourself through those challenges and you come out the other end of the tunnel and you’ve done relatively well for your team. That’s all you can ask.”

But Elgar’s success stood in stark contrast with most of his teammates’ performance. He and Rassie van der Dussen, who scored 67, shared 184 for the second wicket — only for South Africa to lose their last nine wickets for 84. The South Africans know what that feels like only too well. They have lost five wickets for fewer than 100 runs in all 14 of their innings last season, and for less than 50 in half of their last 16 innings.

How did Elgar explain that? “The nature of the pitches we’re playing on, especially now, it’s almost like when you come in to bat you’ve really got to be on the ball,” he said. “Maybe, mentally, we relax a little bit. Maybe we don’t trust our technique and we need to be more assertive. If you apply yourself for a lengthy period of time, you really leave well and you trust your defence, the pitch will start flattening out. You shouldn’t be playing loose or rash shots. You need to stay in your bubble.

“But we do need to take conditions into account, and there were very good balls bowled. South Africa isn’t an easy place to bat, especially when new batters come in. They say it’s a batter’s game but I don’t know about that.”

Vishwa Fernando, who took 5/101, no doubt wouldn’t agree: “We had a simple plan. We try to cut down the runs and build pressure by bowling in good areas. The wicket did assist us, but our bowlers also did a really good job. That’s why we were successful.”

First published by Cricbuzz.

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If fairness be the fuel of cricket, let Karunaratne play on

South Africa lost five wickets for fewer than 100 runs in all of their 14 Test innings last season, and 9/84 on Monday.

Telford Vice | Wanderers

A happy clamour rose from the outfield near the boundary at the Corlett Drive End of the Wanderers before play resumed on Monday. It sounded too hopeful to come from a team who had been dismissed for 157 on Sunday, and who were only nine runs ahead with nine wickets to get before their batters would have a chance to redeem themselves. But, yes, that team was Sri Lanka, who seemed to be having too much fun warming-up for day two of the second Test.

Less than four hours later, a different sound emanated from the field. It was made by Vishwa Fernando bellowing in defiance. And well he might have. Fernando had led the visitors’ effort to stay in the match by taking 5/101 in 23.4 overs of relentless aggression.

It is not intended as a backhanded compliment to say he made South Africa’s batters look Sri Lankan in their timid and sluggish response to his deliveries, which sniped off the seam quickly enough to force errors. Debutant Asitha Fernando posed a similar threat, and a pitch that had quickened — as Wanderers surfaces are wont to do after the first day — allowed the Lankan new-ball pair to strutt their stuff in style.

South Africa planned to bat once, as they did to win the first Test in Centurion. Instead, their lead was limited to 145. What with their last nine wickets disappearing for 84 runs in less than 25 overs, you might wonder how they managed to forge that far ahead.

The answer was the 184 that Dean Elgar and Rassie van der Dussen shared for the second wicket. Elgar took his overnight 92 to 127, his 13th century and the first scored by a South Africa opener at home in 11 Tests. Van der Dussen, who walks out to bat to the fury of a song by a seminal Afrikaans punk rock band, Fokofpolisiekar, which translates as Fuck Off Police Car — sample lyrics: “Aim for my heart/It pumps wilderness in here/” — made a gritty, gnarly 67. The unappreciative will complain that he hasn’t scored a century in his 43 innings across the formats.

For almost four hours Elgar and Van der Dussen built South Africa’s advantage resolutely while ensuring the Sri Lankans couldn’t get the memory of their own awful batting out of their heads. But once they were separated, early in the second hour when Elgar nudged Dushmantha Chameera to first slip, the match swung and it was the South Africans who were left to wonder what might have been. None of their other nine players reached 20 or faced more than 30 balls.

Brittle batting is hardly a new problem for the home side, who lost five wickets for fewer than 100 runs in all of the 14 Test innings they had against India and England last season. In half of those innings, five wickets tumbled for fewer than 50. On Monday, the first five wickets that fell went down for 39 runs and the last five for 45. However you measure it, that’s the eighth occasion in 16 innings that South Africa have sacrificed five for fewer than 50.

