Bat for 90 overs. Take eight wickets. If the last day’s play in the fourth Test at the Ferozeshah Kotla yesterday was that simple Einstein would have formulated e=mc² during a coffee break.SA needed to salvage something – nothing quantifiable or even important; just something – from the series.
India needed to complete something important and quantifiable: a 3-0 triumph over the team who had arrived with a 16-point lead in the rankings.
More realistically, the teams needed to get the job done before or until the umpires decided that the world’s most polluted air, officially, had become too thick with filth to be penetrated by the human eye well enough to allow the ball to be seen.
As a time and space equation, it was e=mc² itself. India solved it, achieving their biggest victory in terms of runs – 337 – to reach up and grab second place in the rankings.
SA, whose lead is now down to four points, tumbled to their worst defeat since Australia beat them by 530 runs in Melbourne in 1911.
When AB de Villiers stalked off having followed and gloved a spitting cobra of a delivery from Ravichandran Ashwin to leg slip, his way was lit by a veritable constellation of cellphone cameras that only just managed to cut through the soupy gloom.
It was 2.39pm and the dying of the light was imminent, in every sense.
De Villiers was seventh out having played the most un-AB-like innings in all of his 169 trips to the Test crease.
For six minutes short of six hours, De Villiers succeeded in that aim with the kind of grace that transported him above and beyond human limitations. But the 297th ball he faced proved one too many.
Sixteen minutes and two dozen deliveries later, the match and the series and the tour was finally over.
The visitors’ last five wickets crashed for seven runs in 26 balls. And that after the first five had stood tall and firm for 746 balls. They were 94/3 at lunch, 136/5 at tea, and 143 all out 31 deliveries into the third session.
“We believed that we could do it,” Hashim Amla said. “That was the reason we tried to go for the draw – we believed that we could.”
Again, stonewalling is anything but simple for players who have been raised to score runs, not swallow deliveries whole.
“Nobody wants to block everything, but the need was for us to try and bat as long as we can,” said Amla.
“It was unnatural. But there is no selfishness in trying to do what needs to be done.”
Even Virat Kohli, a man not easily moved from the centre of his universe, noted SA’s performance: “To play like that is a very difficult skill. I was surprised with their approach but I was also impressed with the way they applied themselves.”
Ashwin, the Einstein, Eisenhower and Eastwood – as in Clint – of this series, finished with 5/61, his fourth five-wicket haul in a rubber in which he claimed 31 scalps.
SA put up a brave fight, none more so than De Villiers. Amla and Faf du Plessis, too, will one day look back on December 7 2015 and wonder how the hell they did what they did.
But that day is a long way off. For now, SA must look ahead. Oh, to be home now that England are almost there.
AB puts back into it in vain
SA needed to salvage something – nothing quantifiable or even important; just something – from the series.
India needed to complete something important and quantifiable: a 3-0 triumph over the team who had arrived with a 16-point lead in the rankings.
More realistically, the teams needed to get the job done before or until the umpires decided that the world’s most polluted air, officially, had become too thick with filth to be penetrated by the human eye well enough to allow the ball to be seen.
As a time and space equation, it was e=mc² itself. India solved it, achieving their biggest victory in terms of runs – 337 – to reach up and grab second place in the rankings.
SA, whose lead is now down to four points, tumbled to their worst defeat since Australia beat them by 530 runs in Melbourne in 1911.
When AB de Villiers stalked off having followed and gloved a spitting cobra of a delivery from Ravichandran Ashwin to leg slip, his way was lit by a veritable constellation of cellphone cameras that only just managed to cut through the soupy gloom.
It was 2.39pm and the dying of the light was imminent, in every sense.
De Villiers was seventh out having played the most un-AB-like innings in all of his 169 trips to the Test crease.
For six minutes short of six hours, De Villiers succeeded in that aim with the kind of grace that transported him above and beyond human limitations. But the 297th ball he faced proved one too many.
Sixteen minutes and two dozen deliveries later, the match and the series and the tour was finally over.
The visitors’ last five wickets crashed for seven runs in 26 balls. And that after the first five had stood tall and firm for 746 balls. They were 94/3 at lunch, 136/5 at tea, and 143 all out 31 deliveries into the third session.
“We believed that we could do it,” Hashim Amla said. “That was the reason we tried to go for the draw – we believed that we could.”
Again, stonewalling is anything but simple for players who have been raised to score runs, not swallow deliveries whole.
“Nobody wants to block everything, but the need was for us to try and bat as long as we can,” said Amla.
“It was unnatural. But there is no selfishness in trying to do what needs to be done.”
Even Virat Kohli, a man not easily moved from the centre of his universe, noted SA’s performance: “To play like that is a very difficult skill. I was surprised with their approach but I was also impressed with the way they applied themselves.”
Ashwin, the Einstein, Eisenhower and Eastwood – as in Clint – of this series, finished with 5/61, his fourth five-wicket haul in a rubber in which he claimed 31 scalps.
SA put up a brave fight, none more so than De Villiers. Amla and Faf du Plessis, too, will one day look back on December 7 2015 and wonder how the hell they did what they did.
But that day is a long way off. For now, SA must look ahead. Oh, to be home now that England are almost there.
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