A tale of contrasting veterans

One man is the most experienced batsman in his team's line-up, the scorer of his country's highest individual Test score, the calm in almost every storm South Africa have faced in the last decade. Things should come easily for him.

The other man is only a year younger than the first. He played a crucial hand in his team winning their first series in Australia eight years ago, but has only played a little over a third the number of matches. He was dropped, then injured - almost career-threateningly so when he ruptured an Achilles tendon four years ago - and has been under scrutiny ever since. Things have often been difficult for him.

But on the opening day of the home Test summer, it was Hashim Amla who battled and JP Duminy who cruised through an absorbing period of play that could prove crucial to both their Test futures.

For Amla, it was the chance to find form after a lean tour of Australia and he could not have asked for a better situation. Not only did Stephen Cook and Dean Elgar make their first century stand as a partnership, they also put on the first hundred-plus opening stand in Port Elizabeth since readmission. They gave South Africa their best start at the venue in since 1970. Having lacked a proper platform in the recent past, Amla had a concrete one.

His main challenge this time was not the circumstances, but rather a seam bowler. Just like cricket should be. Suranga Lakmal's post lunch spell was as probing as his morning one, but more penetrative because he found swing and he tested Amla in the channel outside off stump. Perhaps the only thing Lakmal didn't do was make Amla play enough. He left seven off the first ten deliveries he faced from Lakmal, defended the 11th and was off the mark from the 12th, which was the 23d delivery Amla faced overall.

The dots don't really matter, neither do the 28 minutes it took Amla to get going, but the cat-and-mouse scramble did. Amla had to fight, he had to trust his judgment, he had to ignore the fact that, when Duminy arrived at the crease, he did it with a flourish: a crisp cover drive off the same bowler who had so hampered his batting partner.

Duminy rolled out the cover drive twice in Lakmal's next over and again in the over after that. In between, he unleashed a scything cut behind point. Off the first 14 balls he faced, Duminy collected 21 runs, five boundaries and a solitary single. By the time he had faced 23 balls, he had added three more fours. They were all picture-perfect: high-elbowed, straight bat, complete control.

Amla had to wait 55 deliveries before he could say the same. He came down the track to meet Rangana Herath, rolled his wrists and found the gap at mid-on. It was a shot that could have changed Amla's day but this time it was a false dawn. He did not go on to settle, Lakmal kept him in his firing line and the caution he showed early in his innings was abandoned. Amla's innings ended when he hung his bat out and got a thick edge to Dinesh Chandimal behind the stumps. He would have been disappointed with how he allowed himself to be worked over, as well as his eventual shot selection. So would most of his team-mates.

After making a point about trying to find batting consistency in this series, South Africa's batsmen will all be disappointed with their failure to convert starts and their shot selection. None more so than Duminy.

Having played so confidently through the off side and down the ground, Duminy changed his game plan against Herath and wanted to sweep. He missed a slog-sweep before the tea break, was cut in half by Lakmal twice afterwards, and then missed another sweep which crashed into his front pad. He reviewed, without success, and with the knowledge that he had thrown away a chance at a hundred. Anything less cannot be considered good enough, not at this stage of his career anyway.

Duminy has only scored one hundred in his last 22 innings, dating back to July 2014. Recently he has been given the additional responsibility of batting at No.4 and that move has shown signs of paying off, especially today. He looked more at ease than anyone else and he was scoring quickly. A milestone seemed there for the taking.

For Amla, it was completely the opposite. Even getting to fifty would have taken a struggle but Amla would have known the struggle was necessary. He has gone 10 innings without a century and seven without a fifty. The questions have started, he has yet to provide the answers. There are questions facing Duminy too, which followed him for the two years between his Galle and Perth hundreds and will start up again, especially when AB de Villiers regains fitness.

When de Villiers is available, he will slot straight back into the XI and there don't seem to be any arguments against that. Even Coach Russell Domingo provided a reminder of the permanence of de Villiers, pre-series, when he stressed that "someone will have to make way".

Is that someone going to be Amla, whose stellar career has started to lose some of its shine, particularly away from home? Is that someone going to be Duminy, who could end up with an unfulfilled potential? Or is that someone going to be someone else? And if someone else, then who?