The home side were probably still thinking about what had gone wrong this time when they were welcomed back into the field by the ominous opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony booming from the ground’s speakers. Was the doomful music meant for them or their opponents?

By then, Lungi Ngidi had already had an eventful time. He drove the second ball he faced, from Vishwa Fernando, handsomely through the covers for four, hammered him down the ground for another boundary, chested him over the wicketkeeper for still another, and was smacked square on the side of the helmet by Asitha Fernando. Ngidi’s fend to gully ended the innings and completed Vishwa Fernando’s five-wicket haul. The big South African filled the gaps between those events with mighty blows that, often, did not connect.

So there was little surprise that Ngidi was central to the next nugget of drama, which came with the 15th ball of Sri Lanka’s second innings. Delivered from round the wicket, it snuck through Kusal Perera’s uncertain drive. The ball hit nothing except the leg-side bail, and broke it in two. In the desolate concrete cavern, leather splintering wood sounded like bone crunched between teeth.

Nothing as visceral happened for the next hour-and-a-half while Dimuth Karunaratne and Lahiru Thirimanne took Sri Lanka into the final hour with a stand of 86 that was ended by a delivery from Ngidi that looked to be veering harmlessly down the leg side until Thirimanne flapped at it and gloved a catch behind. With his next ball, which swung still further, Ngidi removed Kusal Mendis the same way, this time with the help of Quinton de Kock’s diving catch.

Mendis paused before he trudged off, perhaps to wonder what he had done to deserve a hattrick of ducks in the series, this one a first-baller. Not many steps into his journey back to the dressingroom, he had cause to pause again — this time to pick up his bat, which he had dropped.

With an hour left in the day, surely the meanest delivery debutant Minod Bhanuka has yet faced leapt off the top edge of his horizontal bat and steepled into the dazzling afternoon sky. The ball had been bowled by Anrich Nortjé, and it would take some catching. Keshav Maharaj, who has yet to bowl in the match and lasted for only eight deliveries with the bat, made many metres towards the midwicket boundary, flung himself headlong, cupped the catch in both hands, crashed to earth, and held on. Even if he has no other personal reason to remember this match, he has that. And the noise his amazed teammates made as they ran all the way to where he lay and then rose to mob him with praise.

Far from that madding throng the quietest man on the ground stood solitary at the other end of the pitch. He was still there at stumps, alone in his zen garden, deep in the sound of his silence. He had nursed his team into the lead with an innings of more than three hours of selfless stillness. It might have been ended twice in the last three overs, once with an edge over the slips, then with a blooped return catch that fell safely. And deservedly so. Sri Lanka, just five runs ahead with four wickets already lost, probably won’t win this match. But Karunaratne deserves the nine runs he needs to reach his century.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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2nd Test preview: Less a contest than a fight for survival

If Sri Lanka put up anything like a fight, they should be farewelled as heroes and awarded their country’s highest honour on their return home.

Telford Vice | Johanneburg

MANY will remember the Centurion Test for Faf du Plessis’ 199, Wiaan Mulder’s sturdy performance with bat and ball, Lutho Sipamla’s ballsy rebound from a meh beginning, South Africa’s innings victory and, of course, the Sri Lankans lurching from one injury crisis to the next. Fewer will recall that South Africa were chasing the game until almost an hour into the second day.

Sri Lanka’s first innings of 396 is the third-biggest total made by any team against South Africa at Centurion, and the Lankans’ biggest in a country where they have reached 300 only eight times but been dismissed for fewer than 200 on 14 occasions — five times at Centurion itself. So this effort represented significant progress in their coming to terms with a pitch that is nothing like anything they would have learnt to bat on, and which has led to the undoing of almost every visiting team who have played Tests there.

What might have been had five Sri Lankans, four of them frontline bowlers, not been sidelined by assorted mishaps and calamities? We will never know. The Wanderers would have presented an opportunity to answer the question had Dinesh Chandimal, Kasun Rajitha, Lahiru Kumara, Dhananjaya de Silva, Suranga Lakmal and Oshada Fernando not all been ruled out of the second Test. And it could get worse: Wanindu Hasaranga’s selection is subject to a fitness test.

