England’s three frontline seamers claimed a wicket apiece as South Africa continued their slide towards inevitable defeat reaching lunch on 88-3 on the third day of the second test at Old Trafford in Manchester on Saturday, still a massive 176 runs away from an innings defeat.
Keegan Petersen (20*) and an injured Rassie van der Dussen (14*) will resume after the lunch break with a seemingly impossible task ahead of them.
Captain Dean Elgar (11) was the first to go after a brilliant exhibition of seam and swing bowling from veteran Jimmy Anderson (7-2-15-1) who moved the ball both ways to beat the inside and outside edges of the bat before flattening the off stump.
Fellow opener Sarel Erwee was similarly non-plussed by the movement and off stump line of Ollie Robinson (10-3-26-1) before deciding too late to leave a delivery and getting the thinnest of edges to ‘keeper Ben Foakes. His unconvincing 25 spanned 59 balls.
Aiden Markram endured a horror innings which will surely spell an end to his test career for a while. He played and missed at a couple of deliveries before Stuart Broad (6-2-16-1) removed his off-bail with a beautiful delivery angled into the right-hander and dismissed him for an eight-ball duck. Except that it was a no-ball.
Markram (6) flicked the next delivery to the mid-wicket boundary to get off the mark but never looked convincing and Broad soon had his man courtesy of a wretched, loose drive to a wide delivery which ended in the hands of Zak Crawley at second slip.
Petersen has looked as composed as any batsman in the game so far while van der Dussen, who did not field during England’s massive first innings total of 415-9 because of a fractured index finger, has looked understandably tentative with the bat in hand.
ENGLAND: Alex Lees, Zak Crawley, Ollie Pope, Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow, Ben Stokes (capt), Ben Foakes (wk), Stuart Broad, Ollie Robinson, Jack Leach, James Anderson
SOUTH AFRICA: Dean Elgar (capt), Sarel Erwee, Keegan Petersen, Aiden Markram, Rassie van der Dussen, Kyle Verreynne (wk), Simon Harmer, Keshav Maharaj, Kagiso Rabada, Anrich Nortje, Lungi Ngidi.