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Kolkata: Paul Harris may have tasted success with his leg-stump line in the first Test in Nagpur, cramping the Indian batsmen and sending the home side's team management into a tizzy, but on Monday, it was a completely different story.
The South African think-tank seemed to have been well prepared to try out the leg-side theory against the Indian batsmen once again, but what they perhaps didn't foresee was that the umpires would crack down on the left-arm spinner for his negative line when Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag were at the crease. Harris, in the course of his 24-over effort, bowled a dozen wides, and all of them were given by umpire Ian Gould.
As Dale Steyn was relegated to manning the ropes, South Africa's pace arsenal was not as terrifying as it was in the first Test. India were racing away on 118 for 2 off 24 overs, riding on the onslaught from Sehwag and Tendulkar. Quite expectedly, Graeme Smith resorted to Plan B which had worked wonders on the fourth day of the Nagpur Test.
But the ploy failed to work this time around as a resilient Tendulkar and Sehwag survived leg stump line dished out by Harris, who earned the empathy of umpire Gould.
After a grueling day in the field, Harris finished with figures of 24-1-97-1. His only consolation was dismissing Tendulkar after his century towards the close of play, helping South Africa crawl their way back into the game.
Worn down by both the batsmen and the umpires, Harris was forced to come around the wicket and bowl a lot straighter, while Tendulkar and Sehwag used their wrists with deftness to dispatch the ball to the fence.
Over the next hour or so, both Sehwag and Tendulkar played inside-out strokes to the fence through the covers or deployed their wrists to pick up boundaries on the on-side.
Even as Smith was up in arms, wondering whether it was worth persisting with the mindgame that wasn't working out, Sehwag unleashed the reverse sweep twice to fetch fours. The rough wasn't there to exploit like in the first Test match and Harris was unlucky when stand-in wicketkeeper AB de Villiers spilled a stumping chance with Sehwag on 129, but India had snuffed out Smith's negative line tactics by then.
South Africa coach Corrie Van Zyl admitted after the day's play that the negative line did not work against the Indians on Monday. "You could see it as a negative line and the umpire thought so as well, that's why he called them wides. But there wasn't as much turn as there was in Nagpur for Harris," van Zyl told reporters, adding, "Some of them did turn out of the rough, but most didn't. For Harris, it was a lot tougher here than it was in Nagpur where there was some assistance."
