The night the albatross was lifted Part one

I am not a particularly emotional fella. Maybe a little. Never cried watching Oprah, or Titanic. Okay, Mufasa dying in the Lion King got me a little. Every single time I watch the damn film. But there was something about the performance the South African cricket team put up against a very game Sri Lankan team which brought tears to my eyes. Too understand why, you need to understand South African cricket. It’s methodical, it’s structured. It’s about winning. That is all. It’s also had an albatross around its neck since before I was born. Nobody, but nobody could have imagined the night the weather wreaked havoc with our aspirations in Sydney ’92 that it would be nearly exactly twenty-three years before we would win a knock out match in the World Cup. My first experience with the World Cup failure was that night in Durban when rain and rather strange scientific calculators conspired to prevent us from succeeding against the Sri Lankans. We didn’t lose, but we didn’t win either. And more importantly, in a high pressure situation, we didn’t execute skills which any you could be reasonably expected to execute. In this case, the skill was typing numbers into a computer. We choked. That wasn’t our first brush with asphyxiation of course. The 1999 world cup was characterized not by the final, but by two incredibly bizarre mistakes to make by the South African team. No one will ever know why Herschelle Gibbs, as good a fielder as the world has ever seen, felt the need to celebrate before the ball was completely in his control. Steve Waugh didn’t really tell him, “you just dropped the world cup”, but he didn’t have to. Hindsight and history did a pretty good job of getting that point across all on their own. The Semifinal is often regarded as the essential gold standards in which all ODI games are judged. Rightfully so too, it was an outstanding match with fabulous performances from all-time greats, a fantastic knock from the player of the tournament, and an ending so dramatic, you wouldn’t believe it . We also choked away a win having done a remarkable job to even get ourselves to a place where victory was not an improbable theory. Come 2007, we didn’t choke, so much as have a brain fade the size of which can’t really be quantified. It beggars belief that in the middle of a collapse in Calypso, not one player thought it prudent to maybe try get themselves in first,. Assess conditions. Try not follow the guy who just got dismissed. The idea eventually came to mind, of course. At about 27/5. 2011 Was an ever bigger disaster. Kallie of all people tried taking on the biggest player in the team, on the longest boundary on the ground. It did not end well. Fantastic catch mind you. Faf got into a melee, and elimination swiftly followed. It has been a long journey to that world cup KO match win. One which includes failures in ICC Champions Trophy events, and other failures on smaller scales...