After Varun Aaron cleaned up Hashim Amla with a peach of a delivery that held its line, the crowd at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru went crazy, cheering the fast bowler and India on for picking up the crucial wicket of the South Africa captain.
But those cheers were made to look like the silence in a library when compared to the noise that followed as AB De Villiers walked in to bat in his 100th Test match at the ground he calls home in the IPL.
This is the kind of welcome that a Sachin Tendulkar, an MS Dhoni or a Virat Kohli would have expected, not a member of the opposition, and that too the most dangerous batsman of the opposition, a batsman who can take the game away from India with a few whips of that magical bat of his.
Cries of "ABD, ABD, ABD" rang out through the entire stadium, as he walked in, and continued every time he took guard for the first few deliveries.
De Villiers danced down the track to R Ashwin, buzzing after picking up two wickets in his first over, and defended his first ball, before taking a single off the next, with "Superman" gaining a bonus four runs as well, as his RCB teammate Virat Kohli, who gave his good friend a handshake as he walked into the middle, threw the ball wildly for four overthrows.
His first boundary was a typical De Villiers flick through midwicket for a boundary, before he swatted one through the same area again off Ashwin, and from there it was business as usual for the great man, felicitated by the KSCA before the start of play on Day 1 of this second Test match, from there, as the best batsman in the world went about digging South Africa from that hole they found themselves in again.
He did that pretty well too, scoring a fine 85 (105b, 11x4, 1x6), looking as comfortable as a fish in water as the rest of the batsmen around him struggled. De Villiers finally fell on the stroke of Tea, but not after he had given the fans at the Chinnaswamy another knock to remember.
