CRICKET SECOND TESTENGLAND battled hard yesterday, first with ball and then, in evening sunshine and buffeting breeze, with bat. But with two days remaining, the struggle to stave off defeat will be uphill all the way on a pitch showing signs of uneven bounce, the bane of batsmen when delivered at high velocity.
Conceding a first-innings lead of 319, England lost Andrew Strauss for a duck in the fourth over to a brute of a ball from Makhaya Ntini that just feathered the shoulder of his bat on the way through to the keeper. Alastair Cook and Michael Vaughan both came within a whisker of losing their wickets before the captain finally shortly before the close.
It was gritty, combative Test cricket at its best, with aggressive South African bowling fuelled by the success of their own batsmen, backed by a claustrophobic ring of close catchers.
With eight balls remaining, Vaughan, flummoxed by Ntini's capacity to slant the ball in from wide of the crease and then hold it up away from the bat, edged low to Mark Boucher.
Nightwatchman Jimmy Anderson survived a close and vehement lbw shout second ball to see out Ntini and it was left to Cook, 23 not out, to play out Morne Morkel's final over, leaving England at 50 for two.
To see out the game - a remote proposition but one not to be totally discounted - or even take it into a fifth day, England must avoid the sort of spendthrift batting that characterised their first innings. The disgrace then lay not in being bowled out for a low score in helpful conditions but doing so at the heady rate of four runs per over. England were fallible in being unable, in the few days allowed them, to adjust their game from the pristine surface at Lord's to that at Headingley.
England set out yesterday to exert some control, bowling tight lines to constructive fields, which worked well enough in that the South African batsmen were made to graft harder for their runs. But it has been another flog for bowlers who must be suffering now after the second innings at Lord's and now this.
Anderson in particular has now sent down 77 full-on overs in the two innings, 44 of them at Headingley, while Andrew Flintoff, the bowler whose bowling contributions on his return to Tests England have said they will monitor and manage, got through 40 overs for only 77 runs and one wicket. As ever he gave it everything, but he ended up bowling overs that in a reliable attack would have been shared more evenly.
Instead Stuart Broad looked spent, bowling 29 overs, his average now up around the unacceptable reaches of 50, while Monty Panesar's 29 overs were also fewer than he might have bowled. Darren Pattinson, meanwhile, performed with a tidy efficiency that comes with a good repeating action, but there has been no evidence here of a special talent beyond one that might be able to exploit helpful pitches.
For the first two sessions and beyond, it had been South Africa consolidating on the solid work of the brilliant Ashwell Prince and AB De Villiers on Saturday as they reached 522. Prince was able to take his score to 149 before becoming a second victim for the Dandenong Dazzler, the fifth wicket partnership yielding 212, a record against England beating the 192 of Gary Kirsten and Boucher at Durban nine years ago.
De Villiers, however, went on to reach 174, his sixth Test hundred, an innings embracing the best part of nine hours. It ended when he launched expansively at the third new ball and succumbed to a stunning one-handed catch by Flintoff at first slip.
Both De Villiers and Prince have shown the sort of application in seeking not just hundreds but considerable ones that has been lacking in the England top order all too often in the recent past. A standard has been set.
