“There was a lot more pressure at the end than when I went in at 12/4.” – David Miller
Telford Vice / Cape Town
AIDEN Markram is a decent bloke. He is not the man who stalked off the field spitting mad, offering a face like thunder, like he could bite the head off a live snake, effing and blinding as he went, firing words that would have been understood by South Africans only, but to all clearly filthy, after 15 balls of his team’s innings in Nassau County on Saturday.
And yet that really was Markram — who had chased a legside delivery from Vivian Kingma and, his bat well away from his body, edged the ball. Scott Edwards, who would have been unsighted for much of the moment, dived scooped a fine low catch.
Markram knew he was out before Chris Gaffney and Sharfuddoula asked Richard Kettleborough upstairs to take a look because Edwards’ gloves had snared the ball close to the turf. All Markram could do while the umpires dissected the details of his error was stand there and fume.
By then he had seen Reeza Hendricks and Quinton de Kock entangle themselves in a terrible tango that could only end in the latter’s run out off the first ball of the innings. De Kock became the first South Africa player to suffer a diamond duck — dismissed without facing a delivery — in a T20I. Markram had also seen, from the non-striker’s end, the top of Hendricks’ off stump nailed by a straightening ball from Logan van Beek.
And now this; an unedifying stroke and, consequently, a scoreboard that read 3/3. Let the effing and blinding begin. A dozen deliveries later Heinrich Klaasen pulled Kingma to square leg and South Africa were 12/4.
Only then, when Tristan Stubbs and his old head on young shoulders and old hand David Miller took the game by the scruff of its neck, did Markram’s team look like winning. But the stand of 65 off 72 didn’t look enough when Stubbs and Marco Jansen were removed 10 balls apart.
It needed all of the experience Miller has gathered in his 291 internationals to drag his team home, with seven balls remaining, with an unbeaten 59 off 51. He finished the match with a six off Bas de Leede smote flat over square leg.
“There was a lot more pressure at the end than when I went in at 12/4,” Miller told a press conference. “We got over the line with our tailenders, and I had a lot of faith in them. But you do have those thoughts about how difficult it has been to get boundaries and now we need the boundaries. It’s about managing that space and trusting that if the ball is there you’ve got no other option but to take it down. It’s about being in that positive frame of mind and making sure you’re really capitalised if they do give you the ball [to hit].”
Did he have fun? “It’s all about situations and moments and, given the situation that we were in, I really enjoyed that innings, getting over the line and getting another two points.”
At the other end of the pitch for the last four minutes of the game stood Keshav Maharaj, who faced only one ball. And thereby hangs a tale of context. Before this match, the 16th of the men’s T20 World Cup, Maharaj had never been on the winning side in white-ball internationals against the Netherlands and de Leede had never finished in the losing XI against South Africa. That is no longer the case, on both counts.
This quirk of the recent history between the teams hangs on a certain sleight of fact. Maharaj and de Leede played in a washed out ODI in Centurion in November 2021, in the 2022 T20 World Cup match in Adelaide the next November — when the Dutch earned a shock victory by 13 runs — and in the ODI World Cup game in Dharamsala in October — when the Netherlands’ 38-run win didn’t come as a shock. Neither featured in the ODIs in Benoni and at the Wanderers in March and April last year, which fell between the World Cup games.
Neither Maharaj nor de Leede would have thought the reversal of their fortunes would have been in doubt when the Dutch shambled to a total of 103/9. Whatever had happened in the teams’ previous two tournament tussles, the Netherlands were surely doomed to defeat.
And not, for a change at this ground, because of the pitch. The outfield was still painfully slow but the erratic bounce that has hogged the headlines for several days had been eradicated. The surface hadn’t been reinvented as a belter. Rather, it was vastly improved for batting compared to what had gone before.
Closer to the truth was that the South Africans bowled sublimely and caught superbly, with Ottneil Baartman showing keen intelligence to take 4/11 in his second T20I. It was the kind of massive attack a major side should unleash on opponents who, whatever they might say or even believe, continue to be considered minnows.
Accordingly, the Netherlands’ powerplay of 20/3 was the lowest in this edition of the tournament. Until South Africa slumped to 16/4 in theirs. Markram was part of that problem, and the look on his face as he exited stage left said he knew it. Decent bloke or not, that truth hurt.
Even so, it helps when you can leave a hurtful truth in the dressingroom; when it doesn’t follow you to the hotel. Especially when you’ll be back at the same ground on Monday, leading your team against Bangladesh. Markram’s and his team’s memories of Saturday won’t be purely positive. But they will be more good than bad, and that’s all that matters.
Cricbuzz
Bulletproof Truth 