A mistake made by Smith

Well the South African captain - Greame Smith no doubt should have considered his decision a million times or else repent regarding the same a million times when he chose to field first in a test match and that too involving Australia against whom he has had a series loss in the ODIs. There are hardly any cases in a test match where a captain wins the toss and chooses to field first because, in most of the cases, the pitch gets deteriorated day by day making it tough for the batsmen. In such a case, anyone who faces the bowlers first will have the initial advantage.

It has been more than two years since South Africa faced Australia be it on their home soil or outside. In the last two times since the two teams have met each other, both of them have walked away with a series. Much to anybody's surprise, South Africa won the series 2-1 in Australia while Australia won the series by the same margin in South Africa in the return series. This time, the series is scheduled at South Africa and if anybody has to go by the history, then it should be Australia walking with the honors. However, that has a long way to go.

In the first day's play at Cape Town, the scorecard clearly suggests that the pitch was a tough one to bat on with the way the Australian batsmen scored losing 8 wickets in between. There was Michael Clarke who scored an unbeaten century and Shaun Marsh who supported by scoring a handy 44 runs. In the end, the Australian run-rate was 3.89 runs an over. Though one side of the story suggests that the pitch was tough for batsmen, there was Michael Clarke who scored runs at a quick pace by ending the day scoring 107* runs from 114 balls.

With rain taking away almost 40 overs of the day's play, a lot of excitement has been stripped off the match making people wait for 24 hours more to see their favorite teams play it out there. One has to congratulate the South African wicketkeeper Mark Boucher for claiming his 500^th victim behind the stumps. This was not something achieved by either a batsman or a bowler. Very rarely do wicketkeepers and fieldsmen make news for the good reasons unlike batsmen and bowlers. With none of the wicketkeepers making it to even 400, Boucher's efforts and achievement should never go unnoticed.