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Australia will have the chance to bat South Africa out of the game come the second day of the third Test at Cape Town on Sunday after David Warner and Michael Clarke’s contrasting showing pulled them ahead on the opening day. Follow the action live from 7.30 pm AEDT.
There were talks before the start of the Test match about the Cape Town track being tweaked around to take the pace and bounce from it, thereby making it difficult for the Australian speedsters to garner too much assistance out of it.
That’s exactly how it turned out on the first day but a combination of factors ensured that it wasn’t South Africa who were going to take away the advantage after the day one of the game.
It started with the toss and once Australia had won it and South Africa had gone in without a frontline spinner, things became that much more difficult for the hosts.
Of course, the scrappy nature of the surface should have allowed their seam bowlers to gain some reverse out of it but tragedy struck when Australia’s tormentor-in-chief from Port Elizabeth, Dale Steyn, broke down early and the rest of the bowlers failed to step up sufficiently through the rest of the day.
Make no mistake, there wasn’t much by the way of help in the pitch for the quicker men, and yet, Morne Morkel extracted all that he could from the surface, even wounding the Australian captain a couple of times during the initial part of his innings.
Unfortunately for Morkel, he had nothing to show for in the wickets column, allowing Australia to surge ahead in the absence of a struggling Vernon Philander and Kyle Abbott showing any signs of penetration.
And then there was a small matter of Warner taking the game away from the opposition with an innings that had his name written all over it.
He attacked from the very beginning, and rarely gave his opposition any opportunities, if any. In fact such was his dominance over the South African attack that by the time he was dismissed, he had scored 135 out of the team’s 217 runs made at that stage.
While he slowed down towards the latter part of his innings, he used up only 152 balls to get there as compared to the 194 deliveries that had been used up by his partners to score the remaining 82 runs.
In fact when Warner got out, as the third wicket, there was every chance of South Africa making a comeback into the game.
However, with Steyn back in the shed, and the Clarke having weathered the early part of a raging storm against him, he was able to make it through to the end of the day without getting separated from his number five batsman, Steven Smith.
Clarke will require medical attention through the evening and probably early second morning too for all the blows he took from Morkel – there were at least three of them to his face, forearm and thumb – but that shouldn’t stop him from taking back the crease in pursuit of his century.
And if the pair can see off the first one hour or so of the session without any loss, they could well be in line for a score of more than 500, one that should allow them to dictate terms in this series-decider.
The situation around Steyn is still unclear with the team looking to administer an early morning fitness test on him to decide the course of his further participation in this game.
Join me for this second day of the third Test on Sunday and you can follow the live score of this game from 7.30 pm AEDT and post your comments below.
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