HE MAY not have added to the eight wickets at 76 that he had taken against South Africa in five previous matches before wheeling through 22 overs on the trot yesterday, but Ashley Giles played the prominent and valuable role expected of him. If only he had bowled even a little round the wicket rather than incessantly over, however, he might have been more effective.

South Africans call Port Elizabeth “the windy city” and, like “Windy Wellington” at the foot of New Zealand’s North Island, it seldom fails to justify its epithet. A strong cross-breeze such as the one that blew all day from the Cape Town direction yesterday is manna from heaven for an accurate bowler such as Giles. He has a good arm ball in any case but the 30-knotter buffeting his left shoulder from the Park Drive End was a valuable aid.

What he could not achieve, at this early stage of the game, was any discernible turn away from his persistent leg-stump line. When the patient Boeta Dippenaar was 45, Giles was convinced, along with Geraint Jones and Michael Vaughan, who rushed in from cover, that he had finally spun and bounced a ball sufficiently to touch the outside shoulder of the bat, but Simon Taufel, the umpire, was not in agreement.

In 1995 here in similar conditions, Richard Illingworth, the Worcestershire left-armer, produced perhaps the best sustained bowling performance in his nine Tests for England. He took three for 105 from a ball short of 40 overs in South Africa’s first innings of 428 and followed up with three for 45 from 22 overs in the second. Curiously, it turned out to be his final Test, a fate that will not befall Giles.

Apart from failing to change the angle, Giles must have been disappointed that none of the batsmen were really prepared to take him on. Jacques Rudolph did it only once in his 93; Shaun Pollock threatened to do so. Dippenaar simply waited for the occasional opportunity to get on to the back foot and place him into a gap.

It was as a stock bowler to relieve faster ones that Giles operated for much of the early part of his career. He took 31 Test wickets at 26 last summer and would much prefer the attacking role that conditions in England allowed him for a change. South Africa is unlikely to offer more than cross-breezes, unyielding surfaces and unadventurous batsmen.