Elgar's drift spins a web around India

They said the pitch would turn from day one and they were right. Before lunch, Dean Elgar got a few to jag almost square. Yes, Dean Elgar. They did not say who would turn it.

South Africa's self-confessed 'pie-chucker' produced a performance matched in impact only by his century in Galle last July. In his secondary discipline, Elgar proved the value of an added skill and asked questions of conditions, which made day one appear closer to day four.

This not Test cricket as South Africa know it: the ball turned substantially from the first session. By the end of the day, puffs of dust smoked out of the surface at every footfall and the match is unlikely to last five days. But it is the kind of Test cricket they were preparing for: "the worst," as Faf du Plessis put it pre-match. Part of that preparation was having as many slower bowling options as possible without compromising on the length of the batting line-up or the pace pack, although South Africa did go into the match with six instead of their usual seven specialist batsmen to make room for an extra spinner.

That was the reason Elgar formed part of the attack, although he was not expected to be a big part of it. His job was to act as the pause button, to get rid of some overs while the main men thought of their next move. He was not going to be tasked with being a main man himself.

Hashim Amla brought Elgar when he switched bowling ends for Kagiso Rabada to ensure there was always some discomfort from one side for the opposition. On debut, Rabada showed the potential to perform in the longest format and hurried the batsmen with pace. Elgar was the exact opposite. He delivered in slow-motion, allowing flight and drift to take the ball to the batsmen, almost at the speed of a carrier pigeon and maybe veering off course along the way too. The waiting and the wondering caused uncertainty. Cheteshwar Pujara played down the wrong line as a result.

That dismissal, a fluke perhaps, brought out a caricature celebration from Elgar, complete with chest-bashing. But he saw soon the value of behaving like a serious bowler. He paid attention to the drift and flight and saw that he could draw the batsmen forward and then surprise them with his lack of pace. Ajinkya Rahane and Wriddhiman Saha both went that way to turn Elgar's throwaway overs into trophies that will hold more pride of place than some his previous scalps.

Among Elgar's Tests scalps are Misbah-ul-Haq and Steven Smith but both were snaffled because of their own slackness. Misbah slogged and edged, Smith bottom-edged a long-hop onto his stumps. The only batsmen Elgar dismissed in fortuitous fashion was Amit Mishra; Rahane and Saha were outskilled, not just by the bowler but South Africa's tactics too.

Amla's captaincy deserves some of the credit for the squeeze South Africa applied because of the way he rotated the bowlers and manipulated the field. Amla almost always had at least one close catcher to constantly cramp India. The short-leg was mandatory, the short cover was a constant annoyance and the short mid-wicket was there for a mistake from Vernon Philander's nagging line. It was only fitting that the only close-ish catcher who was called into the action was Elgar himself, who took a good low catch at a cover position that was a little closer than usual to dismiss Virat Kohli.

Kohli was one of only three batsmen dismissed from the Pavilion End. The rest, including three of Elgar's scalps all fell at the City End, where there is substantial rough already.

Doubtless Elgar would have been thinking about the batting consequences of that area, even as he was trying to hit it as a bowler. His real job is to open the batting and he would have known that was going to be tough.

He seemed to have gotten a close enough look at things to have an idea of how to deal with them, though. For the hour Elgar was at the crease, he batted patiently, not the Faf du Plessis-blockathon patience that South Africa have occasionally been known to employ, but the wait-for-the-ball-until-it-comes-to-you kind of patience that Rahane and Saha had not shown.

At first, Elgar seemed to be as anxious as they were. He went forward to R Ashwin, saw a leading edge pop up off one ball and an inside edge off another. Then he remembered to hang back. He could do it against Varun Aaron and continued to stay in his crease most of the time when Ravindra Jadeja was brought on. He did not look comfortable all the time and later called it "the hardest day of Test cricket I've had" but he survived. Today, that was enough. Tomorrow it will turn again. That much we know. We don't yet know for whom.