New Delhi: The drainage at the national capital’s nearly 140-year-old Arun Jaitley Stadium was put to test Tuesday due to several days of inclement weather.
Except for a 30-minute delay due to a wet outfield, the skies cleared up in the afternoon for the third and final One Day International between India and South Africa, which India won resoundingly by 8 wickets with more than 30 overs to spare.
The victory takes India to the top of the ICC ODI World Cup Super League standings, with 129 points from 18 games, and the team has already booked its place in next year’s World Cup as hosts.
South Africa, on the other hand, remain in the lowly eleventh spot, three wins away from the automatic qualifying positions with five home matches against the Netherlands and England due to be played in early 2023.
ThePrint takes a look at some salient talking points of the match.
1. Proteas wilt on spinners’ pitch after losing toss
On a sticky playing surface, which had been covered for days due to the rain and was assisting spin, India’s trio of spinners – Washington Sundar, Shahbaz Ahmed and Kuldeep Yadav – had a field day against the South African lineup that largely lacked patience and temperament to play spin.
Eight of the 10 wickets in the first innings fell to spin, starting with wicketkeeper Quinton de Kock who tried to attack a short-and-wide Sundar delivery without accounting for the wicket’s inconsistent bounce.
A majority of the South African batsmen were guilty of playing premeditated shots across the line, seemingly unable or unwilling to drop anchor, and read the pitch. David Miller’s forward defence missing a standard arm ball from Washington Sundar summed up South Africa’s miserable day.
2. Kuldeep scripts renewed resurgence
One of the surprise stories of the Indian Premier League earlier this year was the comeback of a left-arm wrist spinner who had previously appeared to be lost in the doldrums of domestic cricket – Kuldeep Yadav.
Having spent the latter years of Virat Kohli’s captaincy carrying drinks, Kuldeep enjoyed a stellar season with the Delhi Capitals and showed on Tuesday that it wasn’t a false dawn in the shortest format. Rather, the wrist spinner seamlessly took to the favourable conditions in his adopted home ground and ran through the Proteas’ lower order, using his variations, flighted or flat, to full effect.
3. Klaasen plays lone hand but not for long
Only three South African batsmen reached double-figures, and a little over a third of the team’s score was down to aggressive middle order batsman Heinrich Klaasen, who is unlikely to feature in the starting lineup in next month’s T20 World Cup.
As he showed in the previous two ODIs this series, Klaasen is more adept at playing spin than the rest of the white-ball members of the Proteas squad, frequently relying on sweeps and reverse sweeps to break the rhythm of India’s spinners.
However, with the absence of another batsman to build a partnership with and the mounting scoreboard pressure in a decider, Klaasen couldn’t effectively build an innings all by himself and fell to Shahbaz Ahmed by trying to cut a delivery that was spinning away and grazed just enough of his off stump.
4. Shahbaz’s successful, if not breakthrough, debut series
Left-armer Ravindra Jadeja’s superlative backup, Axar Patel, now has his own capable backup in Shahbaz Ahmed. While Shahbaz never got the opportunity to translate his 47+ List A batting average to the international level this series, he bowled far better than his record in domestic competitions. Despite conceding several boundaries as one would expect a career part-timer to do, Shahbaz displayed enough guile to repeatedly turn the ball away from the right hander with disciplined length and took the two most crucial wickets, that of Klaasen and in-form Aiden Markram.
5. Opener Shubman Gill finally gets going
As the sun sets on Shikhar Dhawan’s ODI World Cup selection prospects with a lackadaisical run-out, his opening partner Shubman Gill finally got off the blocks early on Tuesday instead of falling cheaply as he did in Lucknow and Ranchi.
Gill’s signature dispatching of short balls was on show as he put left-arm pacer Marco Jansen to the sword in particular, punishing him for every ball that wasn’t right on the money. The only blemish in Gill’s largely excellent knock was his failure to convert it into a half-century, as he was trapped in front by a full delivery from Lungi Ngidi.
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