Saturday – South African captain Faf du Plessis bemoaned the lack of a genuine off-spinner to bowl to his batsmen at the nets after his team collapsed for totals of 129 and 73 to the off-breaks of Sri Lanka’s Dilruwan Perera to lose the first Test inside three days by 278 runs at the Galle Cricket Stadium yesterday.
“When we face off-spin in the nets, it’s a coach trying to bowl off-spin at you. It’s not even the same quality as a Perera,” said Du Plessis at the post-match press conference.
“The shape that he has is a lot different than the pace you can practice against. You can practice 10,000 balls, but he bowls a different shape. He gets drift. Especially today, with that extra wind, the ball was drifting a lot. And when he gets that extra spin from the pitch, it makes the variation really big, because one ball is going away from you and one is turning back in.
“Hopefully the guys playing against him can go away in the next week and practice and plan against that. You can only work on a plan if you face someone, and a lot of our guys haven’t faced him. So hopefully that will get better in the next Test,” he said.
Since the retirement of Pat Symcox from international cricket in 1998, South Africa has never had a decent off-spinner in their side although they have been served by a plethora of leg-spinners and left-arm spinners – two of whom are in the present side – Keshav Maharaj and Tabraiz Shamsi.
Symcox played 20 Tests for South Africa and took 37 wickets. Perera proved more than a handful for the South African batsmen as he ended with a match bag of ten wickets.
Du Plessis didn’t blame the Galle pitch for his batsmen’s debacle but said: “I didn’t think the wicket was that bad. I thought it was actually a decent Test wicket.
It’s obviously a lot more challenging to face spin. But there weren’t any demons in the wicket at any stage while we were playing.
“I think there are good lessons for us to learn. We weren’t good enough. We expected it to be tough coming here. We know the Sri Lankan spinners are very, very good, especially in their own conditions. We weren’t up to par, so we need to make sure we get better if we want to compete in this series. If we don’t, then Sri Lanka will be on top of us,” said Du Plessis.
“Sri Lanka showed us why they were better. In the post-match now, if you look at the one innings that (Dimuth) Karunaratne played - if you take that out - the rest of the game was pretty similar.
There were one or two batters in their batting line up that found it a little bit easier, and the rest didn’t. There’s motivation for us that if you keep getting wickets - it is tough coming in. I think that’s the biggest difference when you play in the subcontinent.
When you do lose a wicket, the next five overs becomes tricky - you need to make sure you get through that. Karunaratne was there the whole time for them in the first innings. He scored more than half the runs of their total. He was fantastic in this game. As bad as we were in our batting, he was very, very good,” he said.