Barbados – Bulletproof Truth

The match that was there to be won. Until it wasn’t …

“I feel quietly optimistic about what’s to come, having gone past the hurdle of a semifinal. Now this final is a reality for this team. Once you see the reality, you experience it, and this team and all South African teams know that.” – Hashim Amla

Telford Vice / Cape Town

THIRTY runs needed off 30 balls, six wickets in hand. Twenty-six off 24, still six standing. Twenty-two off 18, five down. Twenty off 12, six gone. Sixteen off six, no further loss. Only eight scored off those last six, and another wicket taken. Defeat by seven runs. How?

“It’s not the first game of cricket that’s been lost with a team needing 30 off 30. It’s more that India are allowed to bowl well, they’re allowed to field well, they’re allowed to go from that position to a position of strength.”

That’s Aiden Markram at his press conference after his team had been beaten by India in the men’s T20 World Cup final at Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados on Saturday. Note the term: beaten. They were not disgraced. They did not choke.

South Africa were in a winning position, but they did not squander it. The opposition were indeed, in Markram’s words, “allowed” to play well. If they play better than you, you lose and they win. That’s how sport works. And India were better in the last five overs.

It helped having the genius of Jasprit Bumrah on hand to bowl two of them. Hardik Pandya’s two overs unspooled like a redemption song for all he has been through since usurping Rohit Sharma as Mumbai Indians captain. Little wonder Pandya had to wipe the tears off his face before availing himself for one of those awful interviews conducted when hearts are still beating too fast for their own good.

It wouldn’t have helped India get through those five overs intact knowing they would be the last time giants of the stature of Rohit and Virat Kohli would be in an India T20 shirt. Did the dressingroom know then that Ravindra Jadeja would also retire? Nor would it have helped that, despite everything the IPL has done for the format, it had been 17 years since India won this trophy. That’s pressure, and it showed in the tears of relief that flowed once the challenge had been met.

India deserved to win because they handled the stresses of the situation better and, consequently, played better cricket. Did South Africa deserve to lose? The question was irrelevant for Hashim Amla, who was part of a SuperSport studio panel that featured Russell Domingo and Chris Morris. Domingo and Amla, who are now on the Lions coaching staff, were sat either side of Morris, who said, “This is why these two do well at the Lions, because he [pointing at Amla] says you don’t deserve anything in this game, that the game owes you nothing. And this one [pointing at Domingo] says the game’s rude.”

Even so, Domingo could empathise: “It’s going to take them a long time to get over this. Emotions were hurt, and it takes so much out of you. You’ve given everything for two or three years leading to this event, and one or two things don’t fall into place. To get back up and step into the arena again is going to be a challenge and there might be a drop-off in terms of intensity for a period of time. They are so desperate to do well and they’re playing such good cricket, and once again they’ve fallen short.”

Domingo knows the feeling. He was South Africa’s head coach at the 2015 World Cup — when clumsy interference by CSA’s suits around team selection on the eve of the semifinal against New Zealand at Eden Park knocked the South Africans off kilter and probably cost them the game.

Then, Grant Elliott launched Dale Steyn over his head for the matchwinning six. This time, Suryakumar Yadav produced a furiously balletic catch on the boundary to remove David Miller and erase six of what might have been the winning runs.

It was the first ball of the last over, and while the target of 16 was steep the South Africans would have considered themselves to still have one hand on the trophy, albeit not as firmly as four overs previously. But while they had Miller, his face set with the knowledge and resolve that the job was his to get done, they had hope. One slipping hand on the trophy wasn’t enough when Yadav, with a hop and a skip either side of the boundary, got both hands to the ball, twice, and held on, twice.

Photographs and video suggested the boundary cushion had moved a few centimetres beyond a line of yellowed grass that looked suspiciously like where the cushion should have been: the actual boundary, in terms of this supposition. The implication is that the cushion was closer to the fence than the boundary.

