“It’s nice, just to return the favour. As a bowler you’re always getting hit.” – Sisanda Magala on his five-ball 18 not out.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
IN the afterglow of what happened in Centurion on Sunday, best this is said softly: Saturday’s match was better. The notion seems diabolical. What’s not to like about two scintillating centuries and a slew of records? How does that not top a game reduced to 11 overs a side?
Saturday’s match didn’t rock and roll with runs at the same volume as Sunday’s, when batting was taken to new heights of sustained intensity. But Saturday delivered a keener contest. Which do you prefer — runs raining down, or a decent game after the rain?
On Saturday the result was in the balance until Rovman Powell hit Bjorn Fortuin for three sixes and a four to leave 20 runs required off the last 18 deliveries. The Windies got home with three balls to spare. Sunday’s match was all but decided after Quinton de Kock and Reeza Hendricks shared 152 off 65 to start South Africa’s pursuit of a world record target of 259, which they reached with seven balls remaining. Clearly they took seriously what Aiden Markram said after Saturday’s match: “Hopefully tomorrow we can start better; start on the right foot — with us batters at the top.”
Both games were excellent advertisements for white-ball cricket. But if you wanted to see pressure put on batters and not only on bowlers, Saturday gets your vote. Here’s what looks like evidence: the matches were played on the same pitch, but Saturday’s overall runrate was 12.23 and Sunday’s 13.30. A difference of 1.07 runs doesn’t sound like much, but that’s per over. It adds up to a significant lump of runs over the course of an innings — runs that weren’t scored because of the bowlers’ and fielders’ efforts.
When they batted first South Africa went at 11.90 runs an over and West Indies at 12.57. That’s a divergence of 0.67 of a run — hardly decisive, but the sides each had nine fewer overs to negotiate on Saturday compared to Sunday.
The tidiest bowler on Saturday was Anrich Nortjé, whose 5.66 was the only economy rate under 10.00 in both innings. He was left out on Sunday, but it’s difficult to argue South Africa’s attack was weakened by the addition of Kagiso Rabada and Marco Jansen. Similarly, the visitors’ decision to omit Alzarri Joseph on Sunday was more than offset by the fact that he was replaced by Jason Holder.
Maybe the 15 wickets that fell on Saturday put the brakes on the batters in relative terms. There’s nothing like the unedifying prospect of being bowled out inside 11 overs to make even the most attacking players reach for caution. Only nine wickets went down on Sunday, affording the batters a measure of security and fuelling aggressive strokeplay.
There’s no pressing reason to make these comparisons. We could enjoy both matches as structurally contrasting games of cricket without pitting them against each other in some kind of evolutionary struggle. But there could be an important reason behind the fact that West Indies scored only 0.33 fewer runs an over on Saturday than on Sunday. The difference between South Africa’s runrates was 1.85 — more than five-and-a-half times as big as their opponents’.
Could that be ascribed to the West Indians’ firmer familiarity with T10 cricket? Seven members of their XI on Saturday played in the Abu Dhabi T10 in November and December. Five of the same players were in the six who featured 6ixty, a T10 competition in the Caribbean, in August last year. Of South Africa’s team, five were part of the Abu Dhabi T10. But only Heinrich Klaasen, who didn’t play in Abu Dhabi, was in the 6ixty.
“It’s a bit chaotic, 11 overs; anything can happen,” Sisanda Magala told a press conference after Saturday’s blur of a game. “It’s tough to predict and plan, as you would in a T20. You have to learn on the fly and try your best to adapt to the situation.” That wasn’t to say he didn’t enjoy the experience. Magala bowled with intelligence as sharp as his skills to take 3/21, and then hammered an unbeaten 18 off five to help David Miller realise 47 off 13 for the seventh wicket. “It’s nice, just to return the favour — as a bowler, you’re always getting hit,” Magala said. “David is a very calming presence. He speaks very optimistically and he’s a very positive guy, so that rubs off on the way you want to play. It was good fun.”
For Powell T10 was “more compact” than T20. It was also licence to thrill: “You can lose a wicket every over and still keep hitting the ball hard. It’s a mindset.” That’s not entirely the case in the 6ixty, where teams are pronounced all out when their sixth wicket falls. The difference when all 10 wickets are in play was apparent in Centurion.
“You can’t just hit good bowling for six, six, six,” Powell had said after Saturday’s match, in which two sixes were hit off as many balls twice, and two in three deliveries also twice. Powell was proved wrong on Sunday, when De Kock did indeed slam a hattrick of sixes off Sheldon Cottrell in the second over of South Africa’s reply. Then again, Cottrell wouldn’t have met Powell’s standard for “good bowling” in an over that sailed for 29 runs.
The way both games unfolded was the product, in large part, of the work done by Centurion groundskeeper Bryan Bloy and his team. Bloy was castigated for his first Centurion Test pitch, the match against India in January 2018, which lost a lot of its liveliness because of intense heat. But he won an award for his work during the SA20, and now he has the weekend’s games on his CV.
Saturday’s match was better. Sunday’s was more emphatic. Take your pick. Or enjoy both equally and for different reasons. Who said T20 or T10 — or even T11 — was devoid of nuance?
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