By the numbers

The South Africans had a chance to take a stranglehold on the first Test match but seemed reluctant to push the pedal to the metal when they had the Indians on the floor. I apologize for the mixed metaphors but the SAffers are just that - a relic, a cliché that belongs to a bygone era of Test cricket.

Before Mark Taylor began the modern trend of batting first and batting fast to bat an opposition out of the game, the practice used to be to pile up runs at a "safe" pace before setting the bowlers loose to exploit the pressure induced by the sheer weight of the run chase. A combination of flatter pitches and more aggressive batsmen has caused teams to revisit what constitutes a safe total. Apparently, South Africa did not get that memo.

Flair is not a word one associates with the SAffers. A better word would be efficient. Like the Little Engine That Could they bat along a preconceived plan, seemingly marking off checkpoints as they put up the runs, head down, fully focused to the task and little else, hardly ever deviating from said plan.

Hashim Amla gives glimpses of subcontinental wristiness but for the most part his game is defined by straight lines. And, boy, did he give a fabulous demonstration of that?! For over 11 hours he defied everything that the Indians threw at him, shrugging off more than ten occasions where Amit Mishra produced a leg-spinner's dream ball and batting along in a manner that the word serene was coined for. His 250-plus was the perfect base to launch a humungous score. With Amla in the zone and the score reading 400 for very few, the stage was set for the other batsmen to expand their horizons and take the game by the scruff of its neck. Instead, what we got was batsman after batsman playing like Amla. For a brief while, the boy-man named Abraham Benjamin threatened to do something about it, routinely jumping down the wicket to tackle the spinners. Initially, I was heartened by it, until it started reminding me of another player of similar style - Michael Clarke. Both de Villiers and Clarke like to play the spinner at the point where the ball pitches yet both approach it as a defend-first, attack-second option. AB got a few fours (5 by my count) off Mishra, but only two of them came from the shimmies down the wicket. The rest of the shimmies were followed by a defensive stroke, not even by a punch to long-on or long-off for a single. So even the one batsman who seemed to be trying to do something was using a safety-first approach. From 476 for 5 in 151 overs (when Duminy got out) to finishing up with 558 for 6 in 176 overs, a total of 82 runs in 25 overs, is not the stuff from which declarations should be made.

Naturally, when AB finally decided to push the scoring along, he perished and the SAffers went back into a single-taking shell. MS Dhoni kept changing the field and rotating his bowlers but it was negated by another no-show by his premier horse - Harbhajan Singh. Economy Singh is a classic case of Georgie Porgie. If things are not going his way, a sulky, irritable Economy creeps out, content to try to hide his tail and plonk away on middle-and-leg hoping for mistakes. When Anil Kumble was bowling, no matter what the state of the game, you could never tell it from either his bowling or his demeanor. All the great ones have it. The "it" being that desire to do so well that the opposition knows that one mis-step results in their downfall. The book on Economy is simple. Negate him for a few overs, avoid rash shots that give him an early wicket, and then sit back and milk the square-leg area as he bowls faster and flatter onto the pads.

It is a telling commentary on Economy that the only time in the entire innings he looked even remotely like the Harbhajan he can be is when the SAffers were approaching the time-to-declare phase and a few quick wickets were in the offing. But when the big boys were out there, he was overwhelmingly outbowled by Mishra and that is not saying much considering Mishra's propensity to give up a short, faster one every once in a while. At least Mishra looked threatening right through the innings and definitely would have had more success on another day.

The day ended with the SAffers asking India to score 359 runs to save the game. If India does that, then I am pretty confident that the SAffers will bat the rest of the Test and move on to Kolkata. At least that is the impression I have been getting from the safety-first approach taken by the Proteas. Economy Singh would fit right into their team. And that is an indictment of both of them.

P.S. Ignore the title and read this article. It tells you all you need to know before Day 3 of the Ind-SAffer Test.