And thus that Yadav, who was perilously close to touching the cushion when the ball was in his hands but did not do so, trod on the actual boundary while he was in contact with the ball. And so the catch should have been disallowed, six runs should have been awarded, and Miller should have been permitted to continue his assault. Did Richard Kettleborough, the television umpire who decided the catch was fair, get it wrong?

What cricket calls its laws says under “19.3: Restoring the boundary” that, “If a solid object used to mark the boundary is disturbed for any reason, then the boundary shall be considered to be in its original position. The object shall be returned to its original position as soon as is practicable; if play is taking place, this shall be as soon as the ball is dead.” But the faded grass line was visible on only some of the replays, and there was no discussion about whether the cushion was in the wrong place.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Yadav acted in accordance with where the cushion was, not where it perhaps should have been. There is nothing to say he was advantaged by where it was, or that he wouldn’t have adjusted his movements accordingly if it had been on the grass line. Besides, umpires’ mistakes — if this was that — are part of the game, just like those made by players.

Far be it for Amla to get into weeds as rancorous as these: “I feel quietly optimistic about what’s to come, having gone past the hurdle of [winning] a semifinal. Now this final is a reality for this team. Once you see the reality, you experience it, and this team and all South African teams know that.”

On Tristan Stubbs: “For a young boy playing his first World Cup, he came out playing without fear, took the game on, and got us ahead of the game.” On the new generation: “With the exposure they’ve had in the IPL, the SA20 and in our domestic system, you’re seeing these youngsters coming in and they’re straight into the game. Before it took longer to get into international cricket. They’re getting into it very quickly, and we’re seeing the performances.”

Amla has always seemed to be from some other, rarefied planet far above messy mortality. The rest of his cricketminded compatriots are struggling not to feel worse than they usually do after tumbling down a cliff of disappointment. For them, it’s precisely because South Africa seemed to have put the past behind them by showing they had learnt how to win tight games, because they reached the final this time, because they came so close to winning it, because they didn’t panic or choke, that this hurts so much. They did all that and made all that progress and it still wasn’t good enough.

Had South Africa been thumped on Saturday, the part of the nation that cares about cricket would have moved on by now. In that case, fair play to India, easily the better team on the day. But it wasn’t like that. The game was there to be won, until it wasn’t.

Afterwards, Camilla Miller held her distraught husband of not quite four months with a tenderness so strong it was difficult to watch. Tabraiz Shamsi put one arm around Khadija Shariff, his wife, and the other around their three-year-old son. It looked for all the world like they were his supporting pillars, keeping him upright when he couldn’t quite find reason to look the world in the eye.

Love like that is needed now, and it seems a lot of it is around the players. But not all of us will have enough of the precious stuff. Some are trapped in bleakness, wondering how they are ever going to watch any team play any sport ever again. They will, of course, but right here, right now, the tunnel has no end.

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Aiden Markram: the thinking person’s doer

“You’ve seen it in the close results, where we haven’t played some of our best cricket in certain games. But that will to win drives you to, by hook or by crook, get the job done.” – Aiden Markram

Telford Vice / Cape Town

IT seems cruel to describe Aiden Markram as an emotional black hole, but also apt. He was asked 14 questions during a long and winding press conference on Friday — seven of them tied in different ways to the fact that South Africa had never won a men’s World Cup or even reached a final.

Markram dead-batted every variation on the theme of what reaching the T20 World Cup final at Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados on Saturday with the same calm he has shown in guiding his team to eight consecutive wins. He refused to be sucked into the maelstrom that spins around any match that involves India, and which is exponentially heightened before a final.

“We all know India are a great team,” Markram replied to the first of the seven questions. “Us as a team, as South Africans, have been sort of trending in the right direction the last couple of years. But maybe not progressed in tournaments as far as we would have liked.”

What?! Surely there was more to this than that?! You’re in a World Cup final! Against India! Come on man, hit the panic button already!

