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When the Cricket World Cup semifinal between New Zealand and India was hanging in the balance on Wednesday, a thought that can occur only to a long-suffering Proteas fan crossed my mind.
Which is better: Falling short before reaching the knockout stages as the Proteas did, or getting as close as the Kiwis have over the years without winning?
In answering that question, the self-pitying South African cricket fan in me briefly thought the Proteas were the lucky ones because they didn’t come within sight of the trophy and not take it home.
But, of course, the better answer is that the New Zealanders are the lucky ones, even though their heartbreak in the immediate aftermath of, say, not winning the World Cup as in 2015, was probably more pronounced.
The simple, age-old sporting logic behind that is a bit like the lottery – you’ve got to be in it to have any chance of winning. This is where the Proteas erred in their attempts to overturn a wretched 27-year involvement with the World Cup that now borders on a jinx.
At the last World Cup, the Proteas made the semifinals for the first time since 1992, when they ran that far upon their return to international cricket in Australia.
As painful as this may sound to people so impatient for a World Cup win that they can taste it, South Africa’s only goal for this World Cup should have been to make the final in the time-honoured principles of incremental improvement in sport.
New Zealand made today’s final against England on the basis of knocking on the door often enough to unhinge it. Crucially, though, the prising of the door was done through the cricket they decided to play and their execution of the skills needed to win matches.
Too often, the Proteas’ World Cup campaign seemed to be based on factors other than cricket.
I must admit to being guilty of doing the same – for some reason, I thought strange factors such as the Proteas going to the World Cup as underdogs, for a change, would count; and like the fact that South Africa returning to the scene of the Edgbaston crime 20 years later would somehow count towards some goodwill the cricketing gods owed us as a country.
Now that I think about it, nobody who has thought they were due luck has actually been lucky.
The simple truth is that, instead of hoping we’d be lucky, we should have asked ourselves whether the Proteas batsmen could be relied on to drop 300 runs on an unsuspecting bowling attack at will, whether their bowlers had the ammunition to blast a team like England out for fewer than 300 seven times out of 10, and if their fielders could catch flies, let alone a cold, out there.
Asking those questions, and how to get those three departments to perform those skills at will, takes the unnecessary emotion out of World Cup campaigns because the point is to play good cricket and nothing else.
Also, we need to stop hoping to play good cricket every four years and work on doing it every day. Through trial and error, England decided they would make playing an ultra-aggressive style of cricket that simply bullied the opposition teams a habit.
There were some spectacular collapses along the way, but, over the past 18 months, their approach and conviction began paying off not only to the extent they could score 300 runs in an innings whenever they felt like it, but they made it all the way to today’s final.
Having just gone through their worst World Cup in history, the canvas can’t be blanker for the Proteas to reinvent themselves into whatever kind of cricket team they want to be.
. sports@citypress.co.za
. Follow me on Twitter @Simxabanisa
