For the first hour of the morning of Day 4, it almost looked like Dean Elgar and AB de Villiers would motor their way to their respective three figure marks. They were scoring at a brisk pace, the runs were coming nice and easy, a few edges failed to carry and there was no stopping the duo.
Jasprit Bumrah looked sharp, Ishant Sharma provided the on and off shouts for LBW, R Ashwin troubled Elgar but to no luck. Enter Mohammed Shami, and there was suddenly a twist in the tale. Shami steamed in hard hiding the ball in his palms, getting some reverse swing and managed to send back three South African batsmen back in the hut with some brilliant swing bowling. It was tough work according to Shami.
“The pitch has been slow since the beginning, even on the first day you saw that it is going low continuously. And even today, it went slow and low and you needed a lot of extra effort. We tried to give 110-120 percent. That was more important for us,” Shami said.
India’s most successful bowler in the first session was hardly given a ball to bowl in the session to follow. This arised a lot of speculations whether he was injured and hence wasn’t asked to comeback for another spell. Shami cleared the air and said there were no injury concerns whatsoever and it was totally the captain’s call as to when he wanted him back in business. Shami did comeback and pick another wicket to take his figures to 4/49. For the fast bowler, it was a moment of satisfaction.
“Whenever you perform overseas, your confidence grows and you feel good. I just try to perform for my team as much as I can and if I can do my best,it will be good for me.”
What was even more a sight to watch was Shami troubling Quinton de Kock in one over where he got past his edge on four occassions. Edges were flying off between slips and running away for boundaries but Shami did get his scalp soon. It was a matter of patience and keeping calm, believed Shami.
“For any bowler it is frustrating when the fielder is there and the edges are coming, but the result is not the one you want and the batsman isn’t getting out. So there is a little frustration mentally but you need to be mentally strong at that stage and think how long you can persist with it. He got three boundaries on three consecutive good balls. So I did the same again and I got result on that. As a bowling unit, we were looking to give away as few runs as possible and we wanted to attack them fully.”
