South Africa send India crashing to 136/9 on Day 1 of first Test

Everything happened in a trice on Thursday. The rains, unrelenting for over 15 hours stopped; the dark clouds, omnipresent in Johannesburg, disappeared; the sun, untraceable in the morning, showed in its full glow and the SuperSport Park in Centurion, waterlogged in the morning, morphed into a dry green expanse.

Yes, all this happened in a flash. The Indian team did not disappoint the hosts. Their batting ensured that things stayed in sync with the happenings of the day.

It did not take much time for the visitors to realise that on this surface Dale Steyn is like a wild animal cut loose on them by the hostile hosts and the 22- yard strip in the middle is not a bouncy wicket but a hydra-headed monster. It also did not take much time for the millionaire cricketers to realise that their technique to the bouncing ball was not adequate. But for bad light, the world No 1 team would have failed to last one full session.

Every time Steyn darted into the wicket, the Indian batsmen must have felt that a bullet in a gun was waiting for someone to pull the trigger on them. They readily obliged to fall prey. At 136 for nine, there is little doubt where the first Test is heading. The only positive from the abysmal batting is that the Indian team will have an extra day or two to spend in the Sun City, near here, that they have planned to visit at the end of this Test.

Although Morne Morkel ended the day with four wickets, Steyn, surely, was the chief tormentor for the visitors. He had the scalps of three main batsmen — Virender Sehwag, Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman. Barring Sehwag (and Harbhajan later in the evening), every batsman fell to the zip off the wicket. Sehwag went into attack mode too early in the day and his insouciance set the trend for the day’s play.

Wickets kept tumbling out at regular intervals, raising questions about their No1 status. Gautam Gambhir and Rahul Dravid spent about an hour each in the middle but not once did they look comfortable. Suresh Raina proved that he did not belong to the Test class. The question is how come skipper MS Dhoni and Gary Kirsten have not yet realised this. Raina lasted for five deliveries.
Tendulkar provided a brief resistance trying to take the fight to the rival camp but he had no answer to Steyn’s in-coming delivery. Before him, Laxman fell to the same bowler, almost in a similar manner. The difference was that Steyn hit Tendulkar’s pad and Laxman’s stumps.

Dhoni, woefully short on runs, stood up to the  pace battery with his typical agricultural technique but he kept running out of partners.

Harbhajan Singh tried to prove that his recent string of scores were not fluke but was run out at the most inopportune time.

Dhoni was unbeaten on 33 when the play was called off due to bad light. Debutant Jaidev Unadkat was giving him company on one. As a bowler, he is known to be an unknown commodity. India would not mind if he turns out as an unknown batting commodity as well. It is not right to predict the result of a match going by one session of play but too many things happened in too little time.

Yes, the Indians seemed to have lost the Test in a trice.