It was seen as something of a miracle, especially by South Africans, when Dimuth Karunaratne’s team became the first Asian side to win a Test series in the country in February 2019. It wasn’t magic, of course: they played the better cricket. Not least Kusal Perera, who delivered among the most epic innings the game has seen in scoring an undefeated 153 in his team’s one-wicket win at Kingsmead. It should shock South Africans that Sri Lanka didn’t even need Perera to chase down their target of 197 to claim the St George’s Park Test by eight wickets. Likewise that Vishwa Fernando’s dozen wickets at 18.91 in the two matches was three more than Kagiso Rabada managed at 29.50. It’s a telling comparison considering each bowled 62.3 overs.

At Centurion, Perera — now opening, having batted at No. 5 in 2019 — made 16 and 64 and Fernando took 3/129. Those figures don’t reflect poor performances, but they are a long way from their matchwinning exploits of not quite two years ago. Happily, Perera and Vishwa Fernando are still in the mix. But it’s difficult to see them sparking the kind of revolution Sri Lanka would need to win at the Wanderers. That really would be a miracle.

Why should South Africa contemplate changes to an XI that has won so emphatically? If there was a case to be made for a departure from the Centurion side, it was that Rabada is back from a groin strain. But team management said on Saturday he would not be considered to ensure his readiness for the upcoming series against Pakistan and Australia. It’s a long shot, but that might open the door for the left-arm Beuran Hendricks, who represents a refreshing change from the home side’s otherwise steady stream of right-arm fast.

If it seems that there is too much dwelling on the past in this preview, which is after all meant to offer a look ahead to the next match, that’s because it’s hard to isolate the context of a match that promises to be less a contest between teams as a fight for survival by one of those teams. There is an unfairness about what the Sri Lankans are being asked to do, considering the wider circumstances. How could they possibly give a credible account of themselves when their ranks have been decimated by injury, and in the midst of a pandemic no less? The South Africans, meanwhile, would be forgiven for feeling queasy about being forced to throw punches at opponents who have a knee on the canvas and both arms tied behind their backs.

If the visitors put up anything like a fight, they should be farewelled as heroes and, on their return home, be awarded the Sri Lankabhimanya — or the Pride of Sri Lanka — the country’s highest honour. It is bestowed on “those who have rendered exceptionally outstanding and most distinguished service to the nation”. Certainly, they have fulfilled that criterion. But, like everything else about this tour, even this will not be simple: only five Lankans can hold the award contemporaneously.

When: Sunday January 3, 2021. 10am Local Time

Where: The Wanderers, Johannesburg

What to expect: A grinch of a pitch. Graeme Smith reckoned opening the batting at the Wanderers was tougher than any other job in cricket anywhere else, and it’s difficult to argue otherwise. The booming bounce and sneaky sideways movement eases slightly on days two and three. There is, at least, a downward sloping, lightning fast outfield to look forward to. But also variable bounce as the surface ages. And if the ever present cracks open up … look out.

Team news

South Africa: Mark Boucher is an old-fashioned cricketer, and old-fashioned cricketers don’t fiddle with winning XIs. Boucher said after the Centurion Test that he wasn’t about to tamper with a batting unit that had amassed 621, that he didn’t fancy an all-pace attack, and that Rabada’s return was not certain. An unchanged side seems the most likely outcome. Unless Hendricks is preferred to Anrich Nortjé, who is nursing a bruised foot. Raynard van Tonder, who was highly unlikely to play, is out of the reckoning anyway with a broken finger.

Possible XI: Dean Elgar, Aiden Markram, Rassie van der Dussen, Faf du Plessis, Quinton de Kock, Temba Bavuma, Wiaan Mulder, Keshav Maharaj, Anrich Nortjé, Lutho Sipamla, Lungi Ngidi.

Sri Lanka: Do they have 11 fit players? That’s not entirely an unserious question considering the epidemic of injuries that raged through Sri Lanka’s ranks at Centurion. Minod Bhanuka and Asitha Fernando should make debuts, and Dushmantha Chameera could crack the nod. If Hasaranga isn’t fit, Dilruwan Perera or Lasith Embuldeniya will likely be selected.

