Amla: batting speaks louder than words

Two days ago, Hashim Amla shrugged off questions about the added pressure on his shoulders now that he would captain SA's Test team at home for the first time.

Yesterday, on the second day of the first Test against West Indies at Centurion, he answered those questions more emphatically than he could ever do in words.

Amla scored 208 - the highest innings by an SA captain on home soil, the biggest score by a South African against the Windies, and the highest by any batsman at Centurion.

And that was only the most glittering jewel in SA's crown. Amla and AB de Villiers shared a stand of 308 - a record for SA's fourth wicket and their 12th-biggest partnership overall. Stiaan van Zyl scored an undefeated 101 on debut - making him the sixth South African to register a Test ton at his first attempt, and the first to do so at home - and SA piled up 552/5 before declaring.

A thunderstorm prevented any further play, giving the Windies until this morning to start chipping away at the 353 they need to avoid having to follow on.

Not much connects Amla to Keith Miller. Except, perhaps, the Australian fighter-pilot-cum-dashing-allrounder-cum-Test-captain's famous answer to a question from Michael Parkinson: "Pressure is a Messerschmidt up your arse, playing cricket is not."

So this effort was, in Amla's eyes, nothing special. "I didn't think of it as anything other than an innings of Test cricket," he said.

SA resumed on 340/3 and nothing distracted Amla or De Villiers until the ninth over of the day, when De Villiers slashed at Sulieman Benn and was caught.

The pomp of Amla's innings and the circumstances of Van Zyl's pushed De Villiers' 152 down the pecking order of prominence, but it was a fine display of Test batting at its most innovative.

Van Zyl needed 11 deliveries, not many of them played convincingly, to get off the mark. "It's a big stage, but it's still just a cricket ball coming towards you," he said, but he conceded that: "My gloves were wet (with sweat) before I faced my first ball."

When his first single was in the book, Amla told him: "I know it's only one run, but well done."

Van Zyl replied: "It's the best run I've scored in my career."

Back in the real world, Amla knows he and his team would have to box clever around the weather, with more rain forecast for today and Sunday.

"We tried to score as quickly as possible to give ourselves enough time to bowl them out," he said. "We've got three days to take 20 wickets."