“You wake up tomorrow and there’ll be a lot of emotions that you’ll feel,” Markram said. “But for the time being we’re just excited at the opportunity and trying not to waste any energy — be it emotional energy or whatever — wondering about what tomorrow could look like. We’ve chatted about taking care of today, and today’s a rest day. So it’s about making sure we sleep really well and spend a lot of time with the feet up, and then take on tomorrow and see where it gets us.”

It was a remarkable state of grace for the leader of a squad of 15 in which nine players know the disappointment of losing a semifinal, Markram included. Quinton de Kock and David Miller have felt that emptiness three times each. Of the XI who went down to Australia by three wickets in the World Cup semi at Eden Gardens in November, only Temba Bavuma and Rassie van der Dussen are not in the current squad. If your glass is half-empty you would consider that a lot of scarring. Not only is Markram’s glass more than half-full, it has been repeatedly topped up during the tournament.

“It’s the same group of people who have been together for quite some time, and there’s a really strong will to win. But it’s not on the level of desperation. It’s an extreme hunger to win games of cricket. We haven’t achieved on the world stage what we would have liked to, and that gets the juices going — to finally achieve it or try to achieve it at least.

“You’ve seen it in the close results, where we haven’t played some of our best cricket in certain games. But that will to win drives you to, by hook or by crook, get the job done. That’s stood out for me in this group. You win those close games and you take a lot of belief moving forward that from any position you feel like you can still win the game.”

Only the first of South Africa’s victories — over Sri Lanka by six wickets in Nassau County on June 3 — was comfortable until they hammered Afghanistan by nine wickets in their semifinal in Trinidad on Wednesday. The rest have been in the seat-of-the-pants, skin-of-the-teeth category.

They were 12/4 in search of 104 to beat the Netherlands, their bogeymen opponents in the two previous World Cups, on a dodgy pitch in Nassau on June 8 before Tristan Stubbs and Miller shared 65 off 72. Miller needed all of his experience and skill, and nuggety partnerships with Marco Jansen and Keshav Maharaj, to clinch the win with seven balls to spare.

Two days later at the same ground against Bangladesh, Maharaj bowled the last over of a T20I for the first time with 10 runs to play with. Despite sending down a wide and three full tosses, Maharaj got away with conceding six. South Africa won by a single run against Nepal in St Vincent on June 14, when Ottneil Baartman defended eight in the last over. England needed an eminently doable 25 off 18 in St Lucia last Friday, when Kagiso Rabada, Jansen and Anrich Nortjé limited the damage to 14.

And so on and so forth. Usually by bowlers on pitches that challenged all who batted on them, and by fine fielding and catching — not least by Markram himself. It’s been a wild ride on and off the field, as epitomised by the South Africans’ journey from Trinidad to Barbados on Friday.

The flight itself lasts a piddling 35 minutes, or shorter than teams spend warming up, and it was due to take off at 10.40am. But a crash landing at Grantley Adams International in Bridgetown halted all air traffic to and from Barbados for hours. So the squad’s arrival, expected at 11.15am, stretched beyond 6pm. It wasn’t the first travel tangle experienced during the past few weeks.

“We’ve had a couple,” Markram said. “And we joke about it and say we’re used to it. It’s been part of this tournament. You’ve just got to crack on with things. There’s no point sulking and making it more miserable than what it might already seem to be. So, it was a slightly longer day. But you bite the bullet. You get there a bit later, you have some food, and you rest your head and wake up with a positive attitude about the next couple of days.”

Unpredictability has become part of a fast-paced routine. Thinking about what could go wrong — which has undone South Africa too many times — would be damaging. This tournament has been about doing, not thinking. And, so far, Markram’s men have done and done well.

“You play a game, you get on a plane, you fly, you check in at a new hotel and play your next game of cricket the next day. So there’s not too much reflection. After the competition we’ll sit back and appreciate what we’ve achieved. Whether you win or whether you lose you’ve gone a step further in the right direction. We’d love to win our first final, and hopefully in the years to come that can break the burden of what a lot of people are saying about us as a team.

