West Australian young gun Cooper Connolly has taken his maiden Test wicket on the first day in Cape Town as Australia claw their way back into the contest.<\/p>\n
The 23-year-old has had to bide his time to return to the Test team after debuting in Galle in February last year.<\/p>\n
And with the tourists in deep trouble after electing to bowl first on a batting pitch, he was thrown the ball just before tea.<\/p>\n
Connolly is a batting all-rounder but has become known in white-ball cricket as a handy wicket-taker.<\/p>\n
However, he has only taken five First Class wickets. He didn\u2019t look it as he landed his first ball nicely on a spot and straightened it to threaten the off stump.<\/p>\n
He made it through the first over cleanly but found the perfect line with the first delivery of his second as it slid straight through onto the pad.<\/p>\n
Exciting young Proteas prospect Matthew Breezkte has had a tough start to life as a Test cricketer and must have crossed his fingers in hopes Connolly didn\u2019t see the ball glance off his pad onto the bat.<\/p>\n
The umpire said not out, but the West Aussie very quickly convinced his skipper, Pat Cummins, to send the call upstairs, mouthing \u201cthat\u2019s plumb\u201d.<\/p>\n
The review revealed the ball had hit the pad before the bat, and ball tracker showed it thumping into the stumps, prompting a big celebration in the middle.<\/p>\n
The home side had put on 158 for the first wicket on day one before Nathan Lyon finally struck in the second session, removing second-gamer Marques Ackerman five runs short of a maiden Test century.<\/p>\n
The Aussies were able to grab four in the session to keep their chances of a series victory alive, with both sides heading to Newlands with one win each.<\/p>\n
Connolly has produced a strong tour of Africa so far with success in the one-day series against Zimbabwe and the Proteas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"West Australian young gun Cooper Connolly has taken his maiden Test wicket on the first day in Cape…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":942789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,56117,740,588,85],"class_list":["post-942788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-cricket-team","tag-cricket","tag-sport","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=942788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/942789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=942788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=942788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=942788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}