Tony de Zorzi is 81 not out. ©AFP
Tony de Zorzi lives on the edge. Make that on the edges. At least, that’s what he did at Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore on Monday, when the ball seemed to find the middle of his bat far more rarely than it did the splintery perimeters.
Unsurprisingly, De Zorzi walked a tightrope. With the bowlers, with his batting partners, with the umpires, with the overall drama of the second day of the first Test. Which was mostly a tumble of wickets on an increasingly turning surface.
Pakistan lost their last five for 16 in 56 deliveries. Four of South Africa’s crashed for 26 in 63 balls in the last hour of a day that ended with the visitors six down and 162 behind.
But they still have De Zorzi, and that could make all the difference. He batted for 15 minutes short of three hours and faced 140 balls for his unbeaten 81. How he’s made it that far, no-one can say.
Two deliveries before tea, when De Zorzi had scraped and scratched and edged his way to 23, he was hit on the back pad and given out lbw to Sajid Khan coming around the wicket. Only to be reprieved on review because he had been hit outside off stump.
In the fourth over after the next drinks break, and between Tristan Stubbs being caught behind off Noman Ali and Dewald Brevis bunting the first ball bowled to him – by Sajid – straight into midwicket’s hands, Sajid again thought he had De Zorzi leg-before. Umpire Chris Brown disagreed, and was proved correct because the impact was again outside off.
Thirty-six balls later, and six deliveries after Noman Ali had trapped a sweeping Kyle Verreynne in front, Sajid launched another raucous appeal to try and rid the crease of De Zorzi. Again Brown said no. Again the Pakistanis sent the decision upstairs. Again it came back down unchanged, this time because De Zorzi had – wouldn’t you know it – edged the ball onto his pad.
By then, De Zorzi had done what he hadn’t in his previous nine Test innings going back almost 11 months: reached 50. Those innings included two ducks, two twos, a four, and not one effort of at least 20. Only once did he bat for more than an hour. Not once did he face more than 35 balls.
In consecutive trips to the crease for Western Province in March this year, he scored 78 not out against Northerns and 141 against Boland. But his other three first-class innings for Province this season have yielded just 55 runs.
De Zorzi is a solid thumper of the ball rather than an exponent of the angular elegance that is the preserve of many left-handers. Since his 177 in Chattogram in October 2024, it’s the bowlers who have done the thumping.
His batting on Monday bore the mark of that chastening experience. He played like a man who hadn’t had much success lately, and that served him well. He wasn’t looking for the perfect stroke; he was looking for the stroke that would preserve his wicket. If it also brought him runs, happy days. On a spinning, ever lower bouncing pitch, and against Pakistan’s bristling slow poisoners, that was no easy task.
But De Zorzi was up to it. He edged three of his nine fours and flicked two more. His other four boundaries were meatily pulled, cut and swept. His slog-swept six against the turn and over midwicket off Sajid in the sixth over after tea was a thing of shimmering confidence.
“Yes, I’ve not scored many runs lately,” De Zorzi seemed to say with that shot. “Yes, I’ve hardly been batting with diamonds on the soles of my shoes in this innings. But I’m still here. And I’m getting better the longer I am.”
Other players would have been content to defend the penultimate ball of the day; from Salman Khan, which squatted after pitching outside off. De Zorzi stepped towards his stumps back and fetched a mighty pull that sent the ball racing to the midwicket boundary.
The signature moment of his innings was none of the above. It was, instead, what happened after he had been comprehensively beaten by Salman’s first delivery of the third-last over of the day.
De Zorzi pushed forward defensively, but the ball turned as if it had hit the corner of a table and fizzed past the outside edge. De Zorzi’s foot never budged, which of course did not stop Mohammad Rizwan from denuding the wicket of its bails with a gloved flourish.
One fell on De Zorzi’s side of the stumps. With unnerving calm he turned around, bent at the waist, picked up the bail, and handed it to the wicketkeeper. He was in his personal Zen garden.
“It’s not ideal to have lost those wickets so close to the end of play, but this does happen in Test cricket,” Senuran Muthusamy, who took 6/117 and nursed South Africa to the close with De Zorzi, told a press conference. “It’s about bouncing back and finding some resilience.”
Muthusamy knows what resilience looks like. For the 26 minutes he spent batting with De Zorzi, it was 22 yards away from him.
© Cricbuzz
