South Africa's was a victory earned through better batting, better bowling, better fielding, and better composure under pressure. ©AFP
To see representatives of three generations of men from one South African family hotfoot it along the pavement outside Newlands on Friday to get through the gates in time for the start of a women's cricket match was to watch progress on the hoof.
They stopped for a handshake and a how are you, but their priority was as clear as their urgency. They had a T20 World Cup semifinal to watch, and their nervous enthusiasm and the Proteas shirts three of the four of them wore spoke of their commitment to that cause. So much so that not a word was exchanged about the men's Test series against West Indies, under a new captain and coach, no less, that starts in Centurion on Tuesday.
It was also progress of a sort that a caterer at the ground would, almost 12 hours later at 3am on Saturday, be delivering food to the Atlantic Seaboard for the Formula E Grand Prix, which had snarled traffic to the extent that the journey by car from there to Newlands, which normally takes 20 minutes, dragged on for a gruelling hour.
Maybe Cape Town is becoming big enough to host more than one major event at a time, but the irony of hundreds of thousands of cars forcibly jammed bumper-to-bumper into narrow streets so that less than 3km of public roads could be turned into a private playground for a handful of wannabe F1 drivers and their battery-powered toys for two days wasn't lost on anyone stuck in traffic.
All of which was forgotten as the sun started to sink over Table Mountain, because the survivors of the trudge and the hotfooters alike, and all of the 7,507 in attendance, had been rewarded for their efforts with an epic; a drama of swings, roundabouts and context rarely seen in any format, much less the shortest. And especially not in matches at the sharp end of tournaments that involve South Africa.
It isn't fair to throw the women's team into the mess made by their male counterparts, but that will happen nonetheless. South Africa's women haven't often choked, like their men have done too many times. Now the women must be recognised for having played the best game of cricket any team from their country have yet played. Fittingly, the prize for that achievement has taken them to a place no senior South Africa side had been to, despite reaching eight white-ball semis before Friday's showdown: a World Cup final.
The South Africans'
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