South Africa lost their shot at winning this World Test Championship in 2022, when their board announced the team were going to play 28 games in the next four years. They lost it for a second time during the spring of last year, when they packed their reserve team off to play a series against New Zealand because their centrally contracted players had to stay back and play in a franchise tournament.
They lost it a third time when the team were bowled out for 138 on Thursday morning and they lost it a fourth when they let Australia’s tail put on 134 runs for the last four wickets, leaving them needing 282 to win. Finally, after they had just about run out of ways to lose, they won.
The last runs came hard and the winning ones seemed to be the most difficult of all. It was chaos on the outside of the old brick walls that surround Lord’s on Saturday morning. It seemed every South African in the city seemed to be piling in to see their team win the World Test Championship and five minutes before the start of play the queues ran down and around Wellington Road, where the rush of latecomers forced the traffic wide to the other side of the street. But inside, the scoreboard moved like a stopped clock. “We were trying to get it over and done with,” said Aiden Markram, “but it just wasn’t easy.”
“Even when we got it down to 10 runs,” Temba Bavuma said. “You were on the edge, thinking anything can happen. I mean the belief was there, but it was pretty hard to accept that we were so close to winning something.”
South Africa have blown too many big games to feel sure of scoring even the bare handful they needed here. Kyle Verreynne got himself in a hell of mess trying to pick off the very last they needed after the scores were tied. He ought to have been given out caught behind after he gloved the ball while he was trying to hit a ramp for four, but Australia had used up all their reviews. Besides, by that point even they seemed to have decided they ought to just let South Africa have it. After everything they have been through across the years, even Australians were not going to begrudge them this victory.
South Africa are not a great team, but they have just beaten one. Markram is not a great batter, but he played like one. Bavuma is not a great captain, but he has won a great victory, one which may turn out to be the most consequential in the team’s history.
After all those defeats in other International Cricket Council tournaments across the years, the consequences of losing this final were unthinkable. Now, the implications of winning could be incalculable. Bavuma drew an explicit comparison with the success of the Springboks, whose back-to-back World Cup wins under Siya Kolisi have done so much.
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Bavuma is the first Black man to captain the cricket team and if previous generations fought against one strain of discrimination, he has had to confront another form of it by dealing with the lingering stigma attached to Black players in an era when so many white players have quit because they feel racial quotas are discriminatory.
“For me to be recognised more than just as a Black African cricketer, but to be seen as somebody who has achieved something that the country wanted so much, that’s something which will make me walk around with my chest out, and I just hope that it will inspire the country,” Bavuma said.
And beyond. Bavuma spoke about how it was a victory for all the “small” teams in Test cricket, which, these days, includes all nine Test playing nations apart from India, Australia and England. South African Test cricket is the canary in the mine and 18 months ago it had just about keeled over.
Since then, they have found a way to win eight games in a row, a run that culminated in this famous victory. Bavuma and Markram both said they want to play more Test cricket. South Africa do not have a home series scheduled for another 15 months, when they will play Australia, again.
“What’s important is to keep Test cricket as No 1 in South Africa,” said Markram. “We understand all the dynamics in the cricket world, but for young players coming through, it has to be about wearing this baggy Test cap for South Africa.”
