Amazing!

This post is about the "greatest one day match" that took place on Sunday. Before I write about the match, I have a question? How?

How did the World Champions score a world record 434 and contrive it to lose in less than 4 hours?

How did the SA team, labelled as chokers even think of chasing it? The sheer audaciousness of the thought is unbelievable.

How did Ricky Ponting, one of the best captains in the game miss a trick as he underbowled Brett Lee and allowed Lewis to break a happy Murali's record for the most expensive one day bowler?

May be I will never stumble on the answer. But, the match was certainly superb.

In hindsight, it seems the Aussies took it a bit too easy. After all nobody had chased more than 334 and they were not aware of the danger until Gibbs had given the S Africans hope to win the match. The Windies did the same against India in '83. As Michael Holding said later " Every man went for his shots thinking that the next man would get them. Until there were no next men left" .

But I hate to tell that I missed most of it.

I checked the score after 30 odd overs of Aussies' innings and found that they were going great guns. After my siesta, I got to know that they had scored a (then) world record 434. In the hostel, we were talking about how India had the record for the worst defeat and that Australia would complete a routine victory. How wrong we were.

I checked the score shortly after SA started. Dippenar got out and I thought well everything is going the Aussies way. Well all know what happened later. But I still thought this was too good to last and SA were just giving a fight for the sake of their fans.
Once Gibbs fell, and the run rate dropped, I thought it was all over. Then the game went into a see saw mode, and when Hall fell with 2 off 4, we were telling "No! not now!! Not after coming so far" . What if Ntini got out?? But Ntini score probably the most important run of his career and Boucher finished in style.

The hostel erupted in joy and we went back to our beds still not believing what we had just witnessed.

A small thought crept to my mind later: If our batsmen had batted like Smith, Gibbs and Boucher almost three years back at the same ground, we would be World Champions

-Winz