South Africa stand the heat, India get out of the kitchen

Spicy steak burgers for lunch. Fancy an egg with that? No problem: we'll use the edge of a bat to crack one onto the pitch and fry it. Won't take longer than Temba Bavuma needs to dash a single. Yes, it was that hot in Paarl on Friday.

As a blazing morning sank into a menacing afternoon, smoke rose beyond the ground from what must have been a bush fire. It disappeared into the blowtorch blue sky like a departing soul. The heat made everyday activities like eating and drinking feel unnatural. You were too scared to blink because your eyelids might melt together, and stay like that. From that you might deduce that thinking boiled the brain to mush.

But the umpires didn't fall over, the scorers were able to count as unfailingly as ever, and the press did what they always did: not a lot. Even so, as the day reached peak unpleasantness at 39 degrees, one among the latter - not of Cricbuzz' parish - needed rehydration and medical attention, complete with blood and electrocardiogram tests. Happily, a clean bill of health was returned. Even, no doubt to the surprise of some, a heartbeat. There was, however, concern about the ink in the veins.

Despite all that, South Africa and India delivered 98.1 overs of cricket with what looked like their usual vigour. Bowlers charged in and bowled, batters hit and ran, fielders, chased and stopped and turned and threw. How?

"It felt way hotter than two days ago [during the first match of the series, which South Africa won by 31 runs]," Janneman Malan told an online press conference. "It's always a challenge for the body to field and bat in conditions like these, but that's what we work for and do conditioning for. I'm glad we could meet that challenge."

He did that better than most, clipping a cool 91 before he gloved Jasprit Bumrah onto his stumps with South Africa steaming towards victory. "Maybe if I batted through I would have felt a sniper bullet in the leg," Malan said, referring to the likelihood of cramp setting in. "I'm critical but stable."

Too often here in the civilian ranks we are blase about the extraordinariness of the elite cricketer. Friday in Paarl, a day when pans were surplus to the equipment needed to fry eggs, was a reality check. Elite or not, in the mercifully air-conditioned dressing room after India's innings, players took ice baths and some were fed what a South Africa team management source called "slowmag slushies".

While those went down, maybe some of the conversation would have been around Mark Boucher's