To the mythical ‘you just dropped the World Cup’ jibe of 1999 was added the Proteas’ latest bad dream of ‘SKY just hopped for a catch to snatch away your World Cup’.
The montage of misery expanded with the new addition, and this new bitter will get stocked in the cellar marked Caribbean 2024 T20 World Cup vintage.
South Africa’s file of cricketing memories, their hard-done-by disc of tragic tales, now acquires a new clip of an aspiring David Miller Six, that seemed to be stopped as if by a 3D iron dome, with an astute boundary fielder denying them an elusive World Cup win in their first-ever final.
Like their southern hemisphere brethren from 2019, the luckless New Zealanders in the 50-over World Cup, this boundary Six business will remain sufficiently fuzzy for a few days, though not formally controversial. A top-angle hinted at the rope wedges being pushed further than usual when Suryakumar Yadav did his tip-toe juggle. It effectively means Miller will live with lifelong nightmares of ‘what-if’: what if he had struck the Hardik Pandya delivery slightly higher, and got the six off the first ball of the 20th over?
There will be sleepless nights galore over why this keeps happening to that earnestly-trying nation of talented cricketers, and deep reveries and suddenly-bursting tears for why they just can’t seem to catch a break. The generally impoverished African nation, with a million real-world problems, makes up for daily drudgeries with sporting triumphs. But their cricket teams, which picked up the bottlers’ tag at some point in their World Cup journey, just can’t seem to shrug off the moniker though there was no choke whatsoever in their 7-run loss on Saturday.
A whole 25 years since Herschelle Gibbs botched that catch, and the venues (Birmingham to Barbados) and teams involved (Australia, India) spanning five continents, South Africa’s World Cup continues brimming with woes. There are the notorious numbers of yore: like 22 needed off 1 ball in 1992, the one run they forgot to run in 2003, and the one they couldn’t complete that they’ll never forget even if they wished to. To all that got added the 30 off 30, a seemingly comfortable position, from where they couldn’t get the job done.
Indian fans have wisened up to not taunt the Saffers as ‘chokers’, because it dawned upon them that such foolish cackling would amount to undermining the efforts of Bumrah, Hardik & Co. But for the defeated side, which didn’t dredge up the boundary-wedge controversy and took the loss stoically, even the non-choking gaps in their team were glaring.
Loopholes in the system
An uncharacteristically long tail for a white-ball side that’s always batted deep, and not having a No 8 who could swing dependably, was a concern. A world-class all-rounder, a staple of the Proteas, wasn’t around. Scapegoating individual batsmen isn’t their style, but the side that finally made a World Cup final hadn’t looked sturdy in batting this whole World Cup. Too much was expected of young Marco Jansen within a short time. Yet, they seemed to have progressed incrementally, by pulling off a sling of narrow wins.
The demands of the racial transformation quota were kept aside this time. Reeza Hendricks came in for Temba Bavuma, but couldn’t deliver in the crunch, just like in 1999 when an all-white team had stuttered. The quotas can’t be jettisoned but the SA20 competition, with foreign entities owning franchises, isn’t particularly concerned with the country’s racial representation project, so cannot be expected to help much in bringing coloured cricketers to the fore – restricting their player pool to a fraction of India’s. Still, Ottniel Baartman is a promising find.
What this T20 World Cup did achieve was getting the majority Black population invested as fans as the team surprisingly made the final. A noisy campaign was successfully started to get the Barbados final on free-to-air channels, and the Wanderers big screen showing pulled in a good mixed-race crowd. The catch phrase ‘No DNA, just RSA’ – which tags sporting wins like those of Springboks, Bafana Bafana or a rare UFC title for Driscus du Plessis – was widely seen on timelines, as a nation woke up to the team’s progress in the ‘non-proper’ (not 50-over) World Cup.
Tik Tok dance videos from merrily-grooving Black dancers cheering for the Proteas are nothing like the heyday of the poignant Invictus, when rugby was embraced by Nelson Mandela. There was no Madiba around to urge the cricket team to fulfill their destiny in their first-ever World Cup final. But maybe the new fans of colour, only recently piqued by and attracted to cricket with the Rabadas and Baartmans coming through, needed their own personal heartbreak and hurt-on-loop of the Miller dismissal replays to kick off an intense love affair. For the more the Proteas lose, and the closer to the titles they get without actually winning, the deeper the affection for them seems to get.