“We were a happy bunch the other night after qualifying for the final, but straight after that game in the changing room we said guys, we’ve still got one more step to take. It’s not driven by a coach or a captain. The whole unit feels that and is driven by that. Sportsmen are highly competitive people and nobody would want to lose, and especially not lose in a final. There’s no sense that the guys are satisfied regardless of the result tomorrow.”

All of which was said in the gentle, warm, fuzzy, unassuming tone of someone talking casually to a friend. Not a captain taking a team where they have never yet been, and perhaps beyond even that. Panic? Over-thinking? Under-doing? Try somebody else. And know this: Aiden Markram is a scary man.

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Unseen, unheard, unknown: South Africa’s secret final

“I’ve always said that if South Africa reach a final they will win it.” – Herschelle Gibbs

Telford Vice / Cape Town

THE four people in a Cape Town barbershop didn’t betray any sign of knowing. Neither did a crew of around 20 roadworkers down the street contemplating a large hole where the pavement might have been. No-one behind the counter at a buzzing café, nor the clientele, further along the drag were any the wiser.

The staff at a gym didn’t know, perhaps because all of the seven televisions in the place were tuned to reruns of the previous night’s matches in the men’s European football championships.

Had you not known better, you would have thought South Africa’s men’s team hadn’t reached the final of a World Cup, the T20 version, for the first time not many hours earlier.

If any of those working out in the gym as Thursday morning turned towards afternoon knew, they didn’t let on. Most of them, anyway. Among the latter was Herschelle Gibbs, who held a series of frenetic conversations that must be what nuclear reactions made flesh would look like.

It was in the midst of these exchanges that Gibbs’ eyes caught those of someone he has known since his playing days. The two men stared silently at each other across the gym floor, and for some strange reason each held up an index finger. The expression on both of their faces was that of someone who had been kissed for the first time.

Gibbs admitted to Cricbuzz that he was “happy, excited and nervous all at the same time; it feels lovely”. He noted that, “I’ve always said that if South Africa reach a final they will win it.” Indeed, Gibbs made that assertion on radio as recently as Wednesday, when he also said he hoped Saturday’s final in Barbados would feature South Africa and India.

He was granted half that wish at 4.37am on Thursday, South Africa time, when Aiden Markram’s team completed a nine-wicket thrashing of Afghanistan in their semifinal in Trinidad. Had Gibbs watched the game? “Nah. When I checked the score Afghanistan were 23/5. There was no point, so I went back to sleep.”

England and India met in the other semi, in Guyana, later on Thursday. Were India still Gibbs’ favoured opponents? It was agreed that “once the Indians get going they’re difficult to stop”, but also that while England have quality spinners in Adil Rashid, Liam Livingstone and Moeen Ali, “Kensington Oval doesn’t turn”.

While he was talking, a woman old enough to be Gibbs’ mother — he is 50 — approached and interrupted the discussion. “Excuse me,” she said. Gibbs: “Yes madam?” She explained that she was struggling to adjust a nearby piece of weight training equipment. Could he help?

Without another word Gibbs accompanied her to the machine, repositioned a cable that had lost its way, set the weight to her desired level, watched her perform the exercise, and offered her tips on how to do so safely and optimally. Clearly clueless about who he was, she thanked him. He smiled and returned to his conversation companion.

Gibbs duly earned his reputation as a rock star cricketer who was never too far from trouble off the field. But, away from all that, he is steeped in basic human decency. His greatest gift isn’t that he played the game better than most people on the planet, and doubtless would have done in any sport of his choosing. Instead it is that he is the most unfamous famous person you could meet. Greet him once and the next time he sees you he treats you as a friend. When you do see him again and you ask how he is his answer is invariably a booming, “Tremendous!”

His good manners were on display on the night of March 16 2007, the day he hit every ball of Dutch leg spinner Daan van Bunge’s fourth over for six in a World Cup match in St Kitts. Gibbs stood dapperly at the counter of a beach bar, a veritable off-duty James Bond. He bought drinks for others and accepted drinks from others, all the while maintaining impeccable behaviour, until at least 2am. Four hours later he strode purposefully up a fairway on a nearby golf course, five-iron in hand.

