Fast ... and really fast

Every now and again - just so that the world can keep on spinning, karma can remain aligned and humans sane - it's good to have a day like this. "Nice, flat track," all the commentators agreed, as Graeme Smith was winning the toss. Apparently, in choosing to bat, he did as well. Get in, stay in, make hay: another, regular, batsmen-dominated day in world cricket.

It appeared, for a few overs, precisely that way. If there was anything in the track at all for bowlers, then you'd rely on Mohammad Asif to sniff it out and even he gave the impression that he was bowling on cement. By the end of the day, 16 wickets and 259 runs later, with rarely a ball doing anything it wasn't really meant to do, we could thank God for fast - really fast - bowlers. Pitches, opposing batsmen, the situation of a series, a Test. It doesn't always matter to them.

Shoaib Akhtar was up first and though it doesn't seem like it, he hadn't played a Test for ten days shy of a full year. He wasn't meant to be totally fit either and though that assertion wasn't fully tested, as he was only required to bowl 11 overs, batsmen might rightly ask what can he do when he is fully fit. But he neared his top pace in only his second spell so he can't be that out of shape.

If you were being mean-spirited, you could argue that AB de Villers, Hashim Amla and Shaun Pollock fell to poor shots. But because it doesn't happen often enough, it's nicer to think that they were undone more by their first sighters of serious pace this summer. And pace used cleverly; Shoaib mixed his lengths in both spells. Jacques Kallis couldn't even blame a poor stroke, just a devilishly good delivery.

It's tempting to think he took people along with him in his slipstream. Danish Kaneria took a wicket early on, as rare a feat recently as a Roger Federer Grand Slam loss, subsequently settling into a fine spell. Even Mohammad Sami was suddenly buoyed, not only into bowling quick, but with some control. He even took a rare Test wicket, courtesy a rarer poor shot from Ashwell Prince and that rarest of species, the Imran Farhat slip catch. South Africa should've been down and out then and there. Mohammad Yousuf was back and Pakistan's middle order assumed a familiar, daunting feel.

But if there is a fast bowler (a truly fast bowler and not the fast-medium sly ones we are blessed with) better than Makhaya Ntini in the world today, then to steal a delightful phrase from The Independent's Stephen Brenkley, history hasn't recorded it yet.

His pace is different to Shoaib's, in that he is not skiddy. He has that hard-hitting pace bats might complain about were they able to talk. He throttled Pakistan's top-order and then came back to do the same to the one threat South Africa would have worried about, Younis Khan. Most of them were undone by bounce but the more you watch Ntini the more you realise it isn't just one thing he does, a single skill he has. It is his whole presence.

He just keeps pounding at you, chipping away at your resolve, patience and technique. Ball after ball, over after over, session after session and day after day, he's like Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption who kept chiselling away at his prison cell wall for years and years before he broke through. Ntini is on the verge of breaking through too, to a space occupied by history's greatest fast bowlers. After today's antics, he stands one short of becoming the third South African to take 300 Test wickets

Much like Shoaib, he took people along with him, in this case the whole team. South Africa looked exactly like a team who had just been shot out for 124 and played far too many Tests in the last month when they went into the field. Ntini transformed them, as Shoaib did Pakistan earlier in the day, together managing to spare us the staidness of what was supposed to be a run-infested day.