Who are these players and what have they done with the usual suspects who wear South Africa across their chests; those who don’t seem to have more than one plan and whose performances melt into shapeless desperation when events don’t follow their preferred design?
They’re mostly the same players. Of South Africa’s squad of 15 at the men’s T20 World Cup, only Ryan Rickelton, Ottneil Baartman and Bjorn Fortuin arrived having never played in a World Cup in either format. Rickelton and Fortuin still haven’t.
The other side of that equation is as significant. Quinton de Kock and David Miller are the only survivors of South Africa’s sole success in World Cup knockout games. Both featured in the 2015 World Cup quarterfinal at the SCG, where they beat Sri Lanka by nine wickets.
New Zealand won the semifinal that followed, at Eden Park, by four wickets with a ball to spare. South Africa’s only other appearance at the sharp end of a tournament since then was in the World Cup semi against Australia at Eden Gardens in November last year, when they went down by three wickets.
The South Africans have reached the knockout rounds in seven of their nine World Cups, and in two of their previous eight T20 World Cup campaigns. All told, that’s nine trips to the knockout stages in 18 tournaments. And still no trophy. Not even a place in a final. So cricketminded South Africans are, understandably, still waiting to exhale. The team are in the semis again? Big deal. Come back to us when there’s something new to report.
There is, already, something new. It’s as if this South Africa team have given up on the neat and whimsical but impractical and simplistic notion of playing the perfect game. Instead they’ve settled for playing the game that is only just good enough to win, warts and all. Seven times now.
The unmagnificent seven that all that imperfection has achieved was completed somewhere after midnight in North Sound, Antigua on Sunday – in the slightly less early hours of Monday morning in South Africa – when Aiden Markram guided his side to victory over West Indies by three wickets with five balls to spare. Both teams needed to win to nail down a place in the semis. The result dumped the home side out of the tournament and wasn’t fair on a bumper crowd who had waited out a rain delay of 75 minutes.
It was unpretty cricket, but the way the game unfolded was in keeping with five of the other six wins that have made South Africa the only side among the 20 to earn full points in all of their matches. India were also unbeaten going into their crunch clash against Australia in St Lucia on Monday, but they endured a washout against Canada in perennially soggy Lauderhill two Saturdays ago.
The South Africans dropped four catches in the first half of the Windies’ innings, including in the eighth, when Kagiso Rabada and Marco Jansen collided in trying to catch Kyle Mayers’ botched drive off Markram. Jansen had to leave the field, temporarily, to seek treatment. Then, having lost Reeza Hendricks and De Kock in the space of a dozen deliveries, five wickets crashed for 68 runs in pursuit of a revised target of 123 off 17. Yet they won. How?
“Most of the games have been a lot closer than we would have liked, but the amazing thing is that this new Proteas team always seems to get over the line,” Tabraiz Shamsi told a press conference. “We’ve been put under huge pressure in every game and the boys have managed to find a way to win – no matter what the situation is, no matter how close the game is. In a funny way we look forward to it.
“If you look at the squad there isn’t any individual you can pick and say this guy is responsible for making this team win. There’s no pressure on any one individual. We have a lot of matchwinners and, on each day, someone finds a way to pull the game towards the team. That’s what’s making the guys play without pressure – because we all know we have the ability to win games. But there’s no pressure on any individual to do it otherwise we’re in trouble.”
“This new Proteas team always seems to get over the line” ©AFP
How South Africa won was, in large part, by summing up the conditions superbly and not being nervous to exploit what they needed to do tactically, even if that meant skewing away from their accepted strengths. What kind of team from South Africa, a country blessed with several of the best quicks cricket has yet seen, some of them in this very squad, bowls a dozen overs of spin in a T20I? This one, and with good reason.
Only twice before in previous editions of this tournament – both times by Shaun Pollock in 2007 – has a South Africa new-ball bowler sent down all of their four overs unchanged. Markram became the first spinner to do so, and well enough to claim 1/28. Keshav Maharaj was even tighter for his 1/24, and Shamsi bristled with threat for his 3/27.
South Africa’s fast bowlers were allowed only eight overs, and the most celebrated among them, Rabada, didn’t mark out a run-up until there were three overs left in the innings. He was in action in the first four overs in all but one of his previous 62 T20Is. That’s 5/79 by the slow poisoners, or more than 60% of all the wickets taken for fewer than 60% of the total runs conceded in exactly 60% of the overs bowled.
Remember when South Africa’s top six was vaunted as the most potent batting force in this tournament? Not for the first time, they flipped, flopped and fell over without much fuss. All of them had been dismissed by the 14th over, leaving Jansen and the tail to score the remaining 23 off the last 22 balls. They got there in 18, with Rabada cover-driving Roston Chase for four as sumptuously as Laura Wolvaardt might have done, and Jansen deciding the issue with the next delivery by launching Roston Chase over long-on for six.
It was the fourth time at this tournament that South Africa had gone into the last over with the game still in the balance. Only in their first match, when they beat Sri Lanka by six wickets with 22 deliveries to spare, were they comfortable winners.
The value of the uncertainty was not lost on Shamsi: “It’s a double-edged sword. The previous game [he played, against the United States in Antigua on Wednesday] I bowled [two overs] later in the innings and I went for 50, and critics came out of the woodwork about how I can’t handle pressure. In a quarterfinal match [against West Indies] I hope that was enough pressure for me to respond to.
“We’ve all played enough cricket to understand that sometimes it will work and on other days it won’t and somebody will cover for you, and vice versa. That’s the mentality we have within the squad. Whoever’s day it is needs to take extra load and cover for someone who’s maybe not having a good game. That’s perfectly normal, that’s cricket.
“You’ve got to turn up and try your best the next day. Maybe I might go for 50 again in the next game. Maybe I might be man-of-the-match again. Nobody knows.”
Indeed, nobody does. Maybe the most important difference between these unusual South Africa suspects and the teams who have gone before is that unpredictability doesn’t scare them.
