Steyn record makes a joke of Indian batting

0

It is late afternoon, Kanpur, November 2004. Omar Henry, South Africa's convener of selectors gave a frown when asked a question and scratched his head.

Henry, a former left-arm Test spinner, wasn't quite sure if he had heard the name right. The discussion had been about South Africa's future A Team programme and the name Dale Steyn was mentioned as a future prospect along with AB de Villiers, and no relation to Fanie.

The previous season, Steyn had arrived from a country town called Phalaborwa for an academy programme and after a couple of net sessions was drafted into the amateur or second tier provincial ranks in a game at Centurion before being exposed to the first-class ranks. There as a two-line mention in the 51st edition of South Africa's prestige cricket annual 2004 that suggested, when Henry spotted it, an unknown from a no-nothing school in a country area known better for wild life watching.

Match referee Jeff Crowe, elder brother of Martin and a former New Zealand captain, who was in on the conversation, but for a different reason, grinned and offered an opinion. Match-winning heroes have emerged from more inferior backgrounds. Henry himself, fighting the apartheid system and there was the Xhosa shepherd boy turned strike force, Makhaya Ntini, who had to borrow boots to bowl in his first big school game.

Three weeks later, with Henry and the rest of the selection committee fired (they are inclined to make a habit of that in South Africa), and with barely eight first-class games to his credit, Steyn made his entry at Test level against England at Port Elizabeth's St George's Park. And Henry was still puzzling over ‘Dale Who . . .'

Sure, his first three Tests didn't show much. A lot of raw pace and little else, but as Allan Donald said, he is a quick learner. His average was hanging around in the low 40s, but that didn't mean too much. Check on the early form of most Test fast bowlers and the picture soon emerges, often they have a shaky start. It is all about belief and what the captain and coach want.

In his mid-20s, Steyn is lean, mean, very strong and highly competitive but not nasty; not Dennis Lillee or Jeff Thomson, Joel Garner or Andy Roberts, blood on the pitch nasty. He has that human streak as well, which is why the competitive edge is always there. After all, hunting wild game in the bush near where he lives sharpens the mind to that aggressive approach.

There was an eight over spell of bowling at Newlands earlier this year Paul Collingwood, who hung around wondering just how lucky he was he didn't get an edge. As a Test all-rounder of the 1950s and 1960s once said, Steyn bowled too well to take a wicket. Collingwood was nervous novice when on the last afternoon of that game, and with the new ball performing all types of tricks of a conjuring yo-yo artist, pulling the string this way and that, making fools of Collingwood and his partner Ian Bell.

‘It was all butterflies, thumbs and fingers out there and surviving was tough,' the England batsman recalled with a nervous grimace. ‘It is the best bowling I have faced since Glenn McGrath in the Ashes Tests in Australia. He was like that this whole series. I pity who have to face him next as he is the most lethal fast bowler there is today.'

Steyn's subcontinent record, and this is not just India, is remarkable, and this includes Pakistan and explains as well why Indian batsmen have crumbled the way they have in this Nagpur Test on day three in a career best first innings haul of 7/51 and India succumbed to fire and brimstone for a first innings total of 233 and were listing 66 for two in their second innings.

What it explains is how soft Sri Lanka and Bangladesh bowling attacks on docile pitches in five Tests during the past three months, has seen India scale to top of the ICC Test rankings. After day three of this first Test, that position is as shaky as any ponzi scheme claiming to give investors twice the returns.

Steyn's own comment at the end of the day about how the ball behaved after tea and where he so far collected eight wickets in 20.4 overs, his career strike rate reached an incredible 38.9 – consider that Donald finished with 47, Waqar Younis 43.4, Lillee 52 and Curtly Ambrose 54.4 to give you a guide – the reason why Steyn is top of the Test rankings after 37 Tests is through the type of skilled fast bowling artistry he has so far put together at Nagpur. Five wickets in a remarkable post-tea spell of 3.4-2-1-5 as India's batting collapsed as would a soggy wet paper bag – six for 12 in 7.4 overs – explains much about the young Phalaborwa rocket's intensity with the adrenaline was flowing.

He was bowling in such a way the batsmen had become confused about their shot selection against his mix of in-duckers, occasional cutters and off-stump attack that exposed an inexperienced lower order. It is where his pre-match prophecy of the team's vulnerability missing two of the remaining ‘fab four', Rahul Dravid and Vangipurappu Laxman, has haunted India as the bottom order was dismembered in the way it was at Motera, but with far more efficiency. It spells major trouble for Mahendra Singh Dhoni and, Kris Srikkanth and the remaining coterie of selectors.

To paraphrase a famous Simon and Garfunkel song . . . “Here's to you Raul and VVS . . . India have need of you now, aye, aye, aye. Here's to the hopes of a quick recovery oh . . . oh . . . oh . . . “

Steyn is not just a fast bowler but a streetwise one as well and as Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma struggled, the Titans fast bowler with Morné Morkel in tow, angling the ball from around the wicket, left the Indians bemused, not quite knowing where their off-stump is. It explains that just as batting is about partnerships so is bowling.

While not quite Motera two years on, the pace and variety in the South African bowling has left India knowing that with six sessions left, saving the game is the upper most on the minds of a bruised team on the third evening of the game.

With Hashim Amla scoring a maiden double century in the City of Oranges, the taste of fruit has rarely been sweeter for South Africa and the quiet, gentle number three who has shown his character all too often in the team's cause. This is despite deliberate mischiefmaking by a media con artist in Durban who suggests Amla has been snubbed by the new South African selectors for the limited-overs series.

In far off India, they look at such misrepresentation of facts and laugh it off.