You could hear it in Newlands on Tuesday, Kingsmead on Wednesday, St George’s Park on Thursday and Borland Park on Friday. It was not just the sound of generators turning on lights amidst the wreckage of South Africa’s crumbling infrastructure, but also the end of SA20 waiting to catch your breath.
“What were you thinking?” the tournament organizer asked anyone within earshot of Newlands after the opening game. They seemed eager for answers, as if they were waiting for a list of things they could have done better. The list was short:
all ok. At least most of them.
A sold-out crowd watched a match featuring Joss Butler, Jason Roy, David Miller, Eoin Morgan, Tablais Shamsi, Dewald Brevis, Sam Curran, Rashid Khan and Jofra Archer. They turned with decent firepower to win 3/27 after Butler sliced 42-51, Brevis went 41-70 undefeated, and Archer returned from injury after his 17-month stint. I’ve seen the
If there was anything to criticize, it was the one-sidedness of the fortress. The Cape Town Mumbai Indians beat Pearl his Royals with 8 wickets and 27 balls passing, hardly breaking a sweat in their familiar blue shirts. Not that the organizers could have planned it.
Also, the problem was rectified the next day in Durban, with the Joburg Super Kings rebounding from his 27/4 to 190/6. Quinton Decock’s 52-ball 78 was not enough to bring home his Giants in Durban’s supers.
JSK won a very notable 16-run game.
Height, height, height of the bleachers at the south end of the site, Stephen Broy, health, risk and safety manager for the sugar industry and brother of Centurion curator Brian Broy, stretches his legs stood as if One with his left foot caught six Ferreira who were pinned to the ground in front of Senuran Muthusamy. Bloy will keep the full amount of his R1 million if no one else does the same during the tournament. When the two floodlight towers on the ground went dark between innings, you might have thought you were about to wake up to the diesel smell of disaster. However, it was a temporary problem caused by the need to refuel the generators between innings, and lights, cameras, and action were resumed on command.
The normally unflappable Sean Pollock fluttered enough to confuse overs and wickets in his comments.
“28 after 0.” He modified himself, but the original was consistent with the sudden infusion of fun into South African cricket. The largest crowd went home satisfied, even though the home team finished on opposite sides of the score.
Unusually for an Eastern Cape game, his play at Gqeberha on Thursday was interrupted by lightning. But that didn’t stop Phil Salt from opening and closing an innings of 193/6 for the Pretoria Capitals, posting an unbeaten 77 of 47 innings. Salt and Wayne Parnell missed all but three runs of 9-ball 29 on 4 and 6, sharing consecutive 36 from 13.
The weather in Pearl on Friday couldn’t have been better. Temperatures reached 30 degrees Celsius by noon, and the earliest to reach the ground before the 1:30 p.m. start was given a prized spot in the shade of the trees on the lawn bank. Also, these generators gave us a break from a blackout that would have cut power to Pearl from 10am to 2:30pm.
The Royals responded to Tuesday’s drubbing by rattling JSK for 81 and scoring within 11 overs. Bjorn Fortuin and Evan Jones shared his six wickets and Lungi Ngidi played his first match since returning from Test his series in Australia, his best match in months. Ngidi held 1/13 and was on target with just six shots from bowling, half of which were last overs. His exuberant celebration after the top of Faff du Plessis dived into the third was raw, powerful and beautiful. Not having to play in South African uniforms probably helps.
The result marked an impressive turnaround for both sides, with the game even more one-sided than the first, but rebalancing the format’s main selling point: unpredictability. And as the only franchise out of a small South African town, it doesn’t hurt the narrative if the royal family stays competitive. But not all is well. CSA’s transformative goals don’t apply to tournaments, and it shows. Of his 88 playing opportunities in his first four games, only 20 were given to the South African black and tan player. All 32 places reserved for foreigners were actually occupied. Nearly two-thirds of South Africans were white. The pitches for the first four games were not to the liking of the T20 tournament organizers. Many enjoy the conditions that put the distorted equation back into the bowler, but Suits tend to see the Sixes sailing into the sunset rather than fighting to score and lots of wickets.
Still, if you want to know what everyone thinks about tournaments, you should know that many of us think tournaments are winners.That’s the point of reciting pot highlights.
Quality players have entertained us with not always tight and sometimes explosive cricket. That’s what you can say about the T20 league, which is properly run anywhere in the world. But in South Africa, where multiple challenges cast a shadow of recession across the country, it’s a success.
Friday’s match at Pearl was the only one of the top four matches not to sell out before match day. But the time will come for Bolland Park. Only one of his three remaining games at the stadium will start at 1:30 p.m. With a capacity of 10,000 he is the smallest court used in a tournament, but there is no crowd in the country that rocks and rolls like Pearl.
For the time being, Kingsmead was the SA20 audience’s top vibe. Over the years, attendance here has been low and the weather has been poor. Things could turn around when the tournament moves to Highveld this weekend. Few sites are as rich in character and character as Wanderers and Centurion.