Good win, SA. Now keep doing it

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TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

PUFF the magic dragon lives by the sea, but for an enchanted moment on Saturday he was marooned in the middle of landlocked Harare and left to wonder what the hell had just happened.

There, breathing fire and defiance, his eyes boiling with bewilderment, stood dear Puff. You will know him better as Mitchell Johnson.

Could it be, really and actually and indisputably, that Faf du Plessis had refused a precious single off his brilliant bowling?

It could. It had really, actually, indisputably happened. The over was 40.2. The scores were a run away from level, and Du Plessis had driven Johnson to long-off. A single was his for the taking. He did not want it. Gobs were duly smacked.

The thing was, Du Plessis was 96 not out. The smell of his fourth century in five innings had flared his nostrils. Four more runs would have sealed him into the annals as the first man to score that many hundreds in a one-day series. But, with two runs left in the game, he did not have four more at his disposal - unless, of course, he smote them in a single stroke.

Besides, South Africa had more than nine overs and six wickets with which to score those two runs to beat Australia and win the triangular series final. Not even the champions of choking could get that wrong.

For once, the player was bigger than the team in a side in which that notion is heresy in a way it never was when giants like Graeme Smith, Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher roamed the dressingroom like dinosaurs looking for something to kill. So Du Plessis refused the single.

In that instant, Johnson ceased being the bowler who had scared every last drop of talent, skill and temperament out of South Africa’s batsmen in the Test series in March and became nothing more than the humble conduit to deliver Du Plessis into the record books.

The sheer incredulity of it all threatened to shift Johnson into an inhuman shape. He smiled the smile of the concussed and did not quite know what to do with his hands. So he left them hanging, bent at the elbow, more empty coat-hanger than pouting teapot.

Something less perceptible had also happened. It was Johnson who had labelled the South Africans “predictable” before the final and here they were, doing the unthinkable on several levels. Who, for example, would have thought that they would have humbled the Australians as clinically as they did?

Michael Clarke, meanwhile, discovered that the bad blood between him and Dale Steyn over their on-field altercation in the Newlands Test in March that he thought had dried into harmlessness was, in fact, a gush of haemorrhaging acrimony.

“I don’t take many things personally, but what he did say to me I did take personally,” Steyn said after Saturday’s match.

“I know he apologised in the media and I should be playing this down, but the day he comes and shakes my hand and says, ‘I really mean what I said’ and behaves like the way he should, maybe then I will (forgive him).”

Not often do cricket’s cleverest team shoot themselves in the foot, then put that foot into their mouths and chomp down hard. But that is what the Aussies did last week - their calculated nastiness inspired the opposition to reach the heights they had planned to reach themselves.

Or, as AB de Villiers explained Johnson’s “predictable” jib to Steyn: “It’s a bit of bait - they just wanted us to bite.”

“Well, we do that,” Steyn, an avid fisherman who enjoys a good fight with his prey, replied with bulletproof reverse logic.

The biters had been bitten, and now that South Africa know Aussie blood tastes just like their own there should be no sliding back to the old insecurities.

Scores were tied on Saturday when Du Plessis was caught trying to hit the boundary that never will be. That left De Villiers to win it with a satisfying thrash through the covers.

Whether Du Plessis punched De Villiers in the face when they were both in the dressingroom is not known, but he should have.

It was De Villiers, after all, and not the Aussies who had denied Du Plessis that fourth century. In the previous over, Du Plessis had given his captain the strike by taking a single off James Faulkner’s first delivery. That took Du Plessis to 91 not out. Not to worry: South Africa were still 22 runs away from victory. There was still time to make history.

De Villiers stroked the next ball gently towards point and stayed put. All good. But then he smashed Faulkner over midwicket and long-off for sixes and through cover for four to go to 50. At least he was not able to steal the strike for the next over.

Suddenly, Du Plessis wore his incredulity on his face as he consulted with his skipper, who has been his friend since their pads were almost as tall as they were.

“I lost track of where he was at,” De Villiers admitted afterwards. “I was just watching the scoreboard, counting down every run. I sensed weakness from their bowlers and went after it.

“In that last over, with Faf in the 90s, he reminded me and said, ‘Listen, I’m close to my hundred here, bud’.

“I said, ‘OK, sorry. I forgot about that. We tried our best to get him to that milestone, but it didn’t work out that way.”

De Villiers admitted that “if I could have it over, I would have allowed him (the chance) to get to (a century) a little bit easier than what I left him”.

Now it is every South African’s turn to be incredulous. Rarely have they seen the team they support put themselves in the centre of the equation in a significant game against a side who have always known how to beat them when it matters, and never have they seen them do so with such conviction.

“There’s always been doubt on us in big pressure games and we showed what we’re capable of today,” De Villiers said.

They know they can do it. We know they can do it. Now, for Saturday to mean anything, they need to keep doing it.