South Africa to get down and dirty in Delhi again

SOUTH AFRICA TOUR OF INDIA, 2025 South Africa to get down and dirty in Delhi again Telford Vice Share Tweet

South Africa will play a Test in Delhi in November. ©BCCI

A member of the South African travelling party sleeping in his Delhi hotel room late one night during a men's Test series in India in November and December 2015 was awoken by an alarming rasping noise.

Had some sort of insect crept in? Had an appliance gone on the fritz? Were tree branches being blown against the window? None of the above.

It took several anxious minutes before he realised what the source was: his own breathing. But not like he had ever heard it. An unnatural dry, laboured, scraping sound seemed to fill the dark room.

He discovered the reason why in the lobby the next morning. Some of the air pollution that makes Delhi one of the most dangerous places on earth in which to draw breath in November and December every year had seeped into the hotel. The visible part of it lurked malevolently just below the ceiling.

Even so, the South African persisted with his plan of going for a run. India Gate was nearby, which seemed the perfect option. He ventured in that direction, but despite his phone telling him the 42-metre tall monument was 200 metres away he could see nothing but sludgy, soupy air all around.

India Gate was indeed where the map said it was, and he was lucky enough to witness the changing of the guard. But he had to get to within 50 metres of the mighty stone arch to be able to take in the scene properly. All the while, he could taste sooty sourness.

South Africa will be back in Delhi in November to play a Test. And the air will likely be filthy again. Because factories never stop belching smoke, because there are too many gassy cars and trucks worldwide transforming our roads into traffic sewers, because Diwali and its frenzy of fireworks will not be long past, because that's the time of year farmers clear their fields by burning the stubble that remains after the harvest, because there isn't much wind in Delhi in November and December to blow all that stuff somewhere else.

Dane Vilas was South Africa's wicketkeeper in that 2015 Delhi Test. He spent 16 hours behind the stumps and a minute short of an hour-and-a-half at the crease. Was the state of air on his mind?

"I don't remember," Vilas told Cricbuzz on Thursday. "There might have been a few concerns about it, but Delhi is a great city and it's a great stadium. But it was such a hectic tour for us. There were a lot of things going on with the pitches and other things.

"I don't know if we discussed whether the air would be an issue, so I wasn't really focused on that. I was just trying to worry about the spinning ball when I was keeping and not getting my shin blown off by [Ravindra] Jadeja when I was batting. I was looking down rather than up."

But Vilas does remember that "when you go there, breathing is tough. When you come in to land you can see the pollution. It takes you by surprise, especially coming from a place like South Africa, where we're very lucky with the air quality."

The Delhi Test was the last of the four South Africa played in that series. By then the visitors had been outplayed on a sharply turning pitch in Mohali, denied the chance to bounce back in Bangalore, where the only grassy surface of the series spent four days under cover because of rain, and hammered on a nasty in Nagpur, which the ICC rated poor. Another hiding followed at what was then called the Kotla.

The theory that the Indians couldn't stomach a third series loss - South Africa had won both of the white-ball rubbers - and so retaliated by preparing pitches seriously skewed in their favour soon took hold. That and the idea that the BCCI wanted to protect Virat Kohli in his first home series as Test captain.

How much of that is true isn't known, but we do know the South Africans presented a surface that offered outrageously inconsistent bounce for a Test against India at the Wanderers in January 2018. If it was a revenge plot, it backfired: India won the match and proved to themselves that they could prevail in even the most foreign conditions. That pitch was also deemed poor.

Mohammed Moosajee was South Africa's manager as well as their doctor in 2015, and he had his work cut out keeping players healthy in Delhi, as he told Cricbuzz: "The challenge is guys who have underlying comorbidities like asthma or hay fever. Those are the ones you have to watch carefully. Their conditions tend to flare up when the pollution levels are very high.

"We had a number of players who had allergic rhinitis and allergic asthma. They didn't need medication every day of their lives, but when the pollen count was very high or the pollution count was a bit high, they would react. They needed to take antihistamines, and use nasal spray and asthma pumps. We were proactive in managing it. If a player's symptoms started at night they would call me. We didn't wait for the morning to treat them."

Like Vilas, Russell Domingo, South Africa's coach in 2015, doesn't recall much about Delhi's air during the Test. That wasn't the case, he told Cricbuzz, when he returned to India's capital as Bangladesh's coach for a T20I in November 2018: "It was horrific, very challenging. Some guys got sick. They were nauseous."

Should the BCCI have put this year's Test somewhere else? "That time of year is tricky, particularly in Delhi," Domingo said. "I don't know what the best way to do it is, but it's not a great place to be playing then because of the smog."

Of course, India's players would also be affected. So this is not a case of the BCCI bullying visiting teams. Instead, it could be about political hot air. The Delhi and District Cricket Association have long been a powerful entity in India's administrative pecking order, and they need to be accommodated.

There could be something similar in the fact that the second match of South Africa's series will be played in Guwahati, a north-eastern city and the capital of the state of Assam. Guwahati's population of 1.2-million is almost 29 times smaller than Delhi's. It has never hosted a Test. Why now?

Maybe because Devajit Saikia replaced Jay Shah as BCCI secretary when Shah became ICC chair in December last year. That means Saikia represents the BCCI on the ICC's board. Saikia, an advocate, was born in Guwahati and is a former secretary of the Assam Cricket Association. He kept wicket for Assam in four Ranji Trophy matches in November and December 1990. Happily for him, none of them was in Delhi.

© Cricbuzz

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