Possible XI: Dimuth Karunaratne, Kusal Perera, Lahiru Thirimanne, Kusal Mendis, Minod Bhanuka, Niroshan Dickwella, Dasun Shanaka, Wanindu Hasaranga, Asitha Fernando, Dushmantha Chameera, Vishwa Fernando.

What they said

“We had a convincing win in the first Test, but we know there’s a few red flags going into the second. Even though we scored 621 we shouldn’t take the hard work of batting for granted. We’ve got to be aware that we faced an attack that was affected by injuries. We’re mindful of that; we know we need to start afresh.” – Dean Elgar warns Sri Lanka not to expect any favours.

“Our bench is very strong, so I think we will be able to field a side that will compete with the South African team.” – Dimuth Karunaratne makes a profound prediction. Would that it comes true.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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A flurry of firsts on South Africa’s best day for a year

“I didn’t get to three figures, but I don’t play the game for that. I’m trying to set up the game for my team. I pretty much see my job as done.” – Dean Elgar on scoring 95.

Telford Vice | Centurion

IT’S the seventh over of the morning, the ball is not quite a dozen overs old, the pitch is alive with possibility, and Anrich Nortjé is hoofing towards the crease like one of the snorting steeds of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He bowls … short, way short. Dasun Shanaka shovels the delivery over midwicket as if he was facing a kid in a park somewhere. The six takes Shanaka to his first half-century in his seventh Test innings: the first of the array of firsts that will stud the second day of the first Test at Centurion on Sunday.

The stroke’s audacity is still sparking the air itself two balls later when Shanaka steps wide of the stumps and sends an outrageous slash screaming over the backward point fence. Wisely, Nortjé turns on his heel without offering word or gesture.

The day did not start in accordance with South Africa’s plans. Sri Lanka were dismissed — nine wickets down because Dhananjaya de Silva will miss the rest of the series with a torn thigh muscle — for 396; their highest total in South Africa, whose team took almost seven-and-a-half hours and 584 balls to bowl them out, and employed a long stop to try and stop the bleeding.

The visitors added 56 runs in the 11 overs they faced on Sunday. And they would have made significantly more had Lutho Sipamla not found a way back from an ordinary first day as a Test player by taking the last three wickets in the space of 11 of his deliveries. Unlike on Saturday, when he put the ball more than he bowled it, Sipamla looked like he belonged. He finished with 4/76 — better figures than Dale Steyn, Shaun Pollock, Allan Donald or Morné Morkel managed in their first innings at this level. “He could have gone into shell, but the whole [South Africa] environment tells you you need to step up and he showed character,” was how Dean Elgar explained Sipamla’s success in an online press conference after the close.

By stumps, South Africa had forged to within 79 runs of parity. They will be confident of achieving it, less so of venturing far past it. There was more steel in their batting than has been seen for a long time. There was also some of the fragility that has made watching them a tense affair for their supporters. And why shouldn’t there be? For the first time since they played New Zealand at Eden Park in February 1999 none of their batters had a career average of above 40. But their 317/4 marked the first time in almost 15 months and in 28 innings in any format that they had passed 300 in a completed match.

So hope was kindled, especially while Elgar and Aiden Markram were sharing 141. It was the first time South Africa had enjoyed the stability provided by a century opening stand in 44 innings — their longest stretch without one since they failed to do so in their first 73 innings, from 1889 to 1914. The most recent previous instance was against Bangladesh in Bloemfontein in October 2017, when Elgar made 113 and Markram 143, and they put on 243.

This time Markram scored 68 before slapping a wide delivery from lusty left-armer Vishwa Fernando, coming round the wicket, straight to backward point. Elgar was out for 95, drilling a return catch to Shanaka, who found the wherewithal and the wingspan to hold it. Elgar and Markram hit all but 21 of their runs in boundaries. Elgar was on his best hard bastard behaviour. Markram batted as he might drive a Ferrari. Little wonder each, on being dismissed, stood there and pondered what might have been before stalking back to the dressingroom, where it is hoped attendants had padded the walls and hid anything that could be punched or kicked.

