Mumbai: It’s been six years since a South African Test team came to Indian shores. The 2019 series was during the early days of the World Test Championship. Credit to Faf du Plessis, 41, that he still looks every bit as fit as he was then as South African captain.
“It’s a tough place to come and play cricket. Your best chance is when you start the series well and you get a little bit of confidence that you have got runs under your belt and you put the conditions a little bit out of your head. Then the rest of the series would feel easier,” du Plessis said in Mumbai while promoting the upcoming edition on SA20.
Du Plessis was speaking from experience. His team got off to a poor start in the last series and were eventually mauled by the hosts. Two innings defeats out of three losses and the margin of result in the third Test was 203 runs. There were very few takeaways for the Proteas from the series, only painful memories. Unlike popular perception, none of those matches were played on rank turners. On batting friendly pitches that progressively took spin, three Indian batters - Mayank Agarwal, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma - scored double hundreds in each of the three Tests.
Interestingly, the pitch for the first Test in Kolkata, starting Friday is not expected to take excessive or early spin either. But the conversations ahead of every series in India still revolve around spin, just as pace and seam movement is the catch phrase when South Africa play hosts to India. Because just enough spin is all India’s tweakers require. This time though, South Africa have come better prepared with a drawn series in Pakistan where spin was a big factor.
{{/usCountry}}Interestingly, the pitch for the first Test in Kolkata, starting Friday is not expected to take excessive or early spin either. But the conversations ahead of every series in India still revolve around spin, just as pace and seam movement is the catch phrase when South Africa play hosts to India. Because just enough spin is all India’s tweakers require. This time though, South Africa have come better prepared with a drawn series in Pakistan where spin was a big factor.
{{/usCountry}}“The guys have played really well in the subcontinent in the last 12 or 14 months and they’ve gone to Pakistan and they’ve played well,” he said. “But the first Test will be a big stepping stone…whether we’re going to do well or we’re going to struggle. It’s unfortunate that it’s going to be only two Test matches. That’s the downside of a new schedule these days. You always feel like just when you start getting into a series, the series is over.”
Shorter Test series is a tradeoff Cricket South Africa now have in trying to give SA20 the best chance to succeed commercially. Paradoxically, a series of short sharp series in the last WTC cycle worked in South Africa’s favour as they covered late ground to make the final. In the big match, Temba Bavuma’s team brought out their best game to trounce Australia.
“It’s confidence. The sport has everything to do with it. It’s in your head basically. You walk into the field. You feel like you can overcome any situation that you are confronted with,” du Plessis said about playing as WTC winners. “So South Africa would arrive in India with confidence, as a team that has played well, they are the number one Test team in the world. So that means a lot.
“But confidence also quickly goes when you play one Test match and you lose. Sports is strange, like at one moment you feel like you’re in such great form and then in a replay, you feel like you’re out of it. So it’s great that we’re coming here with it. But the first Test will be very important for the series.”