And so, South Africa’s search for a global trophy continues. This latest defeat was not so much a choke as a cock-up but the questions continue to linger. South Africa’s players continue to look for answers.
“I don’t know, to be honest with you,” said Faf du Plessis, when asked why the team always seemed to fail on the big stage. “We’ve confronted it and we’ve spoken about it. Obviously there’s a lot of (South African) teams that have gone through the same thing. The only way you’re going to get people to stop talking about it is if you actually win an event”
The last major tournament South Africa won was the inaugural ICC Knock-Out (now the Champions Trophy) of 1998; personnel have changed and a new generation has arrived, but the wait does not seem to end. At the Oval on Sunday, South Africa shot itself in the foot, the run out of de Villiers a turning point in the game.
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“Look AB’s run-out is completely my fault,” du Plessis admitted later. “I accept responsibility for it; it was a big turning point in the game. The Indian bowlers would have been very scared of bowling to AB. But what happened after that was also not great, because that changed the game. Dave (David Miller) ran himself out and India just didn’t give us anything.”
Was South Africa perhaps trying too hard to destroy its image of being a ‘choker’? The side seemed overly cautious in what was effectively a quarterfinal tie.
“I don’t know. I’d like to go in the future and ask someone that gets on the other side what they did,” du Plessis smiled. “We prepared well this whole year, played good cricket right through the season. We are the No.1 team in the world. But in this tournament, we weren’t playing like the No.1 team.”
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de Villiers was simply resigned. “We’ve tried quite a few things, camps and psychologists, whatever you want to call it,” he said. “There’s been quite a few game plans around that. In my mind, that wasn’t the problem. We just didn’t play well.”