“That’s been the nature of the beast,” Elgar said, with reference to a pitch that kept the batters on their toes and the bowlers interested, when he was asked what went through his mind when he was dismissed. “Those kind of things seem to be happening. I didn’t get to three figures, but I don’t play the game for that. I’m trying to set up the game for my team. I pretty much see my job as done.”

Even so, he said, the conditions were not easily lived with for batters: “There’s been quite a lot of assistance for the bowlers throughout the two days. So I don’t think the scores we’ve had is a reflection of how the wicket’s played. It’s been a combination of some good batting and poor bowling. The margin for error if you’re a bowler is so small here, so if you miss your mark you’re going to go for runs because the outfield is so fast. But it’s a very good Test wicket.”

Quinton de Kock, the first South Africa player to captain, keep wicket and bat in the top five since Jock Cameron at the Basin Reserve in Wellington in March 1932, would surely catch fire on a surface that seemed to invite his positive approach. But he made just 18 before finding a top spinner from debutant leg spinner Wanindu Hasaranga too hot to handle and edging it to slip.

Three wickets had fallen for 20 runs across 26 deliveries. Sri Lanka had started by bowling too full, a mirror image of South Africa falling short too often, and they lost Kasun Rajitha to an undisclosed injury after he had bowled 13 balls. But they learnt their lessons well and added skill and guile to make up for their comparative deficit in muscle and malevolence.

Faf du Plessis and Temba Bavuma matched that with their own ability, and with discipline. Two of South Africa’s grittiest players showed plenty of that, and took their unbroken stand to 97. After each had faced 32 balls, Du Plessis was 11 not out and Bavuma was 23. But at the close Du Plessis was unbeaten on 55 and Bavuma on 41.

Whoever. Whatever. Their first and only order of business on Monday will be to keep doing what they did. Because South Africa could do with a few hours of quiet run-gathering. It’s up to Sri Lanka to bring the excitement, at least for the rest of this innings. Not for the first time, the fact that both teams still have skin in the game is what sets Test cricket apart.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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SA cricket fiddling with MSL while Test team burns

“I’m sure there are people in much higher positions than myself, at Proteas level and CSA level, who know exactly how they are going to go about improving the situation.” – Ashwell Prince keeps the faith.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

WITH South Africa’s men’s Test team at their lowest point and a series against England starting in just more than seven weeks, the responsible approach would be to divert all efforts into putting out the fire.

Instead, South Africa’s players will fiddle with the Mzansi Super League (MSL) for more than five weeks of that precious time.

Ashwell Prince, who placed a higher price on his wicket than most, and who consequently must have been more frustrated than most at South Africa’s flaccid batting in India last month, might have been able to help fix the problem if his Cobras were out there every week playing first-class cricket.

But that opportunity will be wasted because Prince will coach the Cape Town Blitz in the MSL, which starts on Friday.

“I don’t want to make comments about the Proteas and Test cricket at the moment,” Prince told a press conference in Cape Town on Monday. “I think we’re all here for the exciting second edition of the MSL.

“I’m sure there are people in much higher positions than myself, at Proteas level and CSA [Cricket South Africa] level, who know exactly how they are going to go about improving the situation.

“But at the moment I want to focus on the Blitz. We’ve got an exciting team with some exciting players, and we want to go out and enjoy that, and entertain.”

Except that figures who “know exactly how they are going to go about improving the situation” are thin on the ground.

Enoch Nkwe’s appointment as South Africa’s team director is interim — he was in place for the India tour only — and last week CSA suspended director of cricket Corrie van Zyl, another interim appointee, and sponsorship and sales head Clive Eksteen, the only members of their staff who have international playing experience.

Reality will resume after the MSL ends on December 16 — three days before the start of the only remaining round of franchise first-class games before the England series.

Not that there’s certainty that all or even most of the Test players will be in action in those games.

Only half of the 12 fit players who, in India, presided over South Africa’s worst performance in a series in 83 years turned out for their franchises in last week’s first-class matches.

