'Pretty stock-standard': AB grants under-fire Newlands curator reprieve with measured verdict

"It was a pretty stock-standard wicket."

Those words will be music to Braam Mong's ears following a week where Newlands' part-time pitch curator has been hammered on many fronts for conjuring up a perceived shocker of a wicket in the second Test between the Proteas and India.

The match lasted one-and-a-half days, with the 642 deliveries that were sent down representing the shortest Test match in terms of balls bowled in history. 

Eye-catchingly, that it was a standard pitch is the measured opinion of none other than Proteas legend AB de Villiers, who very reasonably noted the surface wasn't exactly out of character with previous incarnations.

"It was a pretty stock-standard wicket, in my opinion. I remember jumping around there on day one when I played there at times," he said on his Youtube channel.

"If you can just get through the first session on day one, it gets a lot easier [in general]. You could see the players who weren't just trying to hang around, the guys who were playing their shots and being positive, they were doing well.

"I remember Ben Stokes scoring a double-hundred there. I scored some hundreds there. You can't allow bowlers like Vernon Philander, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj, Kagiso Rabada to keep bowling on off stump."

Naturally, no player exemplified the right balance between attack and defence than Aiden Markram, who made a mesmerizing, run-a-ball century in what has been hailed as his best innings in Test cricket to date.  

De Villiers also argued that the Proteas opener overcame a technical deficiency that hampered most of his teammates on that wicket.

"Aiden played attacking cricket, getting down the wicket and batting on off-stump," he said.

"I always found batting out of my crease on off-stump worked