Was David Miller’s constitution that strong? Just more than 10 hours after the semifinal ended he beamed out of a screen at an online press conference wearing team travelling gear and looking at least as dapper as Gibbs did all those years ago. It was 8.30am in Trinidad. How much sleep had he had?

“Three or four hours,” Miller said. “It’s early, but that’s pretty standard. We’ve had some weird timings. Fortunately, we steamrolled them and finished the game earlier than expected, which was a good result.”

Complaints over the hectic schedule teams have had to keep to make it to the six Caribbean grounds that hosted 36 of the 52 group and Super Eight games and will stage all three of the knockout matches have been rife.

“We haven’t really spoken about it as such,” Miller said. “There have been murmurs here and there, but if I told you exactly how our travel in the last couple of weeks has gone you would be shocked. So it’s been a monumental effort from the management and players to buy into where we are right now.

“It blows my mind that it felt like the tournament dragged on in the beginning, and then we played the Super Eights pretty much back-to-back on different islands. It doesn’t make sense. I think it could have been structured better. But it is what it is, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. We certainly are stronger for it.”

South Africa’s four group games were spread over a dozen days, and the first three were played in Nassau County. Their three Super Eights matches were crammed into five days, and they had to go from Antigua to St Lucia and back to Antigua to play them.

But Miller was correct — South Africa were stronger for the experience. All that time on Nassau’s nasty pitch prepared them well for a similar surface in the semifinal.

Did their sudden status as finalists mean a more relaxed programme leading into Saturday’s decider? The question wasn’t asked, nevermind answered. “Apologies, but we have to check out in seven minutes to catch the bus,” the media manager said as she called a halt to proceedings.

Cricket is a major sport in South Africa, but far from the obsession it is in south Asia. Football is to South Africa what cricket is to India, even though the national football teams don’t often get far on the world stage. The Springboks have kept rugby’s profile high by winning a record four men’s World Cups since claiming their first title in 1995.

Cricket hasn’t helped itself by winning only two of their 11 men’s knockout games at World Cups. But, win or lose and particularly should they win, the game’s place in the public consciousness will be elevated on Saturday. Maybe then people will know.

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Robin Jackman: A life in much more than cricket

Decent, loved, complex. Jackman was, like all of us, someone of light and shade.

Telford Vice | Centurion

ROBIN Jackman smiled as easily as he made others smile. He knew how to tell ordinary stories in extraordinary ways and in a warm, welcoming voice that helped him earn another career in the game. He could bowl a bit, talk a bit, and sing a bit: “Jessie, paint a picture about how it’s going to be. By now I should know better, your dreams are never free.”

Few of the evenings on which South Africa’s cricket media gathered didn’t feature Jackman crooning soulfully through Joshua Kadison’s 1993 song. Those happy times are no more. Jackman died on Friday. He was 75.

He lived a life that seemed to have spilled from the pages of a novel. His father was a one-legged officer with the Second Gurkha Rifles, which is why he was born in the Indian hill station of Shimla. His uncle was Patrick Cargill, a noted actor, who one day invited his nephew, then 15, to lunch. Also there were Charlie Chaplin and Sophia Loren — who arrived in a Rolls Royce and elegantly swept into the kitchen, carrying her own pots and pans, to do the cooking.

“She was drop dead gorgeous, sitting in a chair, a bit like royalty … I wish I could claim that I dazzled her with my scintillating conversation and rapier wit but I don’t think I said anything to her other than ‘Good afternoon’,” Jackman wrote, with the help of cricket journalist Colin Bryden in “Jackers: A Life In Cricket”, of his encounter with perhaps the most famous woman in the world at the time.

Despite the title of that 2012 book, Jackman’s life involved so much more than cricket. Even his playing career collided with the real world. His record lists four tests and 15 ODIs for England, but the truth is he was as much South African as he was English. His widow, Yvonne Jackman, is a nurse originally from Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. His home was in the Newlands area of Cape Town. Along with Surrey, he played for Western Province — and managed and coached them — and what was then called Rhodesia. All that connection to pariah states like South Africa and Rhodesia was bound to raise red flags.

So what were England thinking when they picked Jackman for their tour to West Indies in 1981, considering by then his ties to South Africa stretched back 11 years? Guyana revoked his visa, England refused to back down, and consequently the second Test at the Bourda in Georgetown was cancelled. Barbados let Jackman in, and on debut at Kensington Oval he had Gordon Greenidge and Clive Lloyd caught at slip and Desmond Hayes taken behind.

No-one who knew Jackman was surprised by those polar opposites. He was made for drama, or comedy-drama. His uncle was the thespian in the family, but one of Jackman’s early ambitions was to follow him to the footlights. Instead he developed one of the most theatrical appeals of his era, which upset with Ian Botham. “When I first played against him I wanted to knock his head off because he really antagonised me; I thought you arrogant, strutting gnome,” Botham wrote in his autobiography.

Jackman was proud of being able to bowl fast despite, as he described it, being “five-foot fuck-all” and built like an old-fashioned rugby scrumhalf. In the Times, Alan Gibson dubbed him the “Shoreditch Sparrow”. He was a workhorse for Surrey, sending down 71,094 deliveries in the 611 matches he played for the county from June 1966 to September 1982. He took 1,206 first-class wickets at 22.36 for them, and 399 at 20.73 in list A games.

His eyes shone like medals when he was told, in 2010, that he had dismissed Barry Richards more times — 16 — than anyone else who dared bowl to him in first-class cricket. That was no doubt influenced by the fact that Jackman had more chances than others to get Richards out because both played in England and South Africa, but it tells the story of Jackman’s class nonetheless. As did his decision not to use that truth to talk himself up, but to paint a picture of Richards’ greatness: “When the fixtures came out at the beginning of the season, one thing we always used to look at was whether we were playing Hampshire over the Wimbledon fortnight. Because if we were, there was very little chance that Barry would be playing. He managed to find a groin injury when Wimbledon was on.”

CSA’s interim board captured something of what Jackman meant to cricket in a statement on Saturday: “His passing … leaves a void in the cricketing world but particularly in South African cricketing life. We mourn the loss of a fine man, a lover of life, a cricket aficionado and a commentator who became part of the fabric of South African cricket in so many ways.”

A little later came confirmation that South Africa would wear black armbands on the second day of the first Test against Sri Lanka at Centurion on Sunday. But that wasn’t soon enough for Jacques Kallis, who tweeted on Saturday: “Sad to see no black armbands worn by Proteas for Robin Jackman today. A man that gave so much to SA cricket at all levels and all walks of life. RIP Jackers.” That would be same Kallis who has said nothing for all the months that the fraught conversation about racial injustice in cricket has ripped through the game in his country, and who has shown that he is not above using sport to talk abut politics by calling for the return of the death penalty in South Africa.

Ben Dladla, the president of the KwaZulu-Natal Cricket Union, a candidate for the vacant CSA presidency, and one of the few figures on the members council who commanded respect, died in the early hours of Sunday morning. Nobody said a word about him until a CSA statement landed at the stroke of lunch on Sunday. There was no mention of black armbands, although the team has been asked to state their position.

Even in death, Jackman can’t avoid the real world. The fact that he was fathered by a member of a colonising army in a brutally colonised country is in itself worthy of honest examination. Jackman wasn’t responsible for that, of course. But it was his decision to associate himself so closely with apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, where a war between a minority white regime and a subjugated black majority raged even as cricket continued regardless.

And yet, it was impossible not to like Jackman. He neither suffered fools nor put himself on a pedestal. He afforded all he encountered a level of respect that, were it more widespread, would make today’s social media poisoned world exponentially more kind. It was as much a pleasure to talk to him as it was to listen to him. “Howzit Jackers,” was among the most common things you could hear in South Africa’s press boxes. As was: “Fine, thank you, mate. And how are you?”