Given all that, cricketminded South Africans will be desperate for a silver lining.

The closest their going to get to that is Hashim Amla’s appointment as the Blitz’ batting consultant, which was announced on Monday.

Like Prince, who faced 100 or more balls in 28 of his 104 Test innings and more than 200 in a dozen of them, suffered only one first-baller — six innings before he retired — and was dismissed in fewer than 10 deliveries just 12 times, Amla valued his wicket greatly.

He was there for at least 100 balls in 61 of 215 trips to the crease, had just 20 innings of fewer than 10 deliveries, and was also out first ball only once — in the first innings of his last Test, when an inswinger from Sri Lanka’s Vishwa Fernando nailed his middle stump.

Contrast that with the facts that 20 of the 60 wickets South Africa lost in India went down in fewer than 10 balls, that only nine times did a player face more than 100 deliveries in the series and only once more than 200 — Dean Elgar’s 160 in the first Test in Visakhapatnam came off 287 balls — and it isn’t difficult to see why Amla’s insight could be important.

That will, hopefully, be the case even though T20 batting is hardly about occupying the crease.

“There’s been a lot of comments lately in the media lately about the lack of our former national players’ involvement in the game,” Prince said when asked about Amla’s involvement.

“I approached him and he was very open to the idea. I don’t think he’s charging us a penny for his services, which is very rare these days.

“To have him share some of his knowledge and ideas would be invaluable.”

What might Blitz captain Quinton de Kock, who shared 125 partnerships with Amla for South Africa across all formats — 13 of them century stands — have learnt from cricket’s calmest player?

“Yoh! There’s a lot he’s taught me,” De Kock said. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, and he’s been the one guy to be there — backing me and helping me.

“‘Hash’ will know what to do. He will see how he can get the best out of them, whether it’s from a mental or a technical point of view, or just hitting more balls.

“He’s really good at one-on-ones; individual chats rather than in team spaces.”

Warriors coach Robin Peterson thinks so, too. That’s why he enlisted Amla’s help for his team’s first-class match against the Cobras at Newlands last week.

“His manner and the way he talks about batting, he’d be the perfect guy to get the knowledge across,” Peterson said.

Here’s hoping Amla’s wisdom sticks somewhere in the minds of De Kock, Vernon Philander, Anrich Nortjé and George Linde, the Test players in the Blitz squad.

But there’s a catch. Amla will join the side only on November 25.

What’s he doing until then? Playing in something less relevant than even the MSL: the Abu Dhabi T10 League.

Suddenly, that lining is not so silver.

First published by TMG Digital.

Trump! Brexit! Sri Lanka win in SA!

Difficult, isn’t it, to remember that Quinton de Kock reeled off scores of 80, 55 and 86, that Faf du Plessis made 90 and 50 not out, and that Aiden Markram hit 60.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

AMERICANS voted for Trump. Brits voted for Brexit. Turkeys vote for Christmas. Sri Lanka won 2-0 in South Africa in little more than five days of actual playing time. Which of those statements is the least believable?

It gets worse. Not once did Sri Lanka’s modest attack need a second new ball to dismiss the South Africans, who suffered eight ducks — a list that included Dean Elgar, Hashim Amla, Temba Bavuma and Aiden Markram. Only two players, Faf du Plessis and Markram, faced more than 100 balls in an innings.

Difficult, isn’t it, to remember that Quinton de Kock reeled off scores of 80, 55 and 86, that Du Plessis made 90 and 50 not out, and that Markram hit 60.

It cuts no ice that only once did a Sri Lanka innings forge past 80 overs, that they had five ducks — four of them in their top six — or that they had just one century, three half-centuries and a solitary five-wicket haul.

How a team who had won only one of their previous 13 Tests in South Africa, who arrived in South Africa having lost 11 of their last dozen matches and drawn the other, who were missing Dinesh Chandimal, who captained them in 17 of their last 23 Tests before this tour, and Angelo Mathews, whose 80 caps were 20 more than the most experienced player in the squad — new captain Dimuth Karunaratne — could be the first from the subcontinent to win a series in South Africa needs explaining.

