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Captain’s 208 glittering jewel in SA’s crown
TWO days ago, Hashim Amla shrugged off questions about the added pressure on his shoulders captaining SA’s test team at home for the first time. Yesterday, on the second day of the first test against West Indies at Centurion, he answered those questions more emphatically than he could ever do in words.
Amla scored 208 – the highest innings by a SA captain on home soil, the biggest score by a South African against West Indies, and the highest ever at Centurion.
And that was only the most glittering jewel in SA’s crown. Amla and AB de Villiers shared a stand of 308 – a record for SA’s fourth wicket and their 12th biggest partnership overall.
Stiaan van Zyl scored an undefeated 101 on debut – making him the sixth South African to register a test ton at his first attempt, but the first to do so at home – and SA piled up 552/5 before declaring.
An epic thunderstorm prevented any further play, sparing the Windies until this morning to start chipping away at the 353 they will need to avoid the prospect of following on.
Not much connects Amla to Keith Miller. Except, perhaps, the Australian fighter-pilot and dashing all-rounder-cum-test-captain’s famous answer to a question from the BBC’s Michael Parkinson: “Pressure is a Messerschmidt up your arse, playing cricket is not.”
So this effort was, in Amla’s eyes, nothing special. “I didn’t think of it as anything other than another test innings,” he said. “It’s still early days in my captaincy career, but the more I captain, the less I see it as a distraction.”
SA resumed on 340/9 and nothing distracted Amla or De Villiers until the ninth over of the day, when De Villiers slashed a drive off Sulieman Benn and was caught at point.
The pomp of Amla’s innings and the circumstance of Van Zyl’s pushed De Villiers’ 152 down the pecking order of prominence, but it was a fine display of test batting.
Van Zyl needed 11 deliveries, not many of them played convincingly, to get off the mark.
“It’s a big stage, but it’s still just a cricket ball coming towards you,” he said, but conceded that, “My gloves were wet [with sweat] before I faced my first ball.”
When his first single was in the book, Amla told him, “I know it’s only one run, but well done.”
Van Zyl replied: “It’s the best run I’ve scored in my career.”
Ninety-nine runs later, Van Zyl was raising his bat to a sumptuous ovation.
Back in the real world, Amla knew he and his team would have to box clever around the weather what with more rain forecast for today and Sunday.
“We tried to score as quickly as possible to give ourselves enough time to bowl them out,” he said. “We’ve got three days to take 20 wickets.
So, he is at least thinking about the follow-on.