The good in the world... and the bad in SA

South Africa have quality players who would be the pride of any team. What they haven't had since 1998 is a trophy. We look at what they keep getting wrong - and what teams who do win trophies keep getting right

18 June 2017 - 00:00 By Telford Vice

Sarfraz Ahmed looks like a teddy bear, smiles like an angel and speaks not a lot more English than most of the reporters who have tried to get a quote out of him at the Champions Trophy speak Urdu.
Thirty-three players have scored more runs than him in the tournament, among them Hashim Amla, Faf du Plessis, Quinton de Kock and David Miller.
None of that can get in the way of the obvious - the man knows how to captain a cricket team.Not just any XI. Pakistan are less a team than they are a collection of conflicting egos bound together by an undefined anger and thrust forward by the stink of injustice.
They lose matches to other teams, but only one opponent can beat them: Pakistan.And here they are, playing in the final against India at The Oval today.
They must be doing something right.
"After the first loss, we are very down," Sarfraz said after his team had put England out of the tournament in the semifinal at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff on Wednesday.
"But credit goes to the team management. They boost up really well for us. And credit goes to the players as well. They motivated very well.
"And after that match, everything - we bowling well, fielding well, and now today also batting clicking as well. So that's why credit goes to the bowlers and team management."That didn't surprise Virat Kohli.
"You will see more clinical performances in tournaments like these because you don't want to give even a 1% chance to the opposition," India's captain said after his team beat Bangladesh by nine wickets in their semifinal at Edgbaston on Thursday.
"Once you see an opportunity you have to seize that particular moment and grab it with both hands, and today we just felt like the wicket is so good.
"So there was no need for us to play a stupid shot and let the opposition in unnecessarily."
No one knows a moment that's there for the seizing as well as Kohli. The instant Bhuv Kumar had Kagiso Rabada caught behind at The Oval last Sunday, he inserted himself into the slip cordon - and Morne Morkel immediately proved Kohli's genius by steering a catch into his hands.The last time the South Africans saw Kohli outside of the Indian Premier League, during their test series in India in November 2015, he was a brat who waded into juvenile arguments on any subject going.
Happily, he has since grown up and into a fine leader who has lost his fear of allowing others to hold a different opinion.
Eoin Morgan, born irresistibly Irish and now elegantly English, has never had Sarfraz's and Kohli's problems.
Indeed, to listen to him after England's defeat on Wednesday was to hear a captain who had won more than he had lost despite the result.
"One of the huge contributing factors towards topping our table and playing very good cricket in the group stages is that we've stayed true to what we believe in and what's worked for us the last couple of years, and I think that's the continued formula for the future," Morgan said.
"I think it will have to evolve in whatever manner the game does over the next two years in the lead-in to the [2019 ICC] World Cup, but certainly I think we are moving in the right direction."
Every team in this kind of company can bat, bowl and field with the best of them; that is never in question.
What determines the winners from the losers is more difficult to parse, but there is much for other teams to learn from Pakistan's unshakeable faith in the gospel according to themselves, India's magnificent confidence in their ability to do the right thing at the right time every time, and England's embrace of an overtly aggressive style of play that they know will serve them well in the years ahead, even though they let things slip this time.
These are difficult concepts to understand for sides who can't fathom who they are, much less how they need to change.
But that's not impossible because champions are not born; they're made. So are losers. Spotting the differences - and implementing them - is the challenge.
South Africa's mental frailty come tournament time
What's worse than playing so far below yourself you cut fresh scars into those you already have from too many previous failures to launch?
Sympathy from the devil.
Or, last Sunday, from the devilish Virat Kohli, who plotted and pilotted South Africa's downfall in their make-or-break Champions Trophy match at The Oval.
Kohli's co-pilots were the South Africans themselves, who not for the first time and probably not the last delivered a performance that aided and abetted their opponents so much that had they been soldiers in wartime they would have been taken out and shot.
What is it about South Africa and mental frailty come tournament time?"I don't know," Kohli said after the match, his fiery eyes softening with pathetic sympathy. "To me their batsmen looked pretty confident.
"But if you get two runouts pretty quickly then the mindset totally changes.
"As a captain you have to understand where the game is heading after that.
"We went after wickets then because we understood they were probably hesitating in going for their shots, and we've got attacking fielders. We asked the bowlers to make them play difficult shots.
"That paid off and we were able to close the game out."
What a nice man. And what a bullshitter.
The fact was that Faf du Plessis and AB de Villiers had no business taking a single to point when they should have seen the fielder stationed there - Hardik Pandya - swooping towards the ball.
Five deliveries later, Du Plessis turned his back on the hard-charging David Miller, who would have beaten the throw to that end of the pitch.
What followed was the kind of meltdown South Africans have been numbed into accepting from their marshmallow men: eight wickets crashed for 51 runs.
Even so, the game was not yet lost. An attack as fine as that comprising Kagiso Rabada, Morne Morkel, Andile Phehlukwayo, Chris Morris, Imran Tahir and even JP Duminy had half a chance of defending 191.
But the South Africans wore their defeat on their faces long before the extent of their crash at the batting crease hove into view.
That was the hardest, bitterest pill to swallow: that they were beaten hours before the mighty scorers confirmed their fate. What happened to the boast we've heard before every tournament from politicians, captains and a slew of likely suspects between those poles - that South Africa have the best batsmen and the best bowlers around, that they are the best team around?
What happened to South Africa's fighting spirit? We know it exists because we've seen it in test cricket and on the world's rugby fields. Where did it go on Sunday?
"Pleased to meet you," Mick Jagger rasped in Sympathy for the Devil all those years ago.
"Hope you guess my name/But what's puzzling you/Is the nature of my game ..."
On days like Sunday, bloody Sunday, South Africa's game isn't cricket. It's denial - that they're mentally soft, that their allrounders are really bowlers who can bat a bit, that fine players don't often make good captains, that the 2015 World Cup and all that is forgotten.
Yeah, right.
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