With series tied, Amla returns to scene of crime

“I’ve got the same name‚” batsman Hashim Amla said with a twinkle in his eye at The Oval on Tuesday after he was asked whether he was as good a player as he was five years ago‚when the original Test ground’s stately redroofed pavilion and the nearby skeletal steel gasholder served as the backdrop for his finest innings.

Amla’s undefeated 311 in South Africa’s first innings of that series set the tone — and silenced sniping from the more jingoistic sections of the English press — for whatbecame a 2-0 triumph that took the visitors to the top of the Test rankings.

At 790 minutes — or 13 hours and 10 minutes — Amla’s innings is the sixth-longest in Test history. And it’s not the longest by a South African.

That honour belongs to Gary Kirsten‚ who took 88 more minutes to make 275 against New Zealand at Kingsmead in December 1999.S o‚ did Amla fancy reeling in that record? “I’ve trained as hard as I can train‚” he said.

“The rest of it‚ whether the scores come on the board or not‚ is about applying yourself.”That Amla will apply himself tomorrow against England in the third Test at The Oval in London is not in question.

But whether he has retained what’s required to score what remains South Africa’s only triple century is a more complicated issue. In his 75 innings since his last trip toThe Oval in Test whites, Amla has scored 11 centuries‚ among them 196 against Australia in Perth in November 2012 and 208 against the West Indies in Centurion in December2014‚ and he averages 48.31.

Meanwhile, Kagiso Rabada will be in no hurry to revisit the recent past.

The fast bowler was banned for the second Test at Trent Bridge after being docked a fourth demerit point for telling Ben Stokes to “f##k off” after dismissing him at Lord’s.Rabada will be back tomorrow‚ prob ably in place of Duanne Olivier.

Amla and Rabada will be key to South Africa ’s plans to take a great leap forward in a series currently locked at 1-1.