Jackman’s life teaches us what we should know already: that no-one is entirely good nor entirely bad, and that most of us — if we’ve lived decently — will be closer to the former than the latter when we die. Jackman, who spent his evenings drinking and smoking but always looked good as new in the morning, who could crackle with swearwords and cackle with joy all in the same sentence, was decent. And complex. And loved. He will be missed, including by those who question aspects of his life and times.

An hour before the resumption at Centurion on Sunday morning, with the players warming up and the press filtering in for work, the strains of Joshua Kadison’s “Jessie” echoed around the ground, courtesy of the public address announcer. Few seemed to understand the significance, but those who did allowed their eyes to shine like medals.

Jackers, paint a picture about how it’s going to be. By now we should know better, our dreams are never free.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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‘Snowballing’ batting issues cloud SA’s Caribbean sunshine

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in London

THIS time last week South Africa were in good place, and in more than one sense.

Seven days on, that’s no longer the case for Dané van Niekerk and her team.

It’s difficult not to feel good about life when you’re in Barbados, where the sun almost always shines, there’s a beach around every corner, and the locals are as welcoming as the cocktails are expensive.

And, when you’re up in a one-day series with a game to play, you feel better yet.

That’s the case even when Bridgetown has one of its rare sunless days, which happened last Wednesday when the second of three ODIs was washed out after South Africa had slipped to 177/8 in their 38 overs.

Van Niekerk scored 53 but Chloe Tryon’s 37 was the only other effort of more than 25.

Lacklustre batting was again the issue in the third game, also at Kensington Oval, on Saturday.

Despite Marizanne Kapp’s 4/52 the Windies racked up 292/2 with opener Hayley Matthews hammering 117, her maiden ODI century.

Nothing like it was seen in the South Africans’ reply, which spluttered to an end in the 43rd over with only 177 on the board.

Laura Wolvaardt made 54 and Van Niekerk 77, and they shared 108 for the third wicket. Thing is, no-one else reached double figures and only three other partnerships did.

Rather a drawn series than a defeat, Van Niekerk was told kindly, and rightly dismissed that kind of thinking.

“Hmm, that’s interesting … I don’t know,” Van Niekerk said, and followed that with a Freudian slip that belied her disappointment: “It’s not nice to lose an ODI series like this, especially by such a massive margin.”

She added that “the extras column was horrible”. And it was — 35 of the damned things, 31 of them wides.

The teams met again on Monday in the first of five T20s, when South Africa could come up with only 107/7 after restricting the home side to 124/6.

Kapp’s 22-ball 30 stood out in a scorecard in which Tryon’s 23 was the only other relative highlight.

Coach Hilton Moreeng conceded that South Africa’s batting problems had become chronic: “It’s snowballed and it’s something we need to rectify very quickly.”

Monday’s issues, as listed by Moreeng, have affected too many of South Africa’s performances in Barbados.

“We thought it was a total we should have been able to chase down,” he said.

“We didn’t have enough partnerships to be able to set up a total.

“Our application was not up to par.”

There were mitigating factors on Monday in the shape of South Africa picking four debutants — batters Robyn Searle and Faye Tunnicliffe, fast bowler Tumi Sekhukhune and off-spinner Saarah Smith, and all of them just 19 except 21-year-old Searle — and leaving out the dependable Van Niekerk and Suné Luus because of what Moreeng called “niggles”.

“The youngsters, especially in the first half, went very well,” Moreeng said. “The way they bowled and fielded, you could see the energy was there.

“In the second half things didn’t go according to plan. As a youngster you can learn from that.”

The series moves to Trinidad on Saturday, when the second game will be played at the Brian Lara Stadium in Tarouba, 52 kilometres from Port-of-Spain.

“A change of scenery is never a bad thing,” Moreeng said.

Indeed. And it probably doesn’t hurt that Trinidad isn’t quite as touristy as Barbados — all the better an environment in which to work on what’s wrong with your game.