Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE, Cape Town
ANOTHER day, another fine innings for Faf du Plessis. And Dale Steyn’s finest 10 overs in a green shirt. That was almost all SA needed to win the triangular series final against Australia in Harare on Saturday.
SA popped the corks with six wickets standing and 55 balls to spare. Never in one-day internationals between these two packs of pitbulls have SA so dominant, and never have Australia been so meek. Never before, too, have SA won a final against Australia.
Du Plessis’ 96 followed the scores of 106, 126 and 121 he banked in the previous 10 days. He got out with the scores tied trying to become the first man to score four tons in a single rubber.
No matter. Du Plessis batted like he was starring in a commercial for a German luxury car - all precision engineering and advancement through technique.
What Australia would not have given on Saturday for an innings like that. Instead, not until James Faulkner and Mitchell Starc put on 71 off 73 balls for the ninth wicket could the Australians find a way to survive, nevermind prosper, against SA’s bowling long enough to make their partnerships count.
When Steyn crashed an inswinger into Brad Haddin’s back pad in the 37th over, his seventh, he had figures of 4/19. Not helped by Faulkner taking 13 runs off his last over, SA’s spearhead finished with 4/34.
On other days, Steyn has taken more wickets and conceded fewer runs. But he has never had more presence on the field and has, surely, never bowled better in the format.
No play-and-miss passed without him smiling sneakily at the errant batsman, eyes alive with mischief, and sending a conspirational glance towards the pitch. Always, of course, doing so from significantly nearer the opposite end of the pitch than his own.
The ball was an active participant in all this non-verbal communication, swerving this way and that for Steyn and doing so late.
In the 29th over, when Steyn zapped Finch’s middle stump and trapped Glenn Maxwell in front with his next ball, it was all too much for one man and his dog observing from afar.
“Reverse swing in the 28th over,” Michael Clarke tweeted from his spot next to a staffie on a couch in his Bondi Beach apartment minutes after posting a picture of the two of them sat snugly together watching the game. “With two white balls this means it’s really the 14th over ... Hopefully we get it swinging as well ...”
Clarke’s comments would have been churlish had he not asked a fair question. SA have, after all, been nailed for ball-tampering twice in less than a year.
But the show went on, and wild, woolly Wayne Parnell was able to squeeze enough of his deliveries into the anal confines of what is required of bowlers in the ODI game to induce a top-edged hoik from Steve Smith and find Mitchell Marsh’s middle stump via the inside edge.
Beyond that, Parnell’s spontaneity of spirit gave the Aussies something to think about in the wake of Mitchell Johnson labelling them “predictable” and George Bailey saying they depended on “one or two” batsmen.
So enamoured were SA of Parnell’s performance that De Villiers sent the left-hander and not himself to the crease when the second wicket fell. The experiment failed - Parnell was bowled by Faulkner having scored six off 24 balls - but so did the Aussies’ suggestion that SA were boring.
The stand of 98 Hashim Amla and Du Plessis shared certainly was not. Neither was the unbroken partnership of 98 with which Du Plessis and De Villiers won the match. And Steyn? Predictable? Predictably destructive, maybe.
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