Kuldeep, Chahal feast on SA frailties
Billed the No 1 side in ODIS, South Africa’s capitulation to Indian spinners raises questions over their prospects at the 2019 World Cup
“In every game, one of their top three has scored a hundred and that’s been the difference in the series. We got one hundred from our captain Faf du Plessis in Durban, and we’ve not been able to get another hundred since. It’s not that we can’t. Hash (Hashim Amla) has 27 hundreds in ODI cricket so he knows how to do it. You want to have a group of players who can adapt to certain conditions. We know we have those players but they haven’t produced it in this series, which is disappointing.”
JP Duminy was asked if the Indian spinners were actually good or the South Africans made them look unplayable.
“In South Africa, we are used to hitting spinners straight down the ground as they usually bowl full. But in this series, they have held the length back and given flight to confuse us,” he had said after the third ODI at Cape Town.
Hussein Manack, a former first-class cricketer and now a TV commentator and national selector, says the Indian spinners have been smart. “In India, you can bowl quick with side-spin and still turn the ball. Here you can’t. They have understood that here you need to give flight, and impart over-spin and topspin, to extract turn and bounce. The South Africa spinners have been pushing the ball through.”
Both Kuldeep Yadav and Yuzvendra Chahal have got a bagful of wickets. Kuldeep, who has 16 wickets in five matches here, had just 22 wickets in 14 games before this series. Chahal has picked 14 in five games, while he had 27 in the previous 17 games.