London — "I’ve got the same name," Hashim Amla said with a twinkle in his eye at The Oval on Tuesday after he was asked whether he was as good a player as he was five years ago, when the original Test ground’s stately red-roofed pavilion and the nearby skeletal steel gasholder served as the backdrop for his finest innings. Amla’s undefeated 311 in SA’s first innings of that series set the tone — and silenced sniping from the more jingoistic sections of the English media — for what became a 2-0 triumph that took the visitors to the top of the Test rankings. At 13 hours and 10 minutes, that Amla innings is the sixth-longest in Test history. But it is not the longest by a South African. That tired honour belongs to Gary Kirsten, who took 88 more minutes to make 275 against New Zealand at Kingsmead in December 1999. So, did Amla fancy reeling in that record? "I’ve trained as hard as I can train," he said. "The rest of it, whether the scores come on the board or not, is about applying yo...
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