The Standard Bank Proteas took 16 wickets on the second day of their one-off day/night Test match against Zimbabwe to clinch victory by an innings and 120 runs at St. George’s Park in Port Elizabeth on Wednesday.
Zimbabwe simply had no answer to the Proteas attack as Morne Morkel (his seventh five-wicket haul) did the demolition job in the first innings and then Keshav Maharaj helped himself to his third five-wicket haul in the second innings when the visitors had been forced to follow on.
In all Zimbabwe batted no more than 72 overs in their two innings and while they had to contend with the twilight and night time conditions for the first part of their first innings their entire second innings took place in day light.
In addition to Maharaj’s 5/59 in 17.3 overs Andile Phehlukwayo returned career-best figures of 3/13 in 7 overs.
Aiden Markram was named Sunfoil Man of the Match for his first innings century.
AB de Villiers, the stand-in wicketkeeper for the injured Quinton de Kock, took eight catches behind the stumps and now has 205 catches (not all behind the stumps) and five stumpings from his Test career.
Meanwhile: De Villiers has given the four-day pink ball experience the thumbs-up despite the one-sided victory over Zimbabwe at St George’s.
De Villiers says the novel idea brings in a fast-paced dynamic compared to the traditional five-day approach, and teams can learn to adapt to the varying conditions that affect the match throughout the day.
“I think it was quite nice,” he said of the experience. “I found the batsmen were a little bit more positive. There were talks of declaring earlier than normal, I spoke to Gibbo (Gibson) last night and we started talking about declarations a lot earlier than normal. It encourages a lot more positive cricket, I enjoy that. I still enjoy five-day cricket but there is definitely an excitement to day-night test cricket for four-days. It is positive, there is a lot happening, we all enjoyed it as well as the spectators.
“It’s like any other format,” he said. “You have to adapt, find ways, game plans, structures and strategies to get through certain times of the test match. It looks like the last hour is tough to bat and that is an area that guys have to be aware of. We took some learning from that, it is an area where you need to tighten up as a batsman but on the other side the bowler has an opportunity to expose the batting line-up. It’s a mindset and awareness of knowing what times are a little bit better to bat on and which aren’t. There is room for day-night test cricket, we love playing it.”
De Villiers says the squad will take some experience from the match despite it lasting less than two days, with both the batsmen and bowlers building up on match intensity workloads ahead of the three-match series against India starting next week.
“We still take a lot out of it,” he said of the match. “I think our batters toiled really hard on a wicket that seamed around the entire innings. It sped up in the evening and we started losing wickets, so the guys will take learning from that. From a bowling point of view, it was nice to get them (Zimbabwe) to follow-on so the guys got a few overs under the belt, we bowled 70-odd overs consecutively which was good.
Some of the guys got good results on wickets that you can’t buy in the nets. All in all it was a good outing for us, we will go out there and work hard before the India series but I was happy with the two days.” - ANA @Cricket SA @Supersport
