First ODI: With a late charge, Sanju Samson almost pulls it off for India

First ODI: With a late charge, Sanju Samson almost pulls it off for India

First ODI: With a late charge, Sanju Samson almost pulls it off for India. Sanju Samson nearly staged a historic theft over South Africa after escaping defeat.

His brilliant unbeaten 86 off 63 balls gave India renewed optimism for a win that had seemed out of reach for much of their chase. 

South Africa won the match by nine runs in a bizarrely exciting performance, but just as he was about to take the night, fate dealt him a brutal hand.

Sanju would look back on this night with a trace of sadness despite the undeniable beauty of his knock: the effortless grace of his strokes, the unnatural serenity that rests on his face, the calculation abilities, and the tempo of his game.

In the innings, he largely made the appropriate plays.

The more aggressive Shreyas Iyer farmed the strike early in his innings.

Boundaries

After the other left, he took the wheel and changed gears expertly. In the 33rd over, after plucking the chords at a low level, he abruptly upped his tone, showing off two distinct boundaries by striking Wayne Parnell.

With one powerful stroke, he dismisses the third man, and with the other, he dabbed him in the face. To make matters worse, the required rate was still too high, with 86 additional runs needed off 42 balls (more than two runs per ball).

The target of 39 runs off of 16 balls is a difficult but realistic equation in today’s day and age, but Samson and Shardul Thakur looked confident and not flustered as they brought it down to that score.

A couple of wickets by Lungi Ngidi, one each for Thakur and Kuldeep Yadav off consecutive deliveries, turned the game around. Unfortunately, Sanju will only get to bat against 8 of the following 15 balls.

Not only did he fail to single off Ngidi’s final two deliveries of the 38th over, but he also failed to get on strike for a single ball in the 39th over and was then set with the very impossible job of slamming 31 runs off of 6 balls. He got to 21, but that wasn’t good enough.

Initial overs

However, the first ten overs planted the seeds of defeat. The top order crumbled under the onslaught of Kagiso Rabada and Wayne Parnell’s swing and lift.

Rabada has the edge and viciousness of a butcher’s knife. Shubman Gill was knocked unconscious by a vicious inside swing. Gill had intended to force him into cover, but his late, inward maneuver rendered that futile. A delicate inside edge was all he could muster.

When it came to reality, though, Rabada was particularly harsh on Ruturaj Gaikwad. In an over and a half of unrelenting aggressiveness, he beat both edges of his bat, made him inside edge a few times, and had him flapping the thin air of a bouncer.

Finally, Tabraiz Shamsi ate him up, and India’s score plummeted to 48 for three after a clean stumping by Quinton de Kock.

The deft Keshav Maharaj soon had Ishan Kishan caught at leg-slip, and the score went from 50 to 51 for four. After falling behind by 67 runs, optimism was reignited when Samson teamed up with Shreyas Iyer for a 67-run stand. When Iyer left, defeated once again by the short ball, his kryptonite, it was up to Samson to play the hero.

Players

But for the death-over glitter of old foe David Miller and Heinrich Klassen, who scored 74 and 75, respectively, to sew together 139 runs for the unbeaten fifth-wicket partnership, off of which only 54 were bargained off the final five overs, India would not have ended up chasing such a lofty target.

Both were given breaks shortly after reaching fifty, with Ruturaj Gaikwad dropping Miller off Siraj and Siraj spilling Klaasen off Avesh.

However, despite the late drama, the match ultimately didn’t matter. At least South Africa was driven by the prospect of securing automatic participation in next year’s 50-over World Cup should they triumph in this series. The Indian government and its allies, however, will get less attention.

The story was caught by the half-filled, or rather half-empty, stands.

Three-quarters of the regulars didn’t show up, and some of them had already left for their flight to Australia, so the meeting was relatively quiet.

A lot of matches are played there, but few people from Lucknow make the trip to Ekana Sportz City on the outskirts of the city to see them. In the shadow of the T20 World Cup in Australia, the 50-over format was not well received. Not to mention the weather that eventually shortened the contest to 40 overs per team. However, it ended up being a very strange thriller.

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