India’s bowling plan was refreshingly simple and yet very cerebral after losing the toss at Cape Town. It had the remnants of India’s 2021 triumph in Australia but with an attacking twist: attack the leg-side game of the two most successful left-handers in the previous Test, and keep it simple to the right-handers.
INDIA VS SOUTH AFRICA, 2ND TEST LIVE
Against Australia, it was initially to test out the batsmen’s strengths and patience (like Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne’s), keeping them tied with a packed on-side field. Here, they gunned for the left-handers with a more attacking approach to actively pursue a dismissal.
That open-chested predator Mohammed Siraj had a leg-slip, a deepish short-leg very square (Rohit Sharma had himself stationed there) and kept peppering Elgar.
Jasprit Bumrah, who had kept angling it away from left-handers at Centurion, bowled a series of inward-curlers, even bending in the yorkers at Elgar and Zorzi. The leg slip was omnipresent, there didn’t seem anything untenanted on that side. The off-side though was almost barren. ‘Go on, try to conjure a shot there if you can’.
Elgar’s father Richard tells a sign that he looks for that tells him how he knows his son is going to have a good batting day. If the leg-side tuck through square-leg comes early in the knock, he is happy. “It’s a bit strange but somehow that tells me he is focused, his balance is fine, and he is going to be okay” Richard had told this newspaper. The opportunity came in the fourth ball he faced, the first from Bumrah. But Elgar’s attempted nudge turned into a shovel and the ball ballooned just over midwicket. Was that a sign of what was to come?
More curlers came from both seamers, and Elgar would try his best, but couldn’t effect any jail break. The man who had dazzled everyone in the first game with his picture-perfect inside-out cover drives wasn’t getting anything there. But dogged as he is, he seemed to hunch down in the pit, shovelling away.
Then came a series of Siraj deliveries on that leg and middle line, and Elgar would do his hop-and-stab or stand-and-tuck. Siraj then threw the bait, a length delivery outside off. In his mind’s eyes, Elgar must have seen acres of empty spaces on the off-side and jumped at it like a real-estate agent. But it wasn’t just temptation but deception too that Siraj had thrown in: this ball straightened a touch and suddenly Elgar was cramped for room. He tried to stab it out, but after being so intent on his pads for a long while, the off-side game wasn’t quite there yet. And unsurprisingly, he dragged it on to his stumps.
Siraj meanwhile was working over the dreadlocked Tony de Zorzi. Unlike Aiden Markram, who continued to be a walking wicket unable to pick length early and was playing at everything down the line and to noone’s surprise edged Siraj behind, Zorzi was leaving balls on lengths. Crisp, compact, and secure. Siraj tightened down quickly, started to go for the leg and middle, at his legs. Yet again, the leg slip and leg-side was packed. Eventually, Zorzi went for a nervy glance, constrained no doubt with the leg-side army, and KL Rahul continued his good wicketkeeping job. According to the reports published in indianexpress.com .
Bumrah would sort out the debutant right-hander Tristan Stubbs with his pack of tricks, alternating lengths. Then when he saw one of his regular inward-kickers pop off Stubbs’s thigh pad, he would have known that’s the way to go. Another one was GPSed in the same code, and Stubbs stabbed it off the inner edge to Rohit at short-leg.
