Rain makes Vilas’s debut ‘so far, so easy’

Cyclone wrecks second Test as three days lost to downpour

FOUR days into his debut Test match, Dane Vilas could take issue with Hashim Amla’s joke before the start of the match that “if it was easy it would be called easy cricket”.

But so far, so easy for Vilas, who like the other players involved in the second Test between Bangladesh and SA in Dhaka, has spent the past three days with his feet up.

The hat-trick was completed yesterday when Cyclone Komen showed no signs of going and the fourth day’s play was also abandoned.

That left the match high and incongruously dry on its day one stumps score of 246-8 in Bangladesh’s first innings. Of the 360 overs that should have been bowled by the end of yesterday’s play, only 88.1 have been sent down.

Not that others’ lives have been as lightly brushed by the storm as the cricketers’.

Yesterday morning the death toll in the region approached 100.

But Vilas, who at 30 has been waiting for his chance and earned it because of Quinton de Kock’s batting blues, could be forgiven for narrowing his focus to the cricket. Or lack of it.

“The last couple of days have been frustrating,” Vilas said. “It’s been bittersweet – really exciting but also disappointing because of the rain.”

Vilas, with 10 centuries and an average of 41.00 from his 71 first-class matches, has made a decent fist of things in the limited time he has had to get noticed.

The five byes he has conceded can all be blamed on Morné Morkel spraying deliveries down the leg side, and while he spilled one catch, he held two others.

They were also difficult grabs, off Dean Elgar and J P Duminy.

But as an experienced gloveman, Vilas made them look simple.

De Kock has been re-assigned to SA A’s tour to India. The tour starts on Wednesday and ends on August 28.

Thing is, Vilas is at this stage also in the SA A squad and is set to captain them in the two four-day matches they will play against India.

New Zealand will be in SA from August 14 to 26 to play SA in two T20s and three one-day internationals.

And if both Vilas and De Kock are in India, who might be behind the stumps against the Kiwis?

A B de Villiers, freshly back from daddy duty, is the obvious answer.

But, for Vilas, things were not that simple: “Everybody wants to get into this team”.

Including of course, the Dolphins’ Morné van Wyk.