Published: Mar 26, 2011, 10:32 AM (IST)
Edited: Mar 18, 2014, 03:16 PM (IST)
By Madan Mohan
South Africa captain Graeme Smith did not make any effort at the presentation to deny the ‘history’ or justify. He simply said they regretted they couldn’t be the ones to reverse it. Choking ceases to shock anymore, seemingly even for Smith. What should have been an aberration has now become a pattern. And with due respect to the Black Caps, falling well short of 220 against them from over a 100 for two down is a choke of seismic proportions.
It was refreshing, in a way, to see Smith make no effort to defend it in the presentation. The team needs to leave justification aside and address what’s going wrong. Even accounting for the weakness of the Indian bowling line-up, something must be going wrong if a team that can calmly overhaul 296 makes a hash of 220 against a determined, but not imposing New Zealand attack.
For starters, they could turn to their Test game for clues. South Africa has shown more resilience in the Test game and has seen tough matches through to the end. They have had their share of implosions, but a pattern such as what we have seen in ODIs is by no means evident. This possibly indicates that the over limits in ODIs plays upon their mind and puts pressure on them. The shot selection of some of their middle and lower batsmen en route to their dismissals indicates panic and nerves.
For instance, Francois Du Plessis didn’t need to target Jacob Oram again in the same over, having just hit him for a six. But, possibly in a rush to finish off the match, he went for the big drive again and this time, found the fielder. The end came really soon thereafter. The AB De Villiers run out too smacked of panic, though the scorecard would tell you that the match was well in the balance then. In previous chokes too, it was some such instance of panic that triggered the lower order collapse.
And why does the lower order crumble in such matches? Largely because they are knock-out matches. South Africa has shown the propensity to crumble even sans the pressure of knock-out encounters, like against England, but it was in knock-outs that the trend emerged. When, in a do-or-die encounter, the team is faced with the task of scoring roughly 40% of the target, the lower order goes weak in the knees and collapses.
Most teams would in such situations, actually. West Indies famously collapsed against Australia to contrive and hand victory to them in the 1996 World Cup semi-final. But teams typically don’t get into such situations because the middle-order takes charge of the chase and sees it through. When a chase is won in a World Cup knock-out match, it is usually through a calm and calculated effort with the batsmen easing up to the target with overs to spare, rather than sneaking through on the penultimate delivery.
The pressure of a knock-out situation doesn’t favour the chasing team. All the defending team needs is wickets to win, whereas every additional run to get to the target suddenly looks massive and out of reach. People have talked about the need for a stronger lower order for South Africa, but it may, in fact, be the middle-order that is not doing the job. Jacques Kallis and de Villiers should not have handed over the chase to Duminy and du Plessis before no more than say 50 more runs had to be chased. Anything more and nerves start to play funny games with the batsmen.
And it’s not just the match in question. Every time South Africa choked, the middle-order had left the lower-order in the lurch with a bit too many to get for comfort. Where things are going wrong with the unquestionably solid Kallis and de Villiers in the middle-order (or Darryl Cullinan in the 90s) is a question South Africa needs to address. Why do their batsmen not feel in control of such chases and make costly mistakes time and again…the same batsmen who show character in difficult situations in Test matches. Of course, one could argue that No 5 and No 6 are supposed to take care of such situations, but the likelihood of implosions when No 3 and No 4 have left too many to get tends to be higher.
Kallis may not be around for very much longer in the ODI game. Which probably means Duminy takes over part of the middle over mantle. And going by history, it probably means these questions won’t be answered anytime soon and history will repeat itself.
(Madan Mohan, a 25-year old CA from Mumbai, is passionate about writing, music and cricket. Writing on cricket is like the icing on the cake.)
