Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE, Melbourne
NEW Zealand reached the World Cup final because a steady, unspectacular 36-year-old South African played the innings of his life.
Grant Elliott’s 84 not out was the difference between two teams who fell victim to the kind of errors that most players, however experienced, will make under pressure.
Without Elliott’s performance, all the fire and brimstone of Brendon McCullum’s batting would have come to nought. Martin Guptill’s double century in the quarter-final against West Indies would have been just another amazing innings, not part of a bigger story. Trent Boult’s heroics would have been in vain.
It all came down to Elliott, Dale Steyn, and the last two balls of the match - five to win, four to tie, which would have been good enough to put the Kiwis through. Elliott sealed it with a six.
“There’s such a fine line between winning and losing, and that line was proven once again,” Russell Domingo said on SA’s return home. “For us to want to make radical or drastic changes or chuck this out or chuck that out based on a boundary with one ball to spare would be immature. We need to let the dust settle and take stock before deciding.”
Too late. The decisions that mattered were revealed when SA’s World Cup squad was named on January 7. One of them ignored SA’s own steady, unspectacular player. His name is Ryan McLaren.
The chickens of McLaren’s omission have come home to roost. And that is not hindsight: the howls when he was left out should still be ringing in the selectors’ ears. Now louder than ever, in fact.
You can pick as many players as you like who allegedly have that dreamed up nonsense - the x-factor. There are 25 other letters of the alphabet, and all of them are needed to form words to fit into sentences that make up chapters to be compiled into a book. The World Cup is a book, and x does not feature in it nearly as often as the more steady, less spectacular letters.
Australia reached the World Cup final because they played like a team who believed they would get there. Their loss against New Zealand in a white-knuckle shootout was, according to the Aussies, an aberration. They proved themselves correct with five subsequent victories, which included beating Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India.
When SA lost to India after a less than convincing win over Zimbabwe, the pressure on them increased exponentially. Going down to Pakistan lent them the look of dead men walking. Their stirring win over Sri Lanka in the quarter-final promised much, but delivered little.
SA never seemed to have the big picture in focus. Instead, they played as if they believed one game would change everything. But the Aussies were confident enough of the coherence of their campaign for Michael Clarke to announce his retirement from one-day cricket on the eve of the final.
Clarke summed up that sureness: “I will train no harder today. I will study New Zealand no harder than I did last time we played them. I will sleep no worse tonight than I ever do. I’ll be no less nervous before I walk out to bat. The feeling is exactly the same.”
When Joel Stransky needed to nail a dropgoal to win the 1995 World Cup final, he did. When Mark Williams was given two chances in two minutes in the 1996 African Cup of Nations final, he scored twice.
When SA needed to stop Elliott from finding four runs off two balls to earn the right to play the biggest game of their lives at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sunday, they failed. Simple. Harsh. True.
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