Verdict:
It's about time Lord's started preparing pitches with something in them for the bowlers. This match could quite easily have lasted seven or eight days and still ended in a draw. What's more this was the 6th consecutive Lord's Test match to end in a draw, a figure which makes for a very poor advertisement for the Home of Cricket.
England once again didn't bowl badly, and Michael Vaughan's captaincy was dynamic and imaginative, even giving Amla a working over with some fast leg theory! What would the reaction have been had the opposition been Australia, I wonder? Unfortunately, James Anderson is no Harold Larwood, and on this pitch, even the latter would probably have struggled to rough up a batsman, even with a field that at one stage had a Jardinesque seven men (plus the wicket keeper) on the leg side! Unlike Nasser Hussain's use of leg-theory when Ashley Giles famously bowled it for over after over to frustrate Tendulkar, Michael Vaughan's use of it to Amla was an attacking ploy, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it used again in this series against the same batsman. It might just pay dividends on a faster pitch.
Amla to his credit took it all unflinchingly, and deserved his hundred.
South Africa can take great heart from their highly disciplined batting display, and given the short gap until the second Test, there are going to be some very tired English bodies after their three long days of solid toil, meaning that South Africa go into the second match with a slight advantage, something that seemed highly improbable after three days of this match.
