Despite a rough day at the office for the Proteas against New Zealand, we’re already looking ahead to 2027. At least we still have the Boks, right? Photo: AFP I suspect, as dawn breaks on the business day with the first office coffee boiling away in the cranny of a kitchen around office parks in South Africa, there will be a lot of sighing, followed by “well, there is always next year”.
There is perhaps only one team in the country that can elicit such despondency —the Proteas— and there will be plenty of that in the coming days. Our beloved cricket team, led byAiden Markramthis time around, once again failed to live up to their billing, losing by a quite devastatingnine wickets to New Zealandin the semi-final of theICC Men’s T20 World Cupon Wednesday. The Black Caps now hold asix-and-oh-bloody-hellrecord against the Proteas at ICC white-ball tournaments.
If we weren’t pumping them in the rugby at the moment, it would be all the more infuriating. That’s the other utterance I reckon will be plentiful today: “at least we have the Springboks”. As far as devastating losses at a cricket World Cup go, however, methinks this one ranks on the lower side of the spectrum.
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Yes, it was a bad defeat, but one that the Proteas can at least look in the eye and admit that they were thoroughly outplayed and simply did not pitch up on the day. You could, I suppose, argue that their nerves got the better of them, but such is the fickleness of T20 cricket — you are king for just a day. For me, the heartbreak of a Proteas loss will never come close to the semi-final lost to Australia all the way back in 1999.
It was then, when we had one foot in the final, that Allan Donald and Lance Klusener got horribly confused, the former being run out by forever and a day. There were also tears in 2003 when Shaun Pollock and company miscalculated the Duckworth-Lewis system to lose to Sri Lanka, but perhaps the most painful loss was in 2015. You’ll notice that defeat was also against New Zealand, where we lost the semi-final in the Cricket World Cup by four wickets with one ball remaining.
Dale Steyn left the field devastated, with Faf du Plessis, AB de Villiers, and Morne Morkel in balling their eyes out. For us mortal South Africans, the pits of our stomachs fell through us as we collapsed onto our knees in heartbreak Wednesday’s loss wasn’t as bad as that and, despite the massive margin, there are plenty of positives to take from this World Cup and cast forward to next year’s Cricket World Cup in South Africa and the following T20 World Cup a year later. So, while the disappointment is real right now, we can take solace in the fact that the next chance for redemption is just around the corner.
We’ve survived 1999 and 2015; we will survive this. After all, “next year” is literally next year.
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