Du Plessis tried to do so after the series ended at lunch on the third day at St George’s Park on Saturday.

“Mentally we were just a little bit soft in giving our wickets away,” he told reporters in Port Elizabeth. “Test cricket is about fighting it out and grinding it out. Bowlers have got to earn your wicket. For most of this series all of our batters gave their wickets away pretty easily.”

Elgar’s average of 10.75 was his lowest in any series since he made a pair on debut in the only match he played in Australia in November 2012, and never in a series in which he has had four innings has he scored fewer than the 43 runs he eked out this time. Amla and Bavuma also didn’t muster 50 runs in their four trips to the crease.

None of those players have suddenly become poor. Amla and Bavuma were two of South Africa’s top three runscorers in the series against Pakistan last month and Elgar, though not at his sturdy best, at least put a 50 into the pot.

And South Africa won 3-0 to earn their seventh consecutive success in a home series. Of their previous 10 rubbers, home and away, South Africa had won seven.

As Du Plessis said, “[Considering] the cricket we have been playing for the last two, three seasons, if we were anywhere close to that we should have beaten this team.”

So, why didn’t that happen? Because, apparently, inexperience is the new black.

“Sri Lanka had a lot of new faces,” Du Plessis said. “That’s probably something in which we were lacking — normally when you play a team you’ve got quite a bit of footage on them.”

Maybe there wasn’t much of the stuff to go on in a squad that harboured eight players who had fewer than five caps and four who were unblooded.

So much so that, it seems, Du Plessis wasn’t aware that left-arm fast bowler Vishwa Fernando, whose haul of 12 wickets was the biggest in the rubber, had played three Tests previously.

“For a guy making his debut in the series to be the leading wicket-taker, that’s not the norm. We didn’t play him well.

“It’s OK if it happens in a once-off innings when you’ve never faced a bowler. But when you’ve played one Test match, you’ve had a look at him, you should be a lot better in the second Test match.”

All of which smacks of complacency, and of the chickens of playing on too many outrageous pitches coming home to roost, and of something being alarmingly amiss with how South Africa’s batters prepared — and were prepared by Dale Benkenstein — for the series, and of being preoccupied with a looming World Cup.

There’s little Du Plessis and his players can do about the latter. The World Cup is coming, ready or not, and that reality will über alles until South Africa win the damn thing.

The rest is on them and the coaching staff. Fix it.

The truth of what happened at Kingsmead, and out the window in London

“I’ll hit the ball with my body, if nothing else. You do what you can.” – Vishwa Fernando to Kusal Perera.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

This is a fraud. It comes to you from a room with a view that’s a long way from the setting for the subject of this piece. The room is in Bethnal Green in London’s East End. The view is of a park, Weavers Fields. As we speak, on a sunny, pseudo spring Sunday morning, weekend warriors are out there doing their football thing.

One game is shot through with the shrill urgency of 12-year-olds fuelled by what might yet be. The other is a huff and a puff of men on the precipice of middle age wondering what might have been.

There. I’ve put some credibility in it. The rest is a sham, a construct of what happened in the other hemisphere on Saturday.

The prospect of the need for this fakery arising seemed minuscule when Oshada Fernando and Kusal Perera, and the trailing South Africans, exited the gloom that gathered at Kingsmead on Friday afternoon. Three overs had been bowled after the day’s last drinks break when bad light sooted the scene. Rain followed.

No matter. Sri Lanka were 83/3 looking for 304 to win. Too many. There would be no repeat of the miracle of 2011, when Rangana Herath took 9/128 and bowled them to a famous victory.

That remained the narrative for much of Saturday. South Africa were without the hamstrung Vernon Philander, but an attack of Dale Steyn, Kagiso Rabada, Duanne Olivier and Keshav Maharaj had more than enough between them of what it would take to get the job done. Much more than enough. Of course they did.

Nothing about that had changed when the visitors reached lunch five down and requiring 138. Sure, Perera seemed determined. But let’s not be silly. An hour after the resumption the last pair, Perera and Vishwa Fernando, were at the crease and they needed 78. Perera? Still there. But you knew it was game over. South Africa would go to St George’s Park 1-0 up. Nothing more to see here. Moving on …

“Sri Lanka won!”

“Sri Lanka won? What?”

“Yes! Sri Lanka won!”

Of all the shocking things you might be told as you emerge from the shower, that’s up there with, “They voted for Brexit!” Or “Trump won!” Happily, “Sri Lanka won!” is significantly less consequential, in bad ways, than either of the above. The worst of it is that the fraud you are reading, if you’ve put up with it so far, that has been perpetrated by someone 12 710.3 kilometres walk away from what he’s writing about.

That’s how big this story is; big enough to bale out of another piece planned — indeed half-written — for this space, a small consideration all things considered. The records set in the process of Sri Lanka’s triumph — most prominently a world-record last-wicket stand to win a Test — have been chronicled far and wide. But there’s more to all this than just that.

Fernando hadn’t survived for more than 25 minutes in any of his other seven Test innings, four of which ended in ducks. On Saturday he batted for 73 minutes — two fewer than he managed to spend at the crease in his other efforts combined — and scored six.

That’s right: six out of a matchwinning, world-record partnership of 78. Six of the most precious runs in the history of the game they unarguably are. Only 13 times in the 2 347 Tests yet played has a match been won by a solitary wicket. That puts Fernando in the top 0.55 percentile of all the 2 964 men who have batted at this level. His average, 1.25 when he took guard, has exploded to 1.75, a champagne super nova in its own way.

“I didn’t even look at the scoreboard when Vishwa came in and we had a lot of runs to get,” Perera told reporters in faraway Durban. “Without any fear I took the single and gave the strike to him.

“He did a huge job. I don’t know how many balls he faced. Those are valuable, valuable balls. What he faced was worth more than my runs.”

Fernando faced 27 balls, a number almost six times fewer than Perera’s 153 runs, not bloody out, and the last 75 of them scored in the company of a comrade who he knew was up for the fight even if he was a No. 11’s No. 11.

“I’ll hit the ball with my body, if nothing else,” Perera said Fernando had told him. “You do what you can.”

What Perera could do was keep doing what he had been doing since Friday: taking the fight to South Africa in the face of an increasingly fearsome onslaught.

He took it with his podgy pugnaciousness unbeaten and unbeatable, his shirt flying flags of sweat and dust, his body beneath pinned with medals marking his courage.

“I think I’ve copped six or seven blows to the head,” he said. “On these tracks if you’re not willing to wear balls on the body you might as well not be batting. I don’t know how many times I got hit; honestly I’ve lost count. But you can’t think about those things while you are batting.

“In Sri Lanka the fastest [bowling] you get is 130, 140 kilometres per hour. Here you get balls that are 150 kilometres per hour. When you come to a country like this, if someone tells you you can bat without getting hit, that’s a lie. That happened to me. That’s what cricket is about.”

Faf du Plessis couldn’t disagree: “This is what Test cricket should be. You’re bowling to one player the whole time and some days you just have to say ‘well played’.

“It wasn’t through our mistakes. It’s not like we dropped catches when the game was on the line. It was purely a super-human effort with the bat and when that happens that’s got nothing to do with us and pressure. It’s got to do with how someone else plays.”

That was an attempt to keep a profane skeleton from rattling right out of its cupboard: that South Africa had, not for the first time, choked. And with a World Cup looming.

Even from 12 710.3 kilometres away, and without having seen a single ball bowled or shot played, it’s as clear as the sky on a sunny, pseudo spring Sunday morning that South Africa coulda, shoulda, woulda won this match, and they will bear a good chunk of the blame for that not happening, particularly as levelled by South Africans. Had their team found a way to lose a game that was theirs for the winning? Hell yes.

But that cannot take away from the wonder that was Perera and Fernando refusing to acknowledge their apparently impending defeat.

Not a hundred metres away from where this is being written, a gaggle of shrill, urgent 12-year-olds know what a bunch of huffing, puffing not quite middle-aged men also know: that what is or what has been couldn’t matter less while the game’s alive and kicking.

All that matters, as Perera and Fernando know as well as anyone, is what might yet be.