Ponting sparkles before the rain in Potchefstroom

A few minutes into the tea interval at the North West Stadium on Sunday, just as the clouds above Potchefstroom started to look really threatening, a chirpy public address announcer declared that there was no need to worry, she'd phoned the weather bureau and it wasn't going to rain. Talk about tempting fate.

Within 10 minutes the covers were on and that was it for the day with Australia 218 for three in their first innings on the first day of their three-day game against South Africa `A'. Usually a bit of rain wouldn't arouse a great deal of alarm, but this has not been a good summer for touring teams. India had the two first-class games outside the Test matches entirely washed out earlier in the season, and while the Indians' lacklustre tour could not be entirely blamed on this, lack of preparation certainly didn't help their cause.

In this light, the Australians might already be ahead of the game. They had 60 overs at the crease and while the `A' attack managed something their elders and betters had failed at in Australia - dismissing Justin Langer and Matthew Hayden cheaply - there was also time enough for Mark Waugh to find some sort of form with an attractive 62 while, weather permitting, new captain Ricky Ponting is poised to score the first century of their tour.

When bad light forced the players off the field five minutes before the scheduled tea break, Ponting was not out on 93. It was not an entirely unblemished innings - he enjoyed a couple of slices of good fortune just after lunch - but it was the performance of a man wholly at ease with his game.

He said afterwards that he had relaxed after the understandable excitement of his elevation to the one-day captaincy, and had slept well on Saturday night. It looked like it on a pitch that offered few favours to the batting team.

Steve Waugh's decision to bat first almost certainly had less to do with the conditions than to give his batsmen a feel of South African soil. By any standards the pitch is underprepared (through no fault of the North West authorities - the groundsman has been able to work on it for only one-and-a-half days out of the last 10 because of rain) and the Australians had to work for every run during the morning session as they ground out 74 for two.

Well almost every run. Ponting announced himself with three successive boundaries off Charl Langeveldt, a passage of play all the more remarkable for what had come before.

This South African `A' attack is an oddly shaped beast with two frontline quicks and a third seamer, Andrew Hall, who has played one-day cricket for South Africa mainly as a batsman (he has bowled fewer than 40 overs in 18 ODIs). These three are backed by two spinners, Claude Henderson and Gulam Bodi and to suggest that, given the conditions, the whole is rather less than the sum of its parts, is to understate the case.

Still, while Andre Nel, Langeveldt and Hall were all fresh, life was not easy for the Australian openers on a pitch that offered some movement off the surface, some swing through the air and uneven bounce on the first morning. Hayden made 18 before Hall straightened one down the line at him to trap him lbw and six balls from Hall later Langer dragged an attempted pull down onto his stumps for 12.

In between the two wickets Ponting had clobbered his three boundaries off Langeveldt, but at lunch Australia would have felt they had been made to work for it. After the break, however, it was a different game. Ponting and Waugh smashed Hall out of the attack, 35 coming off four overs, and Dale Benkenstein's gentle medium-pacers served only to allow the batsmen to adjust their timing.

The chief spinner, Henderson, persisted in dropping one short an over, usually allowing a free hit through the off, and the Australian pair put on 125 in 122 minutes for the third wicket before Waugh contrived to chop another short one from Henderson straight to backward point.

Ponting produced a pair of classic on drives off Henderson and Steve Waugh had one or two decent hits before the light went and although the captains agreed to turn on the floodlights during